By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, November 09, 2012
The Progressives won on Tuesday.
I don't mean the people who voted Democrat who call
themselves "progressive." Though they won, too.
I mean the Progressives who've been waging a century-long
effort to transform our American-style government into a European-style state.
The words "government" and "state"
are often used interchangeably, but they are really different things. According
to the founders' vision, the people are sovereign and the government belongs to
us. Under the European notion of the state, the people are creatures of the state,
significant only as parts of the whole.
This European version of the state can be nice. One can
live comfortably under it. Many decent and smart people sincerely believe this
is the intellectually and morally superior way to organize society. And, to be
fair, it's not a binary thing. The line between the European and American
models is blurry. France is not a Huxleyan dystopia, and America is not and has
never been an anarchist's utopia, nor do conservatives want it to be one.
The distinction between the two worldviews is mostly a
disagreement over first assumptions, about which institutions should take the
lead in our lives. It is an argument about what the habits of the American
heart should be. Should we live in a country where the first recourse is to
appeal to the government, or should government interventions be reserved as a
last resort?
These assumptions are formed and informed by political
rhetoric. President Obama ran a campaign insisting that Democrats believe
"we're all in it together" and that Republicans think you should be
"on your own" no matter what hardships you face. We are our brothers'
and sisters' "keepers," according to Obama, and the state is how we
"keep" each other. The introductory video at the Democratic National
Convention proclaimed, "Government is the one thing we all belong
to."
Exactly 100 years before Barack Obama's re-election
victory, Woodrow Wilson was elected president for the first time. It was
Wilson's belief that the old American understanding of government needed to be
Europeanized. The key to this transformation was convincing Americans that we
all must "marry our interests to the state."
The chief obstacle for this mission is the family. The
family, rightly understood, is an autonomous source of meaning in our lives and
the chief place where we sacrifice for, and cooperate with, others. It is also
the foundation for local communities and social engagement. As social scientist
Charles Murray likes to say, unmarried men rarely volunteer to coach kids'
soccer teams.
Progressivism always looked at the family with skepticism
and occasionally hostility. Reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman hoped
state-backed liberation of children would destroy "the unchecked tyranny
... of the private home." Wilson believed the point of education was to
make children as unlike their parents as possible. Hillary Clinton, who calls
herself a modern progressive and not a liberal, once said we must move beyond
the notion there is "any such thing as someone else's child."
One of the stark lessons of Obama's victory is the degree
to which the Republican Party has become a party for the married and the
religious. If only married people voted, Romney would have won in a landslide.
If only married religious people voted, you'd need a word that means something
much bigger than landslide. Obviously, Obama got some votes from the married
and the religious (such people can marry their interests to the state, too),
but as a generalization, the Obama coalition heavily depends on people who do
not see family or religion as rival or superior sources of material aid or
moral authority.
Marriage, particularly among the working class, has gone
out of style. In 1960, 72 percent of adults were married. Today, barely half
are. The numbers for blacks are far more stark. The well-off still get married
though, which is a big reason why they're well-off. "It is the privileged
Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,"
Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, told the New York
Times.
Religion, too, is waning dramatically in America. Gallup
finds regular church attendance down to 43 percent of Americans. Other
researchers think it might be less than half that.
In the aftermath of massive American urbanization and
industrialization, and in the teeth of a brutal economic downturn, Franklin D.
Roosevelt promised to fight for the "forgotten man" -- the American
who felt lost amidst the social chaos of the age. Obama campaigned for
"Julia" -- the affluent single mom who had no family and no
ostensible faith to fall back on.
In short, the American people are starting to look like
Europeans, and as a result they want a European form of government.
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