By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, September 04, 2012
Starting in the 1930s and continuing after the war, the
Democrats offered a liberal critique of, or perhaps enhancement to, the
Republican vision of rugged individualism. A modern American state now had the
capital and the moral ambition to smooth the rougher edges of capitalism by
insisting on unemployment and disability insurance, a 40-hour week, overtime
pay, and what we now associate with the social safety net. Such entitlements,
along with a rapidly growing economy, redefined poverty — so much so that
whereas in 1930 malnourishment was endemic among the poor, by 2000 obesity was
far more injurious to the nation’s collective health.
Michelle Obama, for example, is admirably warning the
nation’s underclass that Twinkies and Big Macs are far more dangerous to their
well-being than undernourishment brought on by the financial inability to
purchase bulk rice, beans, and cheese. Today an impoverished teen is in more
danger of being robbed or shot while in line waiting to purchase a new pair of
$300 signature sneakers than of being infected with hookworm through being
forced to walk barefoot.
What had once been a daring liberal agenda gradually
ossified into a reactionary dogma that the poor are always to be defined in
relative terms to those better off, never by absolute standards of global
wealth and poverty, and thus are always in need of yet more government help.
The goal became collective equality rather than a safety net to mitigate the
effects of misfortune, accident, and illness.
In other words, what started out as visionary in the 20
years between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s insidiously became reactionary,
on the premise that always more was unquestioned. So much so that today the
liberal vision — the blue-state model, the Democratic orthodoxy, whatever we
wish to call it — is a rigid creed that demands ever more government spending
and ever more government redistribution. It fosters an ever-growing elite
technocracy that oversees the system but wins the capital and influence to be
unaffected by the ramifications of its own ideology. Reactionary liberalism, as
some sort of cult, assumes that its policies are exempt from audit, and that
indeed to audit them casts suspicion on the motives and aims of the auditor
himself.
The dogma, as embraced by Barack Obama, assumes a number
of reactionary givens that cannot be questioned or, indeed, even discussed.
The role of technology, for example, is ignored, as is
the entry of 1-billion-population China into the global exporting business.
That appliances from air conditioners to large-screen televisions to cell
phones not only have made life more enjoyable to the well-to-do, but also are
accessible to hundreds of millions across the economic spectrum, is never
discussed. Walmart can offer the poor a simulacrum of what Neiman Marcus offers
the rich, in the sense that an $8 shirt no longer looks or wears all that
differently from a $150 one.
That a person who has a fraction of the income of Mitt
Romney now has water that is as hot as the rich man’s, a TV that is as large,
and a cell phone that is not inferior to the zillionaire’s simply does not
matter — either in terms of political rhetoric or in government poverty
statistics. The Lexus is always a sign of privilege in a way the Kia is not,
although a man from Mars would have trouble ascertaining which car interior
should belong to the more deprived.
Nor can reactionary liberalism allow discussion of issues
of human concern that had been the stuff of debate and discussion since the
Greeks. Is poverty sometimes a result not just of ill health, bad luck, lack of
education, generational poverty, racism, sexism, or discrimination, but also of
personal choices: the decision to commit a crime, use drugs, have
out-of-wedlock children, or drop out of high school?
If today an observer were to state that the number of
children one chooses to have should be in part predicated on the income one
reasonably expects to make (I think that is why so-called yuppies often choose
to have two rather than five children), then he would be branded illiberal or
worse — despite the fact that societies have accepted that premise for
centuries, and the middle classes implicitly follow such common calculations.
Thanks to today’s government help, the illegal immigrant from Oaxaca might
eventually achieve rough parity with the American-born middle class if he were
to have two children; however, with five it is impossible.
In our therapeutic culture, one must not dare suggest
either that someone on government assistance cannot otherwise support his
numerous children, or that multiple children might explain reduced familial
circumstances. We have all but censored age-old practical matters of wealth and
poverty in our daily political debates — even as they govern our own private
lives. “Don’t have children out of wedlock” or “Don’t have children you cannot
support” are not so much statements that are regarded as callous, but rather
statements that are no longer even made in discussions of poverty.
Demography is another issue that is taboo in reactionary
liberalism. If an aging, larger, and more affluent populace is on the receiving
end of an expanding Social Security safety net, supported by a youthful,
shrinking, and less affluent cohort, it matters little: The system simply must
find new sources of revenue, never readjustments in how entitlements are
allocated, or at what age retirement begins. Just as we are not allowed to talk
about the radical role of technology in ameliorating hardship, and just as we
dare not mention that at least some elements of poverty result from individual
choices, so too we cannot accept that the redistributive model no longer works
with reduced 21st-century Western birth rates and greater longevity. The
lessons of blue states like Illinois and California and nations like Greece and
Italy do not so much warn us that fiscal insolvency is on the horizon, as
remind us that insolvency usually provides the only chance of curbing
unsustainable entitlements.
Finally, a contemporary liberal reactionary talks as if
he were a coal miner or auto worker of the 1940s, whose political activism
reflected his own material circumstances. Today how a person lives — how much
money he makes, where his children are schooled, the sort of neighborhood he
lives in — has nothing to do with his ideology. One could follow Chris Matthews
around during the day and not distinguish his lifestyle from that of Sean
Hannity. Elizabeth Warren’s 1040 will no doubt prove that she is far more the 1
percenter than is Marco Rubio. Nancy Pelosi or Dianne Feinstein probably is
worth far more than is Michele Bachmann. We assume that Senator Obama’s Chicago
mansion is more expansive than is the home of Representative Allen West. When
Chris Rock or Spike Lee rants on about some supposed illiberal conservative, he
usually does so from a position of far greater privilege and wealth.
Most of the architects of contemporary liberalism who
berate the “You didn’t build that” capitalists, or the 1 percenters, or “angry
old white men,” themselves live as 1 percenters, on the fruits of capitalism,
and are mostly white. Take a John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, John Edwards,
or Harry Reid, or an Andrea Mitchell, Katie Couric, or George Clooney: Their
own habits are indistinguishable from those of the people they castigate. The
implicit defense of their hypocrisies is that they are principled traitors to
their class. But the actual landscape of their reactionary liberalism is that
they simply are so privileged that they will never be subject to the baleful
ramifications of their ideology — whether it is more burdensome regulations on
the break-even family farm, a higher tax bracket that turns a contractor’s marginal
profit into a loss and prevents him from hiring the unemployed, or a
neighborhood high school where crime, therapy, and unions ensure that no one
will get into Stanford.
Apparently, to the well-off, reactionary liberalism
ensures social acceptance and advantage among the technocratic administrative
classes. It also often serves psychologically as a means to alleviate guilt
over one’s privilege on the cheap, in a world where you can be for open borders
without having to live and work in an Orosi. You can champion the Delta smelt
and cut off water to irrigated farmland — without either losing your job or
worrying about thousands who will in Mendota.
For the new reactionaries, the challenge is no longer
proving that unionized teachers improve public education. Few any more argue
that the unionized employee provides a better service at a more economical cost
to the taxpayer than does his non-unionized counterpart. We simply do not
discuss whether existing welfare programs result in more humane and vibrant
inner cities. Who cares whether appurtenances that were once the domain of the
wealthy are now easily accessible to the underclass? Instead, all that matters
is how to ensure that the reactionary system continues, for the benefit of
those who administer it, those who receive from it, and those who feel good
about it.
Listening to a liberal reactionary sermonize about the
big-government blue model invokes a wigged nobleman of the Ancien Régime
dismissing French reformists, or a reactionary Greek socialist defending the
bankrupt European welfare state. They no longer believe that their creed works
or can work, only that somehow it must remain in control — or else.
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