My dear wife and I play a little game. I suggest that we move to Europe and she shakes her head and rolls her eyes, no doubt wondering why, if I must be foolish, I don’t find a more entertaining format. My motivation has been to save time, expense and discomfort on vacation trips: “if we lived in England, we wouldn’t have to endure nine hours in coach to visit the West Country,” etc. She acknowledges the logic of my argument but points out that housing is expensive there, the dollar is weak, we aren’t exactly wealthy (and even further from that status than three years ago), we’d be thousands of miles from the family, am I going to move all those books and what about the dog? Good arguments all, so I subside.
However, the desire, illogical or not, is growing, and for reasons unrelated to the logistics of travel. I am becoming increasingly depressed about the state of the union and wish — intermittently, perhaps never quite seriously — that I could leave. My remedy may be unrealistic, but the dissatisfaction is genuine and not without basis; here is a brief list:
• wars, costing thousands of lives and driving us into massive debt,
• tax cuts which further increase the debt while creating a financial aristocracy and allowing our infrastructure, physical and otherwise, to crumble,
• cries of “socialism” whenever anything progressive is proposed, such as bringing decent health care to more people,
• a financial system which operates to enrich insiders rather than to support the economy, and which resists regulation but profits from public bailouts,
• conservative rejection not only of compassion, but of the principle of sharing and common enterprise which is fundamental to civilized society,
• libertarian delusions about rugged individualism and minimal government,
• conservative rejection of science and most aspects of reality,
• a flood of guns and libertarian-conservative determination to arm everyone,
• the power of money, hardly a new development, but increasingly dominating politics,
• a Supreme Court content to allow the previous two trends to continue,
• a mania for privatization, in part based on an illusion about efficiency, in part the result of the refusal to tax the wealthy,
• accusations that the President is a foreigner, a communist, a fascist, or the antichrist, many of them masking racial bigotry,
• suppression of unions, undermining of pensions, and denigration of public employment,
• a shallow, often repellant, celebrity-ridden culture,
• ninnies running for the Republican nomination,
• pathetic news media which ignore when they do not abet these developments, and
• a supposedly liberal president who does little to earn the label.
• wars, costing thousands of lives and driving us into massive debt,
• tax cuts which further increase the debt while creating a financial aristocracy and allowing our infrastructure, physical and otherwise, to crumble,
• cries of “socialism” whenever anything progressive is proposed, such as bringing decent health care to more people,
• a financial system which operates to enrich insiders rather than to support the economy, and which resists regulation but profits from public bailouts,
• conservative rejection not only of compassion, but of the principle of sharing and common enterprise which is fundamental to civilized society,
• libertarian delusions about rugged individualism and minimal government,
• conservative rejection of science and most aspects of reality,
• a flood of guns and libertarian-conservative determination to arm everyone,
• the power of money, hardly a new development, but increasingly dominating politics,
• a Supreme Court content to allow the previous two trends to continue,
• a mania for privatization, in part based on an illusion about efficiency, in part the result of the refusal to tax the wealthy,
• accusations that the President is a foreigner, a communist, a fascist, or the antichrist, many of them masking racial bigotry,
• suppression of unions, undermining of pensions, and denigration of public employment,
• a shallow, often repellant, celebrity-ridden culture,
• ninnies running for the Republican nomination,
• pathetic news media which ignore when they do not abet these developments, and
• a supposedly liberal president who does little to earn the label.
To conservatives, this critique and my proposed solution no doubt mark me as something less than a real American, certainly unqualified to offer opinions about this country, polity and society. I wonder. They too denounce the present condition of the country. Although such true Americans would reject physical emigration, they too wish to escape, into an earlier, more primitive time, dragging the rest of us along.
Like most Americans, I have thought of this as an extraordinary country. I have considered myself lucky to have been born here. I have believed, in the words of the Gettysburg Address, that we are “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” that we have a “government of the people, by the people, for the people. . . .” However, those words no longer describe us, and have been repudiated by Lincoln’s party.
This condition has been developing for decades, but it has come to its full flowering now, and is epitomized, appropriately, by something mundane: the Ryan budget. A book gathering dust on my shelves is entitled Setting National Priorities: The 1980 Budget. Budgets are boring but, as the title states, the federal budget sets, and reflects, national priorities. Ours are a disgrace.
Tony Judt, in his book Ill Fares the Land, noted that “the symptoms of collective impoverishment are all about us. Broken highways, bankrupt cities, collapsing bridges, failed schools, the unemployed, the underpaid, and the uninsured . . . .” He added that these “all suggest a collective failure of will.”59 As to liberals, that is true: will, courage, self-confidence, even real conviction seem absent. As to conservatives, however, the problem is not a failure of will but an ideological inability to address such issues.
Conservatives are fond of claiming that their world view is taken directly from the principles on which the nation was founded, but there is much error and self-delusion in that belief. For example, they refer constantly to “liberty,” but their concept of it is oddly narrow, generally coming down to a defense of business. That does not even have the distinction of being a novel misinterpretation. Judt pointed this out: “Indeed, the thought that we might restrict public policy considerations to a mere economic calculus was already a source of concern two centuries ago.” He noted that Condorcet “anticipated with distaste the prospect that ‘liberty will be no more . . . than the necessary condition for the security of financial operations.’ " 60 Moving from the Eighteenth Century to the Nineteenth, we find that Hegel also criticized this misuse of terminology and concept: “When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really private interests which are being discussed.”61 Hegel had in mind the landed aristocracy, but his comment applies as well to the plutocracy that Republicans defend in the Twenty-First.
About all one can hope for is that, undeterred by shame, logic or responsibility, the Right will push the new paradigm to the breaking point, and a disgusted public, finally enlightened, will elect rational officials and demand enactment and enforcement of sensible policies.
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59. P. 12. Also included in an article in The New York Review of Books, April 29, 2010.
60. Ill Fares the Land, p. 35
61. The Philosophy of History, Fourth Part, Section III, Chapter II, in The Philosophy of Hegel, Friedrich ed., p. 133 (Modern Library)
