The Corruption And The Temptation

UP UNTIL the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt the Democratic Party was split between the “honest graft” wing and the squeaky clean liberal or progressive wing. (Let’s leave the Southern Democratic Party out of this.)

Liberals were embarrassed by the corrupt city machines, and the ward heelers were contemptuous of the egg-head liberals who were full of ideas but couldn’t get anyone to the polls.

Of course, both of these tendencies are bad, very bad. The routine corruption of city machines was a continuation by other means of the rule of the “eternal gang of ruthless men,” the politics of piracy and plunder.

But the liberal approach to politics, if anything, is even worse. Liberals are determined to do good, and that’s a good thing. But they want to do good on someone else’s dime. They want to force other people to fund their programs of social welfare. It’s a matter of compassion, they tell us.

Earth to liberals. Compassion is where you give your money to poor people. Compulsion is where you give other peoples’ tax money to poor people.

There was once a famous person who had the liberal temptation.

Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.

The great political achievement of President Roosevelt was to submit to temptation, to turn the Democratic Party from a coalition of city patronage machines and ideological liberals into a single national political patronage machine, led and run by liberals, focused on using political power to do good.

But he also started the descent into corruption. And anyone can see that in full operation as the Obama administration takes office. It’s not about Hope and Change. It’s just about getting back the levers of political power back from the Republican yahoos.

The great world historical achievement of liberals is this. They took a federal government that was spending about three percent of GDP and cranked it up to 20 percent.

What do liberals spend all that money on? Well, that’s what usgovernmentspending.com is for. Let’s take a look.

United States Federal State and Local Government Spending
Fiscal Year 2009
Amounts in $ billion

Pensions: $891.1
Health Care: $958.2
Education: $873.7
Defense: $806.1
Welfare: $467.7
Protection: $325.0
Transportation: $247.8
General Government: $193.3
Other Spending: $403.6
Interest: $361.7
Balance: $24.3
Total Spending: $5,552.4

Government, especially national government, is there to defend first of all against enemies foreign and domestic. You don’t see a lot of that going on in the top spending categories. Why is that?

The reason is pretty simple. Liberals are running, in the Democratic Party, a political operation. It is not particularly interested in defense. It is interested in its left-wing government programs and its raw political patronage.

The tragedy is that the people most benefitting from all these trillions are well-born educated liberals. The people most hurt are the program beneficiaries, anesthetized by the liberal mess of pottage, who aren’t getting to learn the skills and the trust culture of the city. They aren’t moving up into the self-reliant middle class. And that is a shame. It is more than a shame. It is a crime.

Some day the American people are going to ask conservatives to reform this corrupt regime of patronage and ideological cant.

Until then, conservatives must develop and sharpen their indictment of this cruel, corrupt, and unjust regime.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.