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A Basic Chicken-or-Egg Question for Conservatives
Let’s forget about the mid-term elections for a minute and consider two fundamental facts: 1) government don’t work good (in the immortal words of Michael Barone); and 2) the modern American (Homo ironicus americanus), with his vintage clothing, white privilege seminars, environmental impact statements, interesting facial hardware, skinny no-whip lattes, shade-grown artisanal quinoa, etc., etc., is not the same creature that invented Coca-Cola, built the Golden Gate Bridge (under budget, ahead of schedule and using only private financing), whupped Hitler and Tojo and invaded the Moon (Homo virilis americanus).
Most reasonable people would agree that there is some relationship between fact 1 and fact 2, beyond mere correlation.
This leads naturally to a very basic chicken-or-egg question: did we ruin government, or did government ruin us? What is the direction of the causal logic at work here?
It is important to grapple with this question, because the answer has serious implications, both for public policy and private well-being. If government ruined us, then the problem lies with government, and we have a hope in hell of fixing it by fixing government. If we ruined government, then the problem lies with us, and we should abandon all hope and seek consolation in the private pleasures of family, friends and large quantities of small-batch bourbon.
Which is it?
Published in General
Yes, we are the people who did all that wonderful stuff, and we still do it today, in laboratories, military bases, on the space station, and in tens of millions of homes where the kids are being raised and the bills are paid. We will keep on keepin-on, in fact.
That is, unless you really think Obamacare’s sweater boy represents the USA as a whole–which I don’t.
But isn’t pajama boy “now trending” or whatever the term is?
Some of us are, and some of us aren’t. Many have been emasculated by the ascendant Homo Sovieticus, and are glad to be relieved of the burden.
I used to think that most of our problems weren’t ones that a good depression couldn’t fix, but the last six years are starting to blow my confidence in this assertion. Where is Calvin Coolidge when you need him?
It has always been government ruining us. For a brief couple hundred years we in the United States had a chance to rein in the venomous power of the government to ruin the lives of ordinary people, thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our founders. But any government, once established, automatically devolves into corruption and self-aggrandizement. We let it happen faster than it might have happened, but the process is built-in. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
The old saying goes (roughly) “People get the government they deserve”.
I’d say we ruined the system the Founders gave us, and then let it ruin us.
Government and culture are to a nation what a body and mind are to a person, at least in respect to how the two aspects interact. While one is broken, the other is impossible to repair. They are ruined or healed simultaneously.
Somewhere in the annals of Hell there’s got to be minutes of a secret pact with the devil, probably made some time in the Seventies:
They basically let us win on capitalism;
We basically let them win on the culture.
Some of them took down pictures of Marx, invested in stocks, and started buying real estate; some of us put up centerfolds, started quoting lines from “Pulp Fiction” and “The Big Lebowski” and moved on to second and third marriages.
It’s a funny mixed situation, but not “funny” in the sense of knee-slapping funny. More like a nervous, “Do you hear that? Does the reactor sound kinda funny?”
Mr. McVey please please please don’t take what I am about to write the wrong way but this is exactly why we are in the predicament that we are in right now. We have been saying “we will keep on keepin-on” since the time of Woodrow Wilson. But we haven’t in fact kept on keepin-on. We have merely marched–sometimes at the double step, sometimes not–straight to the shackles of socialism and tyranny. It started when a rambunctious New Yorker decided he was going to “break the trusts” and placed a tiny bit of the private sector under government control. Well that tiny bit has blossomed into employers having to ensure that the benefits they offer their employees meet the standard of the President. But since we didn’t realize it or have the ability to fight it, we “kept on keepin-on.”
Then a bit later some rabid Marxists decided that the best way to take over was to infiltrate the local governments of big cities–all the while the federal government continued to solidify new taxes and design new programs with which to buy votes. Well, we all could probably count on one hand the number of people who pay attention to local elections so the Marxists got their people elected and we “kept on keepin-on.”
Now look at the landscape. Universities? Practically indoctrination camps for the Left. Public Education? If they teach anything, they are teaching a very watered down version of the clap trap they will get in college. Big Business? Oh you mean those people who are supposed to be rock-ribbed capitalists that want government out of the way? Well don’t look now but along with unions investment bankers are some of the largest contributors to both major Parties because they hope to be able to shield their wealth while destroying the small, local banks. State governments reflecting their citizenry? Yeah tell it to a couple of Christians in Idaho of all places who decided they weren’t going to participate in a homosexual wedding. I mean seriously where do you want to look that hasn’t been completely taken over because we decided to “keep on keepin-on”?
Part of my hope here on Ricochet is that I can inspire people whom I have never met and probably never will look at their immediate area and fight what is wrong there. And trust me, every locality in 2014 has something. It wasn’t in the enclaves of San Fransisco where little children were having their lemonade stands shut down for code violations. I am tired of “keeping on keepin-on” because it hasn’t gotten this country anywhere but closer and closer to becoming a gigantic prison while a connected elite who spout the “correct” crap get ahead.
Sorry for the rant folks.
“You cannot have a Conservative government and a Liberal culture.”
–Mark Steyn
Government is downstream of culture.
I blame women’s suffrage. The process you are describing is a result of women seeking stability and safety. Over the last hundred years, the market has faltered and stumbled, but generally improved our lot. But government checks always clear the bank. Most women in this country can’t possibly find a man who is more reliable than Uncle Sam.
Jason, I can’t say definitively that you are wrong. Sigh.
/Dang phone interface — and now no edit capabilities.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s the fracturing of our cultural sensibilities that’s playing out in our politics. You can’t make up some of the radical Marxist crap coming out of the dominant political party in this country (that would be the Democrats for anyone in doubt). It’s unlike anything the nation’s early progressives even dreamed of, and almost 180 degrees from where normative Democrats stood 60 years ago.
And, with the media running cover for them, they’ve managed to convince a large portion of people that Republicans (especially the Tea Party types, who hew most closely to the principles of the founding) are the scary, dangerous radicals.
Natan Sharansky wrote about this in Defending Identity, It’s Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy. The Left has pounded its message of American culpability for so long, that many people are convinced an American identity is a shameful thing. Why would they identify with founding principles?
A people unwilling to fight and die for the tenets of this republic will soon cede it to someone more committed to his (Marxist, jihadist) ideals. That’s what we’re witnessing.
Great post, btw.
Why does it have to be one or the other? Both things happen.
BTW, your username reminds me that it’s a long time since I watched the Nikita Mikhalkov film that’s named after you.
Yesterday, Peter Thiel was on with Glenn Beck discussing this very topic. It was his contention that our society turned in 1969. We had finally reached the moon in July 1969 after a 10 year effort but the environmentalists were becoming ascendant and stifling innovation. His quote, ” After Woodstock, the hippies took over our culture.” (Note: Woodstock was in August 1969.)
It is his contention that we are no longer innovating and improving our world. Remember when we talked about nuclear power as a way to have inexpensive energy. Then the environmentalists took over. The “hippies” have moved into government and have regulated innovation to near death.
We are improving computers at a rapid pace but we are NOT improving the efficiency of the code that runs on them. Windows? Still? Really? It takes faster and faster computers to run the same old bulky and balky programs at the same slow speed. We are coming up with a gazillion ways to entertain ourselves but our government is making it impossible to invent a cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s, etc. or to be innovative in engineering. Where’s the flying car? Where’s the space station normal people can visit? How many kids go to College to be an Engineer as apposed to those going into <Blank> Studies? We are not “keeping on” the way we used to.
Side note: For some reason, I have a 5000 (!) word limit on this post! Anyone for “War and Peace”?
“Government is downstream of culture.”
I think that was true at the beginning of our nation, but politics takes the lead with a government as big and totalitarian as this.
War and peace? Do it!
I think it was George Will who pointed out, long ago, that liberalism works in ratchet fashion – only in one direction. To answer the question, culture and government more or less take turns moving it left. The lowest common denominator of culture (the basest human instincts) is at work in the form of demand for more free stuff and more hedonic license. Government responds with creation of more dependency and by stigmatizing what used to be considered normal bourgeois behavior (defining deviancy down) – ever lowering the baseness of the common denominator. Round and round, down and down.
Sounds like I need to stock up on bourbon. That’s sort of what I thought. Doesn’t really matter how many elections the Stupid Party wins. Sigh….
Reticulator, you bring up a good point. You say: “Why does it have to be one or the other? Both things happen.”
This is true. When two phenomena, x and y, are correlated, there are four possibilities: 1) x causes y; 2) y causes x; 3) the correlation is coincidental; or 4) x and y have some common cause z.
I suppose it’s possible that the relationship between government not working and homo virilis morphing into homo ironicus is purely coincidental. But I doubt it. It is possible, though, that there is some lurking common cause underlying both things. I think calling it “culture” is a bit of a copout though. I would prefer something more specific.
Oblomov,
The great cultural shift that FDR effected was to transfer the responsibility to care for the poor, sick, elderly, and downtrodden from families and neighbors to government.
He only had to get the ball rolling. Politicians recognized an opportunity to buy votes and campaign on an image of compassion. Voters recognized an opportunity to shift their struggles onto the abstraction of “government” and thereby be freed to focus on pleasures.
Institution of the income tax hid the financial costs. Non-monetary costs are hidden by simple geography; one doesn’t see every program recipient, but assumes that “government” is addressing any needs somewhere.
This has progressed to a point that government has become the ultimate guarantor of necessities, so family and neighborly charity are now perceived as good but optional.
Everything is optional today; even one’s basic biology; even life itself.
Aaron, thanks, I agree.
I think the answer to what causes what is obviously hugely complicated, especially in social science, and there is certainly some kind of feedback loop between “culture,” and government.
The trouble with cultural explanations is that they don’t really explain very much. Culture is really just “what makes stuff happen”, so saying stuff happens because of culture is tautological. The question is, what makes culture go a certain way and why?
I think you are right to point the finger at FDR. But more abstractly, I think the answer is probably that the trajectories of both culture and government are explained largely by the interference of massive disruptive shocks from outside forces. The most important of these are probably war, economics, science and individuals. War has had an enormous impact on government, almost entirely in the direction of creating a very strong centralized federal state. In economics, the Great Depression obviously made the rise of an entrenched welfare state possible. Science gave us 20th century industrial society, which tended to favor centralized government, as well as the pseudo-scientific ideology of managerialism, as applied to government by political “science”. It also gave us the pill and dozens of other socially transformative inventions. Finally, the 19th century “great man theory of history” is partially right: we wouldn’t have had the government we have today without the transformative personalities of TR, Wilson and FDR.
So I think my answer is that x and y have a common cause z: disruptive external shocks to the system. What this means for the conservative political project, I don’t know. Any ideas?