Pursuant that reality and now that this particular variant of a deeply ruinous welfare state is coming out of the closet, I’ll freely admit that it’s becoming much harder to find a way to present the argument than it is to define its factors: What do you call such tyranny? Tyranny? Does a program that’s grown beyond a simple socialist bent still warrant the label? Do we trot out and dust off that old standby, Communism? What we’re finding, objectively, has many of the hallmarks of a nice deep shade of collectivist reality, after all (my emphasis).
J. Howard also quotes extensively from the writing of Stephen Baskerville at an Ayn Rand site. Like Howard, Baskerville uses the topic of family law to marshall a lot of conservative words.
it is not called the welfare “state” for nothing. For unnoticed by reformers has been a startling development that is far more serious than even the devastating economic effects. This is the quiet metamorphosis of welfare from a simple system of public assistance into nothing less than a miniature penal apparatus, replete with its own system of courts, prosecutors, police, and jails: juvenile and “family” courts, “matrimonial” lawyers, child protective services, domestic violence units, child support enforcement agents, and more. This kafkaesque machinery operates by its own rules, largely outside the constitutional order, and represents the fulfillment of Friedrich von Hayek’s prophecy that socialism would eventually take us down a “road to serfdom.”
Baskerville's Ph.D. must be in name-calling because that's most of what he does as he performs a kind of operant conditioning on conservatives. It's a pretty simple technique. J. Howard and Baskerville write terms like "deeply ruinous welfare state," "tyranny," and "communism" and conservatives that trigger the conservative group loyalties like identifying something they loathe. Then watch their right-wing audience salivate. Trigger the right-wing group loyalties of their readers with other words like "kafkaesque machinery," "bureaucratic tyranny," and "the state," and they'll salivate even more.
Of course, all of this ignores the realities of the millions of people wanting divorces (hence divorce lawyers), the acrimony involved in a lot of those divorces, deadbeat dads like my father and my brother (hence government involvement in collecting support payments), abusive families, hopelessly addicted parents, and the like. But J. Howard and Baskerville don't care any more about that than Dick Cheney cares about democracy in Iraq. The trick is to formulate right-wing jargon in a way that triggers the sense of group loyalty among conservatives. Once that's accomplished, the particularities of the subject matter aren't very important.
This focus on words can have disadvantages in dealing with the nitty gritty of public. Witness the Bush administration's incompetence in dealing with Iraq and Katrina. However, the words are much more important to almost any conservative than policy success. This kind of word fetishism is a very effective technique when group loyalty is the highest priority of the people involved. And in the case of conservatives, group loyality is at the top of their list.
Call it the socialist dimension of American conservatism.
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So now they've turned to one of their favorite themes. Old, crude, ignorant, and effective unfortunately. They are like the abusive parent who, in his/her cowardice, need to dominate and intimidate. So on whom do they place the blame for society's ills, the poor and the programs put in place to assist the poor. Why? Because the poor are without defense and precious few advocates and because the programs created to assist them do not enjoy popular support. At least not anymore. So it's very easy to sling around words like "socialism" and "communism". And as you point out, it is considered creative to come up with demagogic phrases like, "deeply ruinous welfare state", or "deep shade of collectivist reality", and this is supposed to mean something. This kind of vicious tone among elite conservatives is particularly poisonous because it has been embraced by far too many people who are main-stream middle-class or working poor who truly believe that people who recieve assistance are stealing from them.
When one considers the sources of the programs these hacks deride, one realizes that the leaders who advocated for social justice were not wild-eyed radicals. Consider FDR. This man could hardly be described as a left-wing radical or a socialist. Social Democrat, yes? But his aim certainly was not to undo capitalism but rather to protect ordinary Americans and the poor from the harshness of unfettered capitalism. To create social insurance safety nets for the forgotten and the ignored. Indeed, far from promoting some sort of socialist agenda, the New Deal not only put the unemployed to work, stimulating the national economy, but was designed to prove to an uneasy populace that capitalism worked. FDR appealed directly,through a combination of verbal coaxing and concrete recovery measures,to the do-it-yourself ethos of American culture. So even though most conservatives in Roosevelt's day, and certainly in the year 2007, have always painted a picture of social responsibility as an athema to freedom, Roosevelt had something completley different from their characterizations in mind. "We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression,everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want,everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear anywhere in the world.--(President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Message to Congress, January 6, 1941)"Instinctively we recognized a deeper need.The need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization....We...sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable...we had found a way to master epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance...I see a great nation, upon a great continent, blessed with a great wealth of natural resources. Its hundred and thirty million people are at peace among themselves; they are making their country a good neighbor among the nations. I see a United States which can demonstrate that, under democratic methods of government, national wealth can be translated into a spreading volume of human comforts hitherto unknown, and the lowest standard of living can be raised far above the level of mere subsistence. But here is the challenge to our democracy: In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens—a substantial part of its whole population—who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life. I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day. I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm continue under conditions labeled indecent by a so-called polite society half a century ago.
I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children. I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying work and productiveness to many other millions. I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished....The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."--(Franklin Delano Roosevelt,Second Inaugural Address. January 20, 1937)Not exactly a proclamation in favor of Bolshevism! But certainly a call to action against the kind of grinding poverty that the people who deride public assistance and progressive activist government have never experienced and do not understand. Another leader whose programs have been derided in a similar manner, President Lyndon Baines Johnson made the following comments to biographer/historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, "“ My Grandfather taught me early in life that neither misery nor squalor is inevitable so long as the government and the people are one…So long as the government assumes the positive role of eliminating the special interests that cause most of our problems in America. Particularly the moneylenders...[They’ve] always been paid disproportionately a far higher percentage of the total end product than they deserved. They lived off our sweat, and even before air-conditioning they didn’t know what sweat was...And because of them [the moneylenders] the guy who produces…never gets what he deserves. They’re [the moneylenders] leeches, cancerous, and they’d be unnecessary evils if we had the right kind of money management." (Lyndon Johnon and The American Dream. Doris Kearns Goodwin.1976. St Martin's Press.)Once again, these are hardly the words of some anarchist who wants to impose some sort of welfare "tyranny" on the nation, but rather a leader who saw the same things Roosevelt had seen and who had a strong desire to make things better for EVERY citizen. This is not tyranny nor was it intended to take us us down a “road to serfdom.”
I will say at this point that I am encouraged by public reaction to the draconian cuts in public assistance, health care, and education. People are not happy with it and I tend to agree that the pendulum is beginning an excrutiatingly slow leftward swing. I remember when Katrina hit and the nation watched on their TVs, the absolute chaos and failure of the Republicans to deal with a national crisis. I believe, the election of 2006 was a rejection by the American people, not only of the Iraq war, but of the Republican we-don't-want-government-to-work philosophy. There is a reason why we have government. We have government as President Johnson said, "to do those things for people that they cannot do for themselves." This is not a rejection of individual responsibility. It is an acknowledgement there are some things that people cannot do for themselves. They cannot prevent the effects of a hurricane. They do not set economic policy, that is a job for government. How can our nation encourage other nations to protect workers' rights and human rights if we do not remedy our own problems? Government must do that. In our behalf. A job for every person willing and able to work is the definition of a decent economy. When the market fails to do that government must fill in the gaps. Individuals cannot create jobs for themselves out of thin air.
So those on the right who critisize activist government embrace the same kind of twisted thinking that was/is the underpinning of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen”. The excuse for transforming a War on Poverty to a War on the Poor. Reagan’s “welfare queen” has been supplanted by the “illegal immigrant” supposedly living on the dole, avoiding taxes, and consuming services. The result is unconscionable. America ranks at or near the bottom of 31 industrial nations for poverty.
As I mentioned above, In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt warned about “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” and called for action. In 2008, President Bush looked at 16 million Americans in extreme poverty, and called for spending more money on the military, while making deep cuts in health care, home heating, and food programs for the poor and the disabled. That is a clearer statement of values than any speech can provide.
Ultimately, it comes down to a matter of priorities. Are people a priority or is maintaining an allegence to outmoded illusions of radical individualism what matters most? I think we have the answer from the conservatives. And Americans are liking that answer less and less.
Your ability to simply type that post without your head exploding is proof positive that you lack any functional self awareness, and have no mirrors in your home. That was a true gem. Thank you.
I had another bomb on family law for the warriors of the fluff right, but didn't have time to throw it last night.
No time like the present Ric. LOL. Drop that bomb on 'em now!
BTW: I wonder who "Anonymous" was talking to there? You? Me? Both of us?
I thought Anonymous was replying to me because he referred to the "post" rather than the reply. I could be mistaken though.
Both, you intellectual giants. Bombs away, you chickenblogging academics.
Was he/she trying to insult us or compliment us? I can't quite tell.
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