The Ancien Regime Of The Good Old Usa

One of the core challenges now facing the Party is the collapse of the New Deal coalition and adaptation to the underlying economic realities that brought it about. Bill Clinton’s rallying cry to "end government as we know it" was an attempt to reform government along private sector lines.

Well, yeah! But since then the Democratic Party has turned away from Bill Clinton’s attempt to reform it. It is now driven partly by street brawlers like Markos Moulitsas who want to make the Democrats into a fighting party again, fighting the big corporations that are now more powerful than governments, and partly by the new progressives like Jacob Aronson.

But “reforming government along private sector lines” or using it to fight for the people against the powerful, as Al Gore wanted to do back in 2000, is delusional. Let us look at government in the United States. Let us follow the money in this unified table of government spending in the United States in 2004. It is obtained by combining two spreadsheets, one from the US Census Bureau on state and local government spending, and one from the President’ s budget documents.

Here is the top line result for 2004:

Programs for seniors: $1 trillion
Programs for youth: $700 billion
Programs for defense: $700 billion
Programs for the poor: $660 billion
Programs for transportation: $175 billion
Interest on the debt: $400 billion
All other programs: $2 trillion

Now it seems to me that the great power, the great interests in the land, the folks for whom we work at our jobs and for whom we pour the most money through our government is: senior pensions and health care, education of children, defense against enemies foreign and domestic, relief of the poor, and transportation.

And this is a huge commitment. In fact, it is a commitment that can’t be met.

That is what politics is going to be about in this century. It is a sideshow to talk about management along private sector lines, or using government to punish corporations.

The question is: how long can we go on like this?

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

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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

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

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

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

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

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

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

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

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

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

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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