William Barr’s conflict with President Trump has been the main focus of the wide press coverage of the former attorney general’s new memoir, “One Damn Thing After Another.” Ignored is how much Mr. Barr ascribes the deepest problems facing America to what he calls “the Democratic Party’s lurch to the left.”
“Some liberal and progressive commentators suggested that our polarizing politics was somehow the consequence of an upsurge in right-wing extremism,” Mr. Barr writes, “but no sentient person could take that seriously.”
He observes: “Liberal democratic ideals — strict limits on governmental power, individual rights, press freedom, religious liberty — were framed within the great Anglo-American tradition and are the life’s blood of our Republic.” Mr. Barr offers that this tradition was “painstakingly wrought over many centuries from a rich amalgamation of influences,” among them classical philosophy, Christian precepts, “Anglo-Saxon folkways,” the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, and the common law.
“Under liberal democracy,” he writes, “it is not the role of the state to use its coercive power to remake man and society according to some abstract conception of perfection.”
The modern left, the former attorney general concludes, has an “incipient totalitarian style” that is “poisoning America’s political life.” The left has adopted “the same kind of revolutionary and totalitarian ideas that propelled the French Revolution, the Communists of the Russian Revolution, and the Fascists of twentieth-century Europe.”
In sum: “Radical progressivism’s core idea is that there is a preordained scheme of natural earthly perfection toward which man and society must be led inexorably by the march of history.”
Mr. Barr recalls that what convinced him to return as attorney general under Mr. Trump was the politicization of governmental agencies: “the suspect Russian collision narrative had drawn the Department of Justice and the FBI into the political maelstrom, and many Americans sensed — with some justification — that powerful Washington politicians were using the criminal justice system as a political weapon.”
Mr. Barr calls the charges that Russia helped Mr. Trump win the 2016 election bogus, saying they were “mendacious and fraudulent attempts to invalidate the legitimate election of an American President.”
Well, yes.