The campaign for tolerance and the campaign of shame represent the deployment of “soft” power.  But we cannot ignore the importance of “hard” power, the deployment of political forces that control and direct the political life of the nation and its government institutions.  Like nature, political power abhors a vacuum, and conservatives must learn to use it or lose it.

The AQAL matrix teaches us that power is always with us.  There will never be a society of gentle green communitarians caring and sharing for all their fellow men, because underneath the surface of every green communitarian is the blue purposive that railed against the Iraq war as “illegal and immoral,” and the red impulsive that rails about discrimination and victimization.  There will always be power because there will always be politics.  And politics is a contest of power, of civil war by other means.

Power is shameful, and long-established powers have liked to veil their power behind an image of ritual and orthodoxy.  Edmund Burke, the scourge of the French Revolution, liked to represent the power plays of the British Glorious Revolution a century before as a modest return to ancient liberties.  The United States likes to hide its unprecedented power beneath the skirts of democracy and the rule of law.  But the revolution of 1688 succeeded because the Whigs in parliament had the power to send James II packing and change the royal succession to the foreign Princess Sophia as the “stock and root of inheritance to our kings.”  The United States rules the world because it has power: “hard” power or “soft” power, it is still backed up by its vast military and economic might.   The movers and shakers of the welfare state are no different.  They like to represent their rule as pure benevolence, and they rehearse its history as a succession of benefits given to the people.  In fact, of course, they rule through power, extracting huge amounts of money from their subjects in taxes, so that they can, with vast generosity, give it back to them.

The welfare state was created by political power.  The budding lower-middle class culture of religion, education, mutual aid, and living under law that grew and flourished in the nineteenth century was defeated by that power.  The mutual- aid culture was beaten by the political power of the insurance companies and the doctors and then replaced by a culture of government employees that have come to call themselves helping professionals.  The private education culture was defeated in the United States by the power of a political coalition: anti-Catholics that wanted to cure Irish and Italian children of their Catholicism, socialists that wanted to cure children of their bourogeoisism, Unitarians that wanted to cure children of their Puritanism, and elite Germanophiles in love with the state-run education system of Prussia.  And the law was perverted by the new class of intellectuals and public thinkers who discovered in the law a source of power to effect social change without the mess of political organization and legislating. 

The little platoons of mutualism and non-government education were dragooned into the feudal host of the welfare state.  Only the culture of enthusiastic religion survived more or less undefeated through the tumult of the twentieth century.   And that was because the best and the brightest were so entranced by their own religion, socialism, that they wanted nothing to do with the old kind.

The welfare state is sustained by power.  It is supported by the votes of those that benefit from it: the single women, the red impulsives, and of course the elites and the government employees that work for it.  Its power issues partly from its power of patronage, its power of shame, and the power of its vision of the good society.

But after a century of dominance, the vast undifferentiated host of the welfare state that marched all over middle class culture has started to break up.  The tractable working-class voter that once delivered up his vote in return for the patronage of the liege lord of the big city machine is less amenable to a patronage system.  Ready for responsibility, many of them have revolted against the social agenda of their patrons.  But what will replace the old system?

The entrenched welfare state will not leave the stage unless it is pushed, so conservatives must develop a strategy to defeat it.  We can see the shape of the strategy emerging in the policies of the Republican administrations of the late twentieth century: the tax rate reductions, the privatizations of state enterprises, and deregulations of state sponsored monopolies.   Now in the early twenty-first century we can see the next step emerging: the conversion of one-size-fits-all government monopolies in pensions, health care, and education into more flexible social institutions in which the government remains a major player, but no longer acts as a feudal lord dispensing benefits to a grateful peasantry.  The effect of these reforms will be to reconfigure the political power relations away from the feudal status model of the welfare state to a contract model, as obtained in the commercial empire of Venice, in which the organized interests—princelings, merchants, artisans, churches, and associations—competed with each other in the dance of power.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill