Beyond Mere Blame

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Road to the Middle Class

Saturday May 19, 2012

by Christopher Chantrill

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If we want to understand who to blame for the current cock-up in government, it is easy. The educated elitists, our liberal friends, are to blame. It is liberals that have championed the neo-feudal welfare state and its reduction of everything to politics. It is they that have championed gigantic government programs and made impossible promises. It is their vision that is crashing to earth, and their programs that threaten to drive the various levels of governments in the United States to default.

Meanwhile, life has been good for the educated elite even as things have fallen apart for others. This is made clear in the headline social changes between 1960 and 2010. According to Charles Murray, 88 percent of the top 30 percent of Americans aged 40 to 49 were married in 1960. In 200_ it was 83 percent. But things are different for the bottom 30 percent. For them, 83 percent were married in 1960. In 200_ only 48 percent were married. Things are working out pretty well for the upper-middle class. Things are not so good for the bottom 30 percent, and this during a period in which unprecedented amounts of government spending were directed at the relief of the poor.

Decades ago liberals had noble visions about helping the helpless caught in the riptides of the industrial revolution, and they translated their visions into political programs. There was the bottom-up program of “resistance” and “liberation” for the oppressed to be led by a cadre of educated youth, and there was the top-down program of expert supervision to led by the educated elite. But because their social technique did not extend beyond the administrative model of the absolute monarchs, their noble initiatives have inevitably suffered from the limitations of that model, for administration and bureaucracy are techniques of top-down state control not of social cooperation or social compassion. In consequence of this error, our liberal friends created not a new society founded upon the best that had been thought and said, but a new state founded on the ancient principle of might makes right, and their new state descended with the inevitability of a law of nature into a neo-feudal patronage state. The politician that creates and extend political coalitions by dangling benefits before the voters is not that different from the noble medieval warrior that earns the support of his immediate vassals with the prospect of booty. The new state follows the narrative of every old state. Inevitably, the ruling class promises more than plunder or the economy can deliver and so, at some point, the state patronage apparatus runs out of money to tax, borrow, or print.

So far so good. But there is a question ultimately more interesting and more uplifting than the tawdry question of blame and the mechanics of government default. Governments have always spent and taxed and borrowed up to the limit permitted to them by the natural, financial, and cultural constraints of the time, and the history of all governments is a story of crises, scandals, and failure, a stumbling from one disaster to another. Even in its heyday in the 19th century, the British Empire lurched from crisis to disaster and back again. First there was the mess of the Crimean War. Then there was the Indian Mutiny, called, in India, the Rebellion. Then there was Gordon in Khartoum, followed by the Zulu Wars and the Boer War. All this is routine, the natural unfolding of politics, or civil war by other means.

The interesting question is: what is it about the belief system of our liberal friends that led them into the blind alley of the administrative welfare state? What was it that allowed them to imagine that their big government would be any different from the previous big governments in history? What made them believe that the vast expansion of government would be anything other than a gathering of Circumlocution Offices staffed by battalions of Barnacles and Stiltstockingsⁱ, a moral, cultural, and economic withering? What made them think that you could have liberation, dignity, and justice with a big overweening government? After all, the whole point of a good belief system and the moral universe it conjures up is to deliver to its believers and practitioners a divine truth, inaccessible to ordinary mortals, to help them avoid the common pitfalls of self-delusion and hypocrisy and live instead in truth and justice. A good religion should be a prop, and help you live a worthy and a meaningful life. It should not lead you astray into a reactionary political system and a swamp of hypocrisy.

Here we come to the crux of the problem. Our liberal friends cannot see that their moral and political enthusiasms, their faith in social science, their confidence in their moral leadership, are all, in the strict sense, religious. They imagine that they have grown beyond the superstitions and the narrowness of religious belief; they think that religion is on its way out as more and more people like themselves come to rely and to act on the findings of science and reason instead of a childlike belief in gods and spirits. Their religion, their faith, is that they have evolved beyond religion.

In fact, of course, the history of the modern era is the tale of nothing but a global outburst of secular religion. It has been the story of one secular religious movement after another. A good starting place is the French Revolution and its cult of Reason. Then there is Romanticism, a belief in something deeper than reason that explains the essence of reality and of life. There is socialism in all its variants, the nostalgic idea that we moderns can return to the Garden of Eden of perfect, eternal community. There is Comte and his Religion of Humanity. There is fascism, the modern nostalgia for the lost world of the tribe and the kindred. There is Nietzsche and his Uebermensch, the extraordinary individual. There is the cult of creativity, the fashion among the children of the educated classes to reduce the natural and physical generative urge into a metaphor of non-physical creation. There is the neo-puritanism of the environmentalist movement, a modern eruption of asceticism among the well-to-do, that seeks to purify and save a polluted and corrupted world. It goes on and on.

Our liberal friends fail to understand, any more than the simplest Christian fundamentalist, that the meaning of life, its telos, is always in question, always a mystery. We do not know our human purpose, if we have a purpose. We do not know how we should act in order to survive and flourish. We do not even know if human survival is warranted, and some today believe that the planet would be better with a lot few humans. That is why we need faith, the faith to carry on that we get from God, or His prophets, or from secular prophets, or from our own inspiration. Each one of us believes that his or her particular faith is the best way to survive, to flourish, and to create a moral society. In the day-to-day social life we try to work out what is best for us, best for our families, best for our larger social groupings, and best for the planet. In the arena of national politics, liberals believe in certain liberal folkways and conservatives believe in certain conservative folkways, and all of us are pretty certain that the other guys have missed the point and are likely to bring the nation to disaster. And because government is almost always a train wreck in progress, the governing class must bear the weight of the blame.

In the United States, over the last century, it is the educated class of liberals, progressives, creatives, secularists--whatever you want to call them--that has dominated politics and culture. It is their liberal ideas that drive the government with, in 2011, its trillion dollars a year in government pensions, its trillion dollars a year in government health care, its trillion dollars a year in government education, and its three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year in government welfare.ⁱⁱ It is liberals that dominate the universities, liberals that dominate the entertainment media.

Liberals have caused the current crisis because they lacked the self-consciousness to realize that they, just like everyone before them, have a religion. It's a secular religion, for sure, but religion all the same. When you take your religion and you breathe it into all the organs of government, legislating morality with that secular religion, then you break down the separation between church and state, between the political sector and the moral/cultural sector. Of course, you don't believe that. You think that only right-wing preachers and right-wing politicians can create a theocracy, but that your ideas are illuminated with the light of science and rational ethics.

But it takes a remarkably narrow and pinched understanding of the modern age not to understand that, in socialism and communism, in administrative centralism, and now in environmentalism and the climate change movement, we have what we have often had in the past, militant religions enthusiastically pursuing a vision to save the world from sin. It is time to develop a broader view of the human condition, one that soars above the mean concept of a social rank-and-file patronized by an administrative elite anointed, by right of education, expertise, and evolvement, to rule over us.

To fully understand our ruling class, the educated elite, we must understand that, like many political and cultural institutions it presents itself to us, Janus-faced, as two contradictory yet complementary factions. One faction of the educated elite we may call the “presiding educated class.” Here are concentrated the great universities, the establishment liberal media, the great liberal foundations, and the social service bureaucracy. It experiences itself as a benevolent and beneficent monarch, guiding and ordering the less evolved and less able through thoughtful and uplifting social programs. The other faction is a horse of a different color. We may call it a rampaging “educated youth” to differentiate it from its kinder, gentler uncle. It is the Left, the faction that experiences the present as an intolerable reign of oppression, of irreconcilable class conflcit, and lives for “resistance” and “liberation,” the people rising up to overthrow their unjust rulers, of wars of liberation, and above all, political power.

But first we must develop a more differentiated model of our society, one that reaches beyond the failed model of today’s educated elite, beyond the Circumlocution Office of the liberal Barnacles and Stiltstockings in the presiding educated class, and the adolescent dreams of street action among the educated youth. It is a development of the ideas of the most successful modern revolution, the American revolution and its plan of limited government in a separation of powers between the three branches of government. We call this differentiated model democratic capitalism, 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.”ⁱⁱⁱ

iCharles Dickens, Little Dorrit, “Containing the Whole Science of Government,” Modern Library, p. 107.

iiChristopher Chantrill, usgovernmentspending.com/numbers?year=2011.

iiiMichael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Madison Books, p. 14.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.americanmanifesto.org.

print view

The Crisis of the Administrative State
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Beyond Mere Blame
What led our liberal friends into the blind alley of the administrative welfare state?

Government and the Technology of Power
If you scratch a social reformer, you will likely discover a plan for more government.

Business and the Web of Trust
Business is all about trust and relationship.

The Bonds of Faith
No society known to anthropology or history lacked religion.

All of the Above
Society is differentiated into three sectors.

Springtime for Freeloaders
The modern welfare state encourages freeloaders.

The Curse of Compulsion
The larger the government, the smaller the society.

The Real Meaning of Society
Broadening the horizon of cooperation in the “last best hope of man on earth.”

The Greater Separation of Powers
If you want to limit power then you must limit power.

Beyond Mere Blame

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