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| When Multiculturalism Hits the Wall | Tom DeLay on Rush |
The Ancien Regime of the Good Old USA
by Christopher Chantrill
March 16, 2007 at 4:45 am
OK I ADMIT it. When I read Jacob Aronson’s article Conserving and Consolidating the Progressive Liberal Tradition in TCSDaily, I blew a gasket. Writes Aronson:
One of the core challenges now facing the Party is the collapse of the New Deal coalition and adaptation to the underlying economic realities that brought it about. Bill Clinton’s rallying cry to "end government as we know it" was an attempt to reform government along private sector lines.
Well, yeah! But since then the Democratic Party has turned away from Bill Clinton’s attempt to reform it. It is now driven partly by street brawlers like Markos Moulitsas who want to make the Democrats into a fighting party again, fighting the big corporations that are now more powerful than governments, and partly by the new progressives like Jacob Aronson.
But “reforming government along private sector lines” or using it to fight for the people against the powerful, as Al Gore wanted to do back in 2000, is delusional. Let us look at government in the United States. Let us follow the money in this unified table of government spending in the United States in 2004. It is obtained by combining two spreadsheets, one from the US Census Bureau on state and local government spending, and one from the President’ s budget documents.
Here is the top line result for 2004:
- Programs for seniors: $1 trillion
- Programs for youth: $700 billion
- Programs for defense: $700 billion
- Programs for the poor: $660 billion
- Programs for transportation: $175 billion
- Interest on the debt: $400 billion
- All other programs: $2 trillion
Now it seems to me that the great power, the great interests in the land, the folks for whom we work at our jobs and for whom we pour the most money through our government is: senior pensions and health care, education of children, defense against enemies foreign and domestic, relief of the poor, and transportation.
And this is a huge commitment. In fact, it is a commitment that can’t be met.
That is what politics is going to be about in this century. It is a sideshow to talk about management along private sector lines, or using government to punish corporations.
The question is: how long can we go on like this?
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
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