Posted by
ClearCommentary.com on Thursday, May 22, 2008 3:01:27 PM
The central predicate of modern liberalism is that more government is better. Underlying that premise and providing its political momentum is the cynical notion that certain people are less capable of providing for themselves. Indeed, in the left's view, some--perhaps many--people are congenitally helpless, which justifies its vision of an America with a multi-tiered safety net.
Within this thicket of convoluted reasoning is the misinformed collectivist idea that it takes a village of bureaucrats to survive. In that context, the poor are permanently consigned to lives of economic despair, despite the fact that numerous studies have demonstrated that the majority achieve entrance into the middle class after about a dozen years of hard work. There is a numbing insincerity to the left's desperation to 'help' those in need, not merely because it's based on the smarmy assumption that demographics, ethnicity, and gender define aptitude, skills, and work ethic, but because it's so transparently politically motivated.
They don't call it socialism any more, but if you listen to Sens. Obama and Clinton, much of their rhetoric and policy proposals share the same political pedigree. It's confiscatory taxation, burdensome regulation, centralized governance, an embrace of bureaucracy only a Soviet could love, and a habitual dependence upon the judiciary to muscle through rulings that can't be achieved legislatively.
What's most disturbing is how well received it is by the media, which deftly repackages it in ever more palatable ways, for easy consumption by the masses. With calculated aid from our public school system and academia, is it any wonder that more Americans than ever are warming up to the idea of a national health care plan? The aggregating of disparate problems, coalescing them into a form that makes denying them a kind of civic heresy, creates a robust, if wholly unsubstantiated sense of legitimacy for the endless list of programs to redress them.
The reason it's so successful is that it's imperceptibly progressive, which is how you rewire a culture to ultimately accept a goal it would otherwise find abhorrent. We didn't suddenly wake up accepting partial birth abortion, it was a long and degrading road, which began with the corrosive myth that sex is recreational, not sacred. You can run through the left's entire platform and you'll find the same mechanism at work: They just baby-step their way into our civic lives, and the next thing you know, God and religion are exempt from schools (and Christianity is evil), guns themselves cause crime, it's fine for adolescents to have sex as long as they have mastered condom etiquette (they're going to anyway, remember), those with financial means didn't work for it, and, of course, America has caused as many problems in the world as it's solved.
None of this would resonate with the electorate 45 years ago, but the fact that has achieved a perverse kind of traction demonstrates that with cultural acquiescence, just about anything is possible.