Excellent essay from William Voegeli on the modern liberals (click title of this post), their policies and plans. One issue he raises: why liberals do not set parameters for what they want to achieve with the welfare state apparatus in the US. Why? Because that would set an outer limit:
. . . conservatives' questions about the welfare state's ultimate size and cost are turned aside by rhetoric that emphasizes the processes and attitudes that go into building it. What's important, liberals say, is that the creation of government programs to promote social welfare be pursued in a vigorous, confident, optimistic manner, suffused with concern for the vulnerable and respect for the common man, unconstrained by the stifling precepts of the past . . . Conservatives wonder if all this lofty talk is a smokescreen--they wonder, that is, whether there really are blueprints in a safe back at the central office, detailing the vast, Swedish-style welfare state that is liberalism's ultimate goal for America.
The answer is, probably not. If that answer is correct, it then raises this question: Which would be more troubling--the existence or the absence of those blueprints? That is, should conservatives conclude that liberals pose a graver threat to self-government, freedom and prosperity if they have an ambitious but hidden agenda, or if liberalism has no master plan at all because it is, ultimately and always, an adhocracy?
Liberals have a practical reason why they won't say what they ultimately want, and a theoretical reason why they can't say it. The practical reason is that any usably clear statement of what the welfare state should be would define not only a goal but a limit. Conceding that an outer limit exists, and stipulating a location for it, strengthens the hand of conservatives--with liberals having admitted, finally, that the welfare state can and should do only so much, the argument now, the conservatives will say, is over just how much that is. Keeping open, permanently, the option for the growth of the welfare state reflects the belief that the roster of human needs and aspirations to which the government should minister is endless.
Yipes! This is the EU system imported to the US so that the pious mandarins of the governmental elite can determine what each individual's wants and needs are. Communitarian Socialism?
Actually, it's more like the Star Trek world -- a Utopian construct that sprouted from the dreams of Gene Roddenberry, which was (and is) completely unmoored from reality:
The moral standpoint from which liberalism passes judgment is one it derives from John Dewey, for whom the highest imperative was "growth." According to political scientist Robert Horwitz, Dewey looked to "the bright promise of an evolutionary understanding of human potentialities, a view which presents boundless possibilities for development." The point of growth is more growth; the only standard by which we judge the direction of past growth is whether it facilitates or stymies future growth. It is in this vein that Johnson spoke of a Great Society where the government will enrich minds, enlarge talents and concern itself with monitoring our leisure hours to make sure we are constructive and reflective, not bored and restless. It is an agenda for which prosperity, liberty and justice are "just the beginning," and one which, constantly advancing the constantly evolving goal of personal growth, can have no end.
* * *
. . . [Thus,] humans can rescue their lives from meaninglessness by striving, however they pass their days, to employ more rather than fewer of their talents, finding new ones and expanding known ones, to the sole purpose of being able to enlarge them still further, endlessly. We have seen the future, and it's an adult education seminar, where ever-greater latitude is afforded to ever-smaller souls, and where freedom means nothing higher than the care and feeding of personal idiosyncrasies.
As an ethical precept this position is risible. As the basis for social criticism, it is infuriating. This is the standard by which liberals judge us to be spiritually unemployed, the basis on which they are going to lift the level of our existence? Many Democrats lament that Republicans have been successful in getting working-class Americans to vote "against their own interests," by stressing social issues like abortion and gay marriage. . . It's a "false consciousness" diagnosis that betrays rather than describes the Democrats' problem: the smug assumption that we know, far better than they do themselves, the "real interests" of people who live in dorky places and went to schools no one has heard of.
I don't need people who went to the "right schools" and have the "right thoughts" telling me how to live or inculcating me with their misplaced concept of morality. That's a Big Brother society -- the Orwellian nightmare writ large.
Just another reason to be a conservative.
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