Americas Emerging Liberal Oligarchy - Road to the Middle Class

ANYONE CAN make a mistake. But when a parade of Obama administration cabinet picks—Richardson, Daschle, Killefer, and Lynn—turn out to have ethics or tax problems, and are actual lobbyists or lobbyists by any other name, you start to wonder. But why be surprised? You expect stuff like that from today’s Democrats.

The problem started with the Obama campaign, which set up the absurd expectation that an Obama administration would drive the moneychangers from the temple. Then the Obama administration compounded the problem with the Obama ethics policy, published a week ago. First it said that lobbyists needn’t apply, then it said that one of them could.

You might think that this just shows that the Obama people are hypocrites, like all politicians. But I think it goes deeper than that; it goes to the fundamental delusion in the world-view of our American liberal elite. Its members don’t really understand that, at the beginning of the 21st century, they now constitute an American aristocracy well on its way to becoming merely America’s ruling oligarchy.

You Greek scholars will understand that we mean that our liberal elite is transitioning from the “rule of the best” to the “rule of the few.”

There was a time when our liberals friends truly represented the best of America. They offered up political and economic reforms based upon the best ideas that they knew.

The Progressives of a century ago offered up financial reform, the income tax, the primary election, and popular election of US senators. The liberals of the New Deal offered up labor reform and old age pensions. The liberals of the Great Society offered up civil rights, Medicare for seniors, job training for minorities, and generous pensions for single mothers.

Let us give our liberals friends the benefit of the doubt. They believed, as they agitated for these reforms, that they were pushing for social advances backed by the best in scientific and political ideas. And when liberals launched their campaigns to convince the American people of the justice of their cause, the American people, decent and open-minded as they are, listened to them and agreed to let the reforms go forward. Those were the days when liberals truly deserved to be honored as an American aristocracy.

It truly is sad that all that youth and idealism has given us schools that fail the underclass, welfare that has shattered the underclass family, and health care that will bankrupt the nation. But anyone can make an honest mistake.

Right or wrong, the age of liberal idealism is over. We live today in a different era. As the American philosopher George Maroutsos puts it: If you have power and you haven’t abused it, you don’t have power. You just have responsibility. President Clinton was a man who had power. President Bush was a man who had responsibility.

The liberal aristocracy that once knew itself to be “the best” has become, after half a century of power, merely “the few,” just another cabal of ruthless men and women fighting to keep their hands on the levers of political power.

Our liberal friends do not yet understand how their years of political and cultural power have corrupted them; they still imagine themselves as plucky outsiders battling for the people against the powerful. There is a word for a misunderstanding of reality like that. The word is “delusion.”

It takes delusion to issue foolish slogans about Hope and Change, and make ridiculous promises to ban lobbyists from the political process. Think of it. The federal government disposes of $3.1 trillion a year. (That was last year. This year, who knows?) But any practical person understands that no mere sloganeering will bring change to this spending juggernaut, or drive the influence peddlers from K Street.

It takes an oligarchic sense of entitlement—almost like a bailed-out banker—to come into power and immediately give yourself and your supporters a trillion dollar stimulus bonus before you have achieved anything for the American people.

Things were not done that way back when liberals truly were young and idealistic.

In the early 1900s Progressives couldn’t wait to get into power and legislate the exciting new ideas that would reform the creaking politics of the 19th century. In 1933 liberals couldn’t wait to get into power and legislate landmark legislation to improve the lives of workers and old people. In the 1960s liberals couldn’t wait to legislate a civil rights revolution and put the findings of social science to work in helping the poor.

Now fast-forward to today’s liberals.

In 2009 liberals couldn’t wait to get into power and award themselves a trillion dollar bonus.

Don’t be discouraged! Maybe later they’ll get around to saving the planet, and pave over the nation with solar collectors and wind farms.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: 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. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

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