Famed political scientist Harvey Mansfield is the WSJ’s weekend interview,
The Crisis of American Self-Government
Harvey Mansfield, Harvard’s ‘pet dissenter,’ on the 2012 election, the real cost of entitlements, and why he sees reason for hope.
‘We have now an American political party and a European one. Not all Americans who vote for the European party want to become Europeans. But it doesn’t matter because that’s what they’re voting for. They’re voting for dependency, for lack of ambition, and for insolvency.”
For those who want to split hairs as to which European party, essentially all European politicians and their parties embrace dependency on government-funded social programs, be them public-funded college educations, pensions, or medical care.
Mansfield continues,
The welfare state’s size isn’t what makes it so stifling, Mr. Mansfield says. “What makes government dangerous to the common good is guaranteed entitlements, so that you can never question what expenses have been or will be incurred.” Less important at this moment are spending and tax rates. “I don’t think you can detect the presence or absence of good government,” he says, “simply by looking at the percentage of GDP that government uses up. That’s not an irrelevant figure but it’s not decisive. The decisive thing is whether it’s possible to reform, whether reform is a political possibility.”
What does he want the Republicans to do?
Conservatives should be the party of judgment, not just of principles,” he says. “Of course there are conservative principles—free markets, family values, a strong national defense—but those principles must be defended with the use of good judgment. Conservatives need to be intelligent, and they shouldn’t use their principles as substitutes for intelligence. Principles need to be there so judgment can be distinguished from opportunism. But just because you give ground on principle doesn’t mean you’re an opportunist.”
Nor should flexibility mean abandoning major components of the conservative agenda—including cultural values—in response to a momentary electoral defeat. “Democrats have their cultural argument, which is the attack on the rich and the uncaring,” Mr. Mansfield says. “So Republicans need their cultural arguments to oppose the Democrats’, to say that goodness or justice in our country is not merely the transfer of resources to the poor and vulnerable. We have to take measures to teach the poor and vulnerable to become a little more independent and to prize independence, and not just live for a government check. That means self-government within each self, and where are you going to get that except with morality, responsibility and religion?”
Words to live by, indeed.
Cross-posted at Fausta’s blog.
Hey, if all else fails, we can just L.I.B (let it burn) right? L.I.B (Let it burn) Burn baby Burn…
Political scientist Harvey Mansfield argument is entirely correct and unfortunately, irrelevant.
47+% of the American electorate, plus some massive but judiciously applied voter fraud have provided the needed slim majority for America to vote for the end of modern civilization. They have voted for the ‘soft tyranny of dependency’ that shall inevitably lead to the hard tyranny of oppression.
Socialism in the West inescapably leads to social collapse both fiscally and through an inability to resist the “barbarians at the gate”, who today consist of totalitarian China, KGB ruled thuggish Russia and the emerging Islamist nation-states, whose jihadist ideology mandates world-wide domination.
Europe and the rest of the West lacks the military, moral and cultural resources to resist the 21st century’s ‘barbarians at the gate’. Only America has the needed resources but the American left, along with their “useful idiots”… American liberals, are incrementally reducing America’s resources, working diligently to turn America into another Europe. Once achieved, it will be an historically brief period, with the barbarians quickly bringing in a new modern dark age, an ‘updated’ 1984 awaits.
The reason these social dynamics shall succeed is because the right is split between moderate republicans and conservatives. The perception among many conservatives is that the moderate republicans control who the republican party nominates and thus refused to vote for Romney, arguably handing the election to Obama. They see little difference between America dying a quick death from an overdose of leftist policies or the much slower but as certain death that moderate republicans bring, through their accommodation of supposed political realities.
Correct as those conservatives may be, a divided opposition cannot withstand the ‘marching in formation’ left and its political shock troops; the uninformed, gullible and idealistically naive liberals.
The left is attacking on all fronts; the demographic, with encouragement of illegal immigration from third world countries with populations with no desire to assimilate traditional American values. The external with the UN pushing a plethora of initiatives designed to reduce national sovereignty. Domestically with hyper regulation, Obama’s executive orders, a compliant Senate democrat majority using its plenipotentiary powers to obstruct republican House initiatives to right America’s “ship of state” and the cultural and moral degradation of the American public, especially its young, through the mass media’s promotion and encouragement that youth embrace hedonistic behavior.
It’s an entirely grim prognosis for the last bastions of liberty and the inevitable result of representative democracy’s ‘Achilles heel’, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money. A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.” Alexis de Tocqueville