| Dear Reader (assuming any of you are still there or are taking time out from your four-year biodome projects to read e-mail or maybe you're passed out on the floor having already gone through your palatable liquor and are now working through the mouthwash, cough syrup, and those weird pills that seemed to make your dog feel all right back in '09), I believe it was Bart Simpson who said of Old Faithful, this both sucks and blows. The other day I wrote a post in the Corner titled "Against Despair." I wrote: My only real counsel for the moment is against despair (see: "How to take a beating"). I hear lots of people saying they're done with politics. I understand the impulse. But that way lies ruin. Despair is the gateway drug to cynicism and Nockian indifference. Our problems are too great and our cause too just for that. There is time to take a timeout and have a drink (or 50). But it's worth remembering that the cause is lost only if you leave it and choose to never find it again. "Never despair," Edmund Burke allegedly said, "but if you do, work in despair." I don't know that Burke actually said that, but whoever did was right. I still believe that. But then I proceeded to write this column on the Europeanizing tide in America that Obama rode to victory. It's upbeat in the same way Schindler's List was a feel-good romp of a comedy. I've gotten some grief from some people for sounding so defeatist, particularly given my counsel against despair. I'm not defeatist, but I am dour. Look, I really believe the Right needs to have a big, nasty family squabble. It needs to be a bit like that Thanksgiving episode of Cheers -- a big food fight, followed by a new appreciation of why the conservative family is around the same table in the first place. That said, one thing that's bothering me a lot about GOP Recriminationpalooza is the fact that almost all of us are talking as if the worst news to come out of this election is that the GOP is in disarray. Look, obviously I want the Republican party to get its act together. But if you were to lay out a newspaper that reflected the important news coming out of Tuesday, the headline would be something on the order of "America Screwed: Obama Reelected." Or maybe: "Obama Wins; Experts Take Second Look at Mayan Prophecies." The story about the Republican party's problems would be below the fold, at best. And probably on page A2. It is axiomatic: America's problems are more important than the Republican party's problems. The hitch is that the GOP's problems will only hasten the country's problems if they don't get fixed. The Wasteland As I understand it, the consensus is that Obama won because Romney lost ("How much of that cough syrup have you had?" -- The Couch). What I mean is that Romney's campaign massively failed -- for several reasons -- to turn out the Republican vote. I think Sean Trende has pretty much demonstrated this. If Romney had merely gotten as many votes as McCain he'd be president-elect now. Hell, Romney got fewer votes than George W. Bush did from -- wait for it -- Mormons! Seriously, did they appoint one of those Chinatown tic-tac-toe-chickens to run the turnout operation? Maybe all those dudes standing around in the computer room talking about Orca were part of some sort of secret society of sacofricosis addicts? Still, none of that means that the lamentations over the changing demography of the electorate are wrong. The "Obama electorate" is more like a preview of the demographic shift than the real thing, but the real thing is coming -- fast. Not counting the limousine liberals, government workers, etc., it is an electorate that is not rich in social capital (a point most on the left would freely admit away from a microphone). These are people not particularly plugged into the major institutions of civil society. I got an interesting e-mail in response to my column from a reader: A perfect embodiment of what you discuss in today's column was Obama scoffing at Romney's suggestion that people borrow money from family to attend college or start a business. I thought it strange that Obama would criticize something that is entirely common and practical. When the 18-year-old down the block drops out of college after two years and defaults on his loan, I personally would rather his parents be stuck with the bill instead of me, the taxpayer. I suppose I now understand why Obama disagrees. How sad. I think this is a great point, except for the fact that lots of 18-year-olds don't have two parents, never mind two parents of sufficient means, to pay off the loan. Nor do they come from communities or congregations that might rally to help them out. (Nor do we live in a society that says maybe you shouldn't take out a student loan if you're not prepared to pay it off.) If you don't have a healthy supportive family and the only civil society you know is essentially a denuded wasteland save for a few government bureaucrats with clipboards, then you're going to be really receptive to the idea that government really is synonymous with community. As I note in the column, this is not new. From Liberal Fascism: This was the fundamental public philosophy shared by all of FDR's Brain Trust, and they inherited it wholesale from Herbert Croly and his comrades. "At the heart of the New Deal," writes William Schambra, "was the resurrection of the national idea, the renewal of the vision of national community. Roosevelt sought to pull America together in the face of its divisions by an appeal to national duty, discipline, and brotherhood; he aimed to restore the sense of local community, at the national level." Roosevelt himself observed that "we have been extending to our national life the old principle of the local community" in response to the "drastic changes" working their way through American life. The good news, at least in theory, is that none of these trends are permanent or irreversible. The deracinated, alienated "forgotten men" so crucial to FDR's coalition eventually got married and went to work when the economy got better. Many of them in fact became conservative Republicans and family men. The difference between now and then, of course, is that back then the institutions of marriage and faith were far stronger and the expectations for men were so much higher. The best two books to read on the scorched soil of civil society today are Charles Murray's Coming Apart and Nick Eberstadt's Nation of Takers. Charles demonstrates how a nation of Julias is also producing a nation of "feckless men." Culturally, when a high standard isn't set for what constitutes civilized manliness, men check out of civil society and leave women to fend for themselves. That reduces the engagement of both men and women in civil society. The working mom is too busy being a working mom. The feckless man is too busy doing nothing (remember the line from Joe Walsh: "They say I'm lazy but it takes all my time."). Eberstadt, meanwhile, helps demonstrate how the government is hastening that process by subsidizing fecklessness. In 1948 -- a time when there were lots of truly disabled war veterans in America -- the male labor-force participation rate was 89 percent. Today it's 73 percent and falling. In other words, 27 percent of men are simply out of the workforce. This has been an "unprecedented exit from gainful work by adult men." We have fewer able-bodied men in the prime of their life working than they have in Europe. This is in part because we've made being on disability -- often for largely conveniently unprovable problems -- into something to celebrate rather a regrettable necessity. All of these problems are real and mutually reinforcing. It reminds me a little of that line about failure from Orwell. "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks." Government undermines civil society and marriage, and as a result people demand more government to compensate for the deterioration of civil society. That this is almost exclusively a problem for the poor and working class is particularly infuriating. The upper classes get and stay married for the most part, and as a result they stay in the upper classes. But as Murray likes to say, the upper classes refuse to preach what they practice, an inverted form of hypocrisy that seems literally fitting for a segment of society that figuratively has inverted their heads into their rectums. Entitlement Marxism I really set out to write an upbeat G-File today, but instead got myself even more gloomy. But let me make one last point. We're hearing a lot (including from me, above) about how we've hit some kind of tipping point and the takers have beaten the makers. Maybe that's true. Maybe not. But if it is true, it's not permanent. One of the core beliefs of conservatism is that we are more than mere homo economicus. The Marxists and likeminded brethren believe we are forever trapped by our class interests and can never escape. American lefties like Thomas Frank routinely argue that citizens who vote on social issues are fools who get their economic interests wrong. The conservative view says that we are more than simply our paychecks. Assuming that people protecting their government subsidies and entitlements can never be reasoned with is a weak-tea version of Marxist determinism. Politics is about persuasion, and even people on the dole can be reasoned with, particularly when events beat them over the head. The future of the Republican party is being made tougher by the changing nature of the American character. But the very problems those changes create will make the job of persuasion easier. As the vindicating lessons of the nation's errors mount, conservatives must be there to say, "It doesn't need to be like this." Various Sundry Sorry, got no fun stuff for you today. The G-File is long. My daughter is home sick. The wife has a dental emergency, and we're all leaving for the NR cruise tomorrow. But if you need your weird-link fix, here's Debby's Friday contribution. Next week, if I can get a G-File off the boat I promise to be more chipper. | 
Megyn Kelly -> Pete Hegseth responds to 2017 rape accusation. 🔥 vol. 3, issue 13 | December 6, 2024 Quick Hits All the news you need in...
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