In Life at the Bottom, Theodore Dalrymple has reported on just how poor in spirit the masses have become—no longer the working class but now the “underclass,” because they no longer work.  A hospital and prison psychiatrist, Dalrymple has written extensively on his personal and professional contacts with the underclass in Birmingham, England.

In the British underclass, marriage has collapsed.  Almost all underclass women live a series of tormented relationships with a succession of violent and abusive lovers.  Maintained at state expense, they live a life of diminished consequences.  If the current boy-friend trashes his lover’s apartment in a drunken rage, the police will give him a ride back to his own apartment and the state will supply a new apartment for the woman and her children.  With no employment and self-respect, the men are insanely jealous, and encouraged by drink, get into endless fights, often “glassing” their opponents with the shards of a smashed beer glass.  There’s no consequence to that either, since the emergency services will rush them to the nearest emergency room to repair their wounds.  These monsters live a life peculiarly lacking in agency: “the knife went in,” is how they report stabbing a victim at the pub.

Here the whole gamut of human folly, wickedness, and misery may be perused as leisure… Here are abortions procured by abdominal kung fu; children who have children, in numbers unknown before the advent of chemical contraception and sex education; women abandoned by the father of their child a month before or a month after delivery; insensate jealousy, the reverse of the coin of general promiscuity, that results in the most hideous oppression and violence; serial stepfatherhood that leads to sexual and physical abuse of children on a mass scale; and every kind of loosening of the distinction between the sexually permissible and the impermissible. (Dalrymple 2001 p.xi)

When the sturdy working class of Great Britain has descended to such a hell, there is no longer a scandal of physical degradation, as the progressives have maintained for over a century, but a nightmare of personal degradation.  And since the progressives had promised that the only problem the poor faced was the root cause of oppression and marginalization, they faced the bankruptcy of their great enterprise.

Of course, the bankruptcy of the progressive dream had been prophesied for years, both its political version and its economic version.  The British parliamentarian Edmund Burke had seen how the wholesale, revolutionary politics of the Terror and the nation in arms had certain disadvantages when compared with the retail, evolutionary politics of a nation of shopkeepers.  And when Karl Marx attempted to give socialism an economic basis, his labor theory of value as developed in Capital was refuted by the marginal theory of value developed in 1870 by Menger in Austria and Jevons in England.  The Austrian Jew Ludwig von Mises demonstrated in the 1920s that socialism was impossible because it couldn’t produce market prices.  F.A. Hayek in the 1940s showed that the welfare state was The Road to Serfdom because its government-directed benefit programs inevitably concentrated more and more power in the government and stripped citizens of their right to direct their own lives.  More specific studies by American conservative policy analysts in the 1970s, most notably Charles Murray in Losing Ground and George Gilder in Wealth and Poverty, showed that the poor were particularly disadvantaged by the progressive political agenda.  The welfare state with its subsidy for failure was encouraging a collapse in working class families and creating an underclass of single mothers married to the state and angry young men detached from fatherhood, responsibility, and work.  In 1989, Murray went to England and predicted that the same culture was developing in the United Kingdom.  He predicted increased violent crime and single parenthood for a nation that had experienced extremely low rates of violent crime in the twentieth century.  And it turned out he was right. (Murray 2001)  A decade later he returned to Britain and found that crime rates had actually exceeded the rates in the United States that had horrified Europeans decades before.  In the spring of 2002, Tory opposition leader Iain Duncan Smith could rise in the House of Commons and ask Prime Minister Tony Blair what he proposed to do now that the crime rate in London was higher than the crime rate in Harlem in New York City. 

If Fogel is prepared to face the truth about progressive politics, he is not prepared to deal with the consequences, for a book about the future of egalitarianism is not about to admit defeat for the progressive movement and cede the political high ground to evil Republicans, who had argued from the earliest times that the problem of the poor was their culture, not their material deprivation.  But it is a measure of the seriousness with which he regards the situation that his solution to the problem is to abolish the establishment clause of the First Amendment and institute an established government church.

Experiencing the moral decay of the poor is a “maldistribution of spiritual resources” Fogel calls for government action.  The nation should develop a program to provide the poor in spirit with spiritual values such as a “sense of purpose,” a “vision of opportunity,” a “sense of the mainstream of work and life,” a “strong family ethic,” “a sense of community,” “a capacity to engage with diverse groups,” a “sense of benevolence,” “a sense of discipline,” a “capacity to focus and concentrate one’s efforts,” a “capacity to resist the lure of hedonism,” a “capacity for self-education,” “a thirst for knowledge,” “an appreciation of quality,” and “self-esteem.”  Experts and elitists will provide “spiritual enrichment of nursery and day care” for, after all, “some young mothers and fathers are too deprived, or too young, to call on their own life experiences to transmit a sense of discipline” etc. to their children.  In the new millennium, people will be less focused on “earnwork,” work performed primarily to earn money, and more upon “volwork,” work done to satisfy their personal needs and interests. We will need a program to dismantle standard working hours, fund abundant leisure, health care, lifetime learning, and democratize self-realization.  “At the dawn of the new millennium it is necessary to address… the struggle for self realization, the desire for a deeper meaning in life than… consumer durables and the pursuit of pleasure.”   What is such a program but an established church of positive self-esteem?

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill