Lesprit Descalier At Kplu - Road to the Middle Class

LAST NIGHT I went into the belly of the beast to the taping of a roundtable at the local NPR affiliate KPLU. I and five others listened to audio clips of presidents past, present and future talking about Social Security and welfare—safety nets—and then talked about our feelings to KPLU reporter Paula Wissel.

After an experience like that you always think of the zingers you could have delivered, but didn’t. The French have a word for it: l’esprit d’escalier, the spirit of the stairs.

No problem here though. We eevil conservative Republicans now have our blogs. So we get the last word.

For a conservative, the problem with the whole set-up is that it presumes, almost at an instinctive level, that the Democratic way of social safety nets is the only one thinkable.

You know how it works. It start with a pressing social problem. Concerned activists raise consciousness. Experts devise solutions. Politicians step in with a government program. Everyone cheers and the bureaucrats go to work--for ever.

But the conservative understanding of social safety nets is that, unless you base the safety net on the “mediating structures” of family, church, neighborhood, and private association, you are going to fray the social fabric and eventually break the safety net. Governments don’t do safety nets. They do wars and rumors of wars.

That is what we have seen in the seventy years since Social Security was passed. And it is women and children that get hurt the most.

As we pointed out yesterday, the biggest problem the United States faces is that in the last generation the percentage of children being raised by a single parent has gone up. Among college graduates, it has doubled from five percent to ten percent. But among parents with less than a high-school education it has nearly quadrupled, from around twelve percent to 40 percent, before declining, since welfare reform, into the high 30s.

Children being raised by a single parent are much more likely to live in poverty.

Children being raised by a single parent are much more lilkely to suffer abuse—up to 35 times more than a child living with married biological mother and father.

Children being raised by a single parent probably don’t have a father in the house. The presence of a father means, for boys, that they act out less, and for girls, that they have fewer emotional problems.

The way to avoid all these problems is to anchor people in the mediating structures, discussed by Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus in To Empower People. But that would mean backing out of the government progams and reempowering the mediating structures between individuals and the megastructures of big government, big coporations, and big unions.

Don’t look for our liberal friends at NPR to be talking about that sort of thing any time soon.

And it’s not because they are deliberately avoiding a national conversation about the social safety net. They probably never heard of Berger and Neuhaus, or read Michael Novak’s Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. They probably don’t get the import of Hayek’s dictum that government just doesn’t have the bandwidth to do the things it tries to do and consistently does so badly. And why should they? What would be the point?

Reporter Paula Wissel did a fine job moderating the roundtable. Until it came to the very end. Everyone on the panel openly and freely admitted who they were going to vote for. But not Paula Wissel (who looks a bit like a younger and more intelligent Helen Thomas). Said she: Oh no, I can’t tell you that. Mumble, mumble, “objective journalist.”

Oh please!

Still, it’s salutary to be in the room when an MSM journalist actually utters that canard. The thing is: she isn’t fooling anyone. She is so obviously a second-wave feminist with a standard second-wave feminist political philosophy that it would clear the air for her to be honest and up front. As in, hey, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, and proud of it. Probably never voted for a Republican in my life.

You could respect someone like that.

The roundtable I attended is one of a series that KPLU is putting together for broadcast every Tuesday between Labor Day and the November election as “Looking Backward to Look Forward.” Florangela Davila, lately of the Seattle Times, is the project manager doing the heavy lifting to make the program series happen. News Director at KPLU is Erin Hennessey.

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