After Blair Its The Culture Stupid - Road to the Middle Class

WE KNOW now that the Third Way was the left’s backhanded admission that the Reagan and Thatcher years marked the end of left-wing economics. No longer could center-left politicians propose to direct the economy from the top, backing winners and assuming that only an activist government could keep the economy from running off the rails.

In fact the opposite is true. The government’s job (and it is a vital one) is to set the legal framework for enterprise and then get out of the way.

The years that led up to the Reagan/Thatcher revolution were the years of the Broken Economy, Andrew Neil writes. People thought that the healthy growth of the nineteenth century and the immediate post-war era was a thing of the past. We had entered an era of limits,they realized, and the job of the elite was to manage decline.

Baloney, said Reagan and Thatcher, using the ideas of Hayek, Friedman, and Mises. The only area of limits, they argued, was the limited grasp of economics and capitalism on the part of the academic middle class. And then they took power and showed ’em.

But now the center-left gets it, or at least the political cadre does. Or at least it sorta does.

So we won that one.

As a result the era of the Broken Economy is over. Now we have entered the era of the Broken Society. As Neil writes:

During the Blair–Brown decade social concerns — what kind of society we have become — have gradually replaced economic worries. People fear that we have become an increasingly fragmented, boorish, more violent society.

Now, as then, Britain is in a bigger mess than the United States, and the reason is the same now as it was then. The British people are more in thrall to the power and the influence of the academic middle class than Americans in the United States.

But the problem, the breakdown of the family and of society at the bottom and the formation of a feral underclass, is the same. And it issues from the same cause.

The cause is the progressive welfare state. Today the government showers money upon the non-working poor. It rewards poor people for failure and it utterly marginalizes lower-class males.

As Patricia Morgan argues,

[T]he state, by providing extensive welfare provision, by financing child-care services and by taxing families on an ever-greater proportion of their income, provides strong incentives for families to break up rather than to hold together, and to form family relationships that are hidden from the authorities. Government policy has crowded out voluntary welfare within families and caused otherwise law-abiding people to commit fraud on a very extensive scale.

The fact is, she argues, women cannot afford to bring up children on their own. Nearly all women need help in time or money, or both. A mother can either get help from the father, civilizing him into a provider and a role model for her children. Or, in today’s society, she can get it from the state.

The result, we know, is the Broken Society of feral children and single parenthood that infects our inner cities and is always threatening to break out into the general middle class.

Today in Britain, conservative commentators are worried that Gordon Brown has the tactical advantage. They worry that David Cameron’s conservatives are concentrating too much on wooing upper-middle-class voters with talk about work-life balance and global warming. They warn that Cameron is creating an opening for Brown to pose as the friend of the middle class who will mend the Broken Society that threatens peoples’ children with street violence and a lousy education.

Maybe. But the center left still does not understand that it is the very structure, the very nature of the programs that they have brought into government that are the cause of the problem.

And anyway, if Brown actually fixed the Broken Society, that would realize the vision of the Conservatives.

But is it not likely the Gordon Brown in Britain, or Hillary Clinton in the United States will solve the problem of the underclass or of lousy schools.

To solve the problem of the Broken Society will require that the left gives up its patronage and its power: over the poor, over education, over health care. Before it does that it will try every top-down government program in the world.

But the conservative answer will remain the same. There is such a thing as society; it is just not the same as the state. The health of a society comes from the strength of its little platoons, the civic society of voluntary give and take, of charitable giving. It is precisely what big government programs crowd out.

And I don’t know a single liberal friend who gets it.

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