Americas Emerging Liberal Oligarchy - Road to the Middle Class

ANYONE CAN make a mistake. But when a parade of Obama administration cabinet picks—Richardson, Daschle, Killefer, and Lynn—turn out to have ethics or tax problems, and are actual lobbyists or lobbyists by any other name, you start to wonder. But why be surprised? You expect stuff like that from today’s Democrats.

The problem started with the Obama campaign, which set up the absurd expectation that an Obama administration would drive the moneychangers from the temple. Then the Obama administration compounded the problem with the Obama ethics policy, published a week ago. First it said that lobbyists needn’t apply, then it said that one of them could.

You might think that this just shows that the Obama people are hypocrites, like all politicians. But I think it goes deeper than that; it goes to the fundamental delusion in the world-view of our American liberal elite. Its members don’t really understand that, at the beginning of the 21st century, they now constitute an American aristocracy well on its way to becoming merely America’s ruling oligarchy.

You Greek scholars will understand that we mean that our liberal elite is transitioning from the “rule of the best” to the “rule of the few.”

There was a time when our liberals friends truly represented the best of America. They offered up political and economic reforms based upon the best ideas that they knew.

The Progressives of a century ago offered up financial reform, the income tax, the primary election, and popular election of US senators. The liberals of the New Deal offered up labor reform and old age pensions. The liberals of the Great Society offered up civil rights, Medicare for seniors, job training for minorities, and generous pensions for single mothers.

Let us give our liberals friends the benefit of the doubt. They believed, as they agitated for these reforms, that they were pushing for social advances backed by the best in scientific and political ideas. And when liberals launched their campaigns to convince the American people of the justice of their cause, the American people, decent and open-minded as they are, listened to them and agreed to let the reforms go forward. Those were the days when liberals truly deserved to be honored as an American aristocracy.

It truly is sad that all that youth and idealism has given us schools that fail the underclass, welfare that has shattered the underclass family, and health care that will bankrupt the nation. But anyone can make an honest mistake.

Right or wrong, the age of liberal idealism is over. We live today in a different era. As the American philosopher George Maroutsos puts it: If you have power and you haven’t abused it, you don’t have power. You just have responsibility. President Clinton was a man who had power. President Bush was a man who had responsibility.

The liberal aristocracy that once knew itself to be “the best” has become, after half a century of power, merely “the few,” just another cabal of ruthless men and women fighting to keep their hands on the levers of political power.

Our liberal friends do not yet understand how their years of political and cultural power have corrupted them; they still imagine themselves as plucky outsiders battling for the people against the powerful. There is a word for a misunderstanding of reality like that. The word is “delusion.”

It takes delusion to issue foolish slogans about Hope and Change, and make ridiculous promises to ban lobbyists from the political process. Think of it. The federal government disposes of $3.1 trillion a year. (That was last year. This year, who knows?) But any practical person understands that no mere sloganeering will bring change to this spending juggernaut, or drive the influence peddlers from K Street.

It takes an oligarchic sense of entitlement—almost like a bailed-out banker—to come into power and immediately give yourself and your supporters a trillion dollar stimulus bonus before you have achieved anything for the American people.

Things were not done that way back when liberals truly were young and idealistic.

In the early 1900s Progressives couldn’t wait to get into power and legislate the exciting new ideas that would reform the creaking politics of the 19th century. In 1933 liberals couldn’t wait to get into power and legislate landmark legislation to improve the lives of workers and old people. In the 1960s liberals couldn’t wait to legislate a civil rights revolution and put the findings of social science to work in helping the poor.

Now fast-forward to today’s liberals.

In 2009 liberals couldn’t wait to get into power and award themselves a trillion dollar bonus.

Don’t be discouraged! Maybe later they’ll get around to saving the planet, and pave over the nation with solar collectors and wind farms.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

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

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

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

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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

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