Lesson Of The Noughties Government Hasnt A Clue - Road to the Middle Class

THOMAS FRANK, the >Wall Street Journal’s tame liberal columnist, experienced the Noughties as a “low, dishonest decade.” It was all corporate scandals, slack regulation, and unnecessary wars.

Allow me, Mr Frank, to propose a narrative a little more expansive, a little less cramped. The Noughties was a decade of Progressive chickens coming home to roost.

Before coming to this obvious judgment, it helps to read a quartet of articles published just before Christmas in National Review about the founding Progressives back in the late 19th century: Richard Ely, John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Herbert Croly (Links may still be behind a subscription wall). Most of the ideas about the living constitution and the wise, powerful federal government advised by educated experts, that our liberal friends get with their mother’s milk, came from them.

When we talk about the Democrats poised on the edge of a precipice tis holiday season, we are talking about whether our governing educated liberal elite are going to make the Progressive world view, developed by Ely, Dewey, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Croly, and implemented by FDR, LBJ, and now BHO, into a suicide pact.

This world view was sorely tested all through the last decade and got its comeuppance this last year. Last month we saw the scientific climate experts exposed as conniving manipulators in Climategate. On Christmas Eve, the United States Senate passed a health reform bill with 2,000 pages of undigested expert ideas on gaming the health system with untested administrative rules and commissions. Then on the weekend, in response to its failure to interdict the hot-crotch Detroit bomber, the heaving security apparatus of the United States government triumphantly implemented—new security measures on the innocent traveling public.

These liberals, progressives, or whatever they want to call themselves next, are clueless.

Here’s how the last decade looks to me.

We had the pre 9/11federal government stolidly pirouetting around a wall of separation between intelligence agencies. We had the Federal Reserve Board ponderous snuffing out two investment bubbles and then ponderously printing money to get the economy started again. We’ve had the State Department and the Defense Department, with President Bush in the middle, arguing for a year over how to govern Iraq. We’ve had Congress posturing for years about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and doing nothing but argue about the racism of the agencies’ critics.

Now we have President Obama and the Democratic Congress hosing down the economy with bailouts, deficits, and huge new administrative schemes for health care, energy, autos, finance. Yet we are assured by Peggy Noonan’s unnamed Obama aide source, that the president “just does what he thinks is right. And that consumes a lot of his time. Most of it, in fact.” No kidding.

Over in Britain, my favorite columnist Minnette Marrin is advising the government to “do nothing.” In government, especially, there is “too much that doesn’t matter going on.” No kidding.

For years, the hit on capitalism is that even though it floods the world with prosperity, it must go because it is unjust.

The liberal, progressive conceit was that their recipe of living constitutions and educated expert administration would not only work, but it would be just.

But now we know, after a century of progressive politics and the last decade of bureaucratic bungling that they are wrong. It isn’t just that progressivism doesn’t work. That’s obvious. There’s a bigger problem.

Progressivism is profoundly unjust.

As David Freddoso wrote last week: “Big government is always for sale to the powerful.” When liberals start planning new trillion-dollar programs, all we get is a feeding frenzy.

As Dick Morris and Eileen McGann put it:

We are watching, real time, as moderate Democrats fold for tiny, dirty little payoffs to their states and their egos.

A moderate Democrat is just someone who will demand a higher price for caving into what Reid and Pelosi and Obama want him to do.

Conservatives have an answer to the unjust vote auctions of liberalism. That answer is onservatism, a moderate and just world view balanced between the unjust world of the administrative state and the cramped world of the old traditional society of the aristocracy, the gentry, and the lower orders. That’s what freedom means: Freedom from the government bureaucrat, from the rapacious landowner and the unjust employer, the freedom to get up and move to a new state or a new job.

Conservative philosopher Michael Novak writes in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism that this freedom should be institutionalized in the Greater Separation of Powers between the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

What are we waiting for?

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

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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

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

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

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

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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

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

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

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

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

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