When Politics Is Only About Spin

TEN, FIFTEEN years ago in the heady days of the Third Way fashionable commentators were all agog about Spin. Clinton did it. Blair did it. Everyone swooned. It was so cool.

Later, when President Bush made his case for the invasion of Iraq, of course, the swooners were nowhere to be found. It is one thing to do a bit of advocacy for the good guys, but another thing to shill for evil neo-cons.

But now, in a British row about taxing the income of pension funds according to Robin Harris, people are even fed up with spin from Third Way progressives like Blair and his designated heir, Gordon Brown.

Now people can see the spin for what it was, trying to square circles.

New Labour�s strategy of gaining power was to be at once fresh and reassuring, to split every difference and to be all things to all men. Accordingly, generalised pledges, bland phrases and a selection of well-judged soundbites provided a substitute for philosophy.

The reason for this, of course, the substitution fo spin for political philosophy was the same for New Labour as it was in the case of Clinton spin. New Labour and Clinton Democrats were trying to do the impossible, keeping their lefty base happy by not really reforming the welfare state while assuring the rest of the country that they had left their old lefty ways behind and would be accountable and deliver government services just like market-driven retail giants.

Eventually all this was going to come crashing down, despite the best efforts of the MSM deniers. The science is in on this. You can�t deliver good public services with big government. You can�t deliver flexibility; you can�t deliver efficiency.

The science is in. Government is good for force and compulsion, and it�s none to good at that. But we have to put government in charge of force and compulsion because the alternative to government is to have private armies floating around rather like China in the 1920s to 1940s and Iraq and Lebanon right now. Not a nice place for peaceful people who just want to get on with their lives.

But for anything else, government is a loser.

The problem is that there are many people—bright, educated people—who don�t want to see this.

One day they will wake up from their dogmatic slumber. They will join with us in building a better society that empowers people in the mediating structures between government and the individual.

But that day is not yet.

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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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