Unaccountable America

I’M often shocked by the children of liberal acquaintances. One has has a daughter with depression. Another has an ADHD son. Yet another has a bipolar son. All in their twenties.

Of course this is the season of the man-child, as in Kay S. Hymowitz’s Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys. The Girl Project has raised up a generation of girls to be anything but wife and mother. But the Girl Project’s unintended consequence has been to raise up boys to be slackers: inattentive and angry. Now we talk about “preadulthood.” It’s the new extended transition between childhood and adulthood.

A century ago, experts discovered “adolescence.” that was the new transition period for teenagers. Used to be, in the 19th century, that kids went directly from school to work, childhood to adulthood, in their early teens. But with the invention of the high school, a lot of children hung around in school all day and became adolescents. The ones that got into trouble were called delinquents.

In reality, this is nothing new at all. Anyone that has cracked a 19th century novel knows that the rich kid characters displayed all the characteristics of adolescents and pre-adults. In those days they were considered to be merely the spoiled children of the idle rich.

You can see that, whatever the reality, the social science jargon is convenient for today’s idle rich, or rather, today’s affluent parents with troublesome children. When you medicalize your kid’s problem then it removes the worry and the stigma of disappointment and accountability. And for the kid in question, my friend Stephen reminds me, there is also a payoff, the excuse: I’m bipolar, so I’m not responsible.

Suppose all this is not the glorious achievement of an age of feminist and medical miracles, but the age-old result of the rich shirking their responsibilities and paying for nurses, servants, governesses, and teachers to raise their children?

The unaccountable culture extends beyond the family into government. A friend told me recently about a problem at her daughter’s high school. A young math teacher with a problem had approached her, as head of the PTA. Washington State now requires kids to pass Algebra for high school graduation but many kids can’t handle Algebra. Couldn’t she help push for pre-Algebra classes to help those kids? What’s the point, said the school principal. We tried that some years ago, but it didn’t work.

Oh well, I guess we’ll just have to let those kids fail. They probably never would have amounted to much, not without more funding.

It’s a good thing that nobody lets BP get away with talk like that. Imagine BP saying: I guess that people in the Gulf of Mexico will just have to deal with all that oil; It’s just not practical to make those well preventers 100 percent effective. They tried to fix them years ago, but it never worked out. Or Wal-Mart, defendant in a gender discrimination suit now up before the US Supreme Court. Gee, we’d like to promote all those women checkers. But what are you going to do when women keep taking off to have children.

We know there are Two Americas. The are the Makers and then there are the Takers as Peter Schweizer puts it in Makers and Takers: Why conservatives work harder, feel happier, have closer families, take fewer drugs, give more generously, value honesty more, are less materialistic and envious, whine less... and even hug their children more than liberals. But that is just at the individual level. So what if conservatives are happy and generous workers and liberals are whiners?

There is Accountable America and then there is Unaccountable America. In Accountable America liberal lawyers sue Wal-Mart for discrimination against women employees based upon statistical patterns of promotions. In Unaccountable America, 50 percent of college kids need remedial instruction while high school teachers demonstrate over their collective bargaining rights. In Accountable America President Obama tells BP to post $20 billion on account to pay for oil spill damage and BP says what’s the account number. In Unaccountable America Sen Chuck Schumer calls a spending cut of $0.06 trillion in a $3.8 trillion budget “extreme.”

Not everyone is going with the flow on this. Robert Epstein has written The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen. He has a simple idea. He say we should give young people adult authority as soon as they demonstrate readiness.

The German General von Seekt had a similar idea for the young soldiers in the German army. He wanted young soldiers that were “self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility.” It worked so well that now the US Army trains its soldiers the same way.

Obviously the dog-in-a-manger government workers and certified victims of Unaccountable America represent the opposite pole and they are welcome to it.

But what is it in the hearts of Unaccountable Americans that allows them to make so many excuses for themselves, and aim their sights so low?

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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