It's Rugged Out There for an Individualist

Jim Antle reminds us where Tocqueville got it wrong:

Robert Samuelson has an important column on middle-class economic anxieties. By most objective measures we are doing better, but there are fewer guarantees: that well-paying job could be downsized, your investments and 401(k) could go south, your health insurance premiums could rise and eat into any income growth you experience, you might be pushed out of your job in your 50s, etc. That's why I think it is a mistake for conservatives to simply talk up the economy by pointing to historically low unemployment, household net worth increases, GDP growth rates since 2001, and other measures in an attempt to (rightly) defend the Bush tax cuts. What's going on is more complicated than that and trying to reassure people about the economny by citing these statistics misses the point. Neither the Pollyanna nor doomsday scenarios are quite true.

Peter Lawler has said what I'm about to say before, but it's important enough to repeat: Tocqueville's fear of soft despotism as the future of American democracy turned out to be simply wrong. (It's much more a problem in Europe, strangely enough.) Americans are more independent, rootless, and on their own than ever. Neither the very young nor the very old hold families together like they used to be able to do, at least out of a 'sense of' obligation. The hypermobilization into which you must be socialized to 'succeed' (move across the country for college, move across the country for your first job/law school, move across the country to wherever 'the best opportunity' is to be found) makes putting down roots not only pointless but counterproductive. The massive growth of government spending, even entitlement spending, reflects if anything a hands-off approach to despotism -- with the federal government as a deadbeat dad who sometimes sends you a birthday card or a five-dollar bill.

Another Detroit-area Greek-American once claimed that he never understood that approach to caring, and he guessed that he never will. But for many Americans, this is the only workable middle ground between a libertarianism that frightens our sense of patriotic nationalist communitarianism and a socialism that upsets our sense of patriotic nationalist individualism. It's in the context of this dilemma that conservatives need to offer 'solutions' -- fresh ideas on how to manage this quintessentially American paradox now. Stephen Bainbridge is right that a mood of skepticism -- even cynicism -- regarding our public ideology of novelty. But Megan is right too that

as a policy matter, conservatives need to figure out how they're going to stop the juggernaut. Reagan did it with tax cuts, big increases in defense spending, and deregulation. The first two are pretty much out of the picture, and no one's mounted a serious drive at deregulation for more than a decade. It would be nice if one could win an election on "Don't just do something--stand there!" This would quite warm my little heart. But it doesn't work. Conservatives need to figure out how they are going to roll back the bad ideas and prevent new bad ones from getting through. For that, they need a proposal a bit more eloquent than "Stop!"

Yet, one more eloquent way of saying "Stop!" is saying "Stop being so afraid of trying to solve our seemingly intractable problems that you wind up paying yourself in money we don't have to put off thinking about this nightmare until tomorrow. What are we, children?" I think that's got to be where conservatives (and...not just conservatives) start.

Comments

[John]

"as a policy matter, conservatives need to figure out how they're going to stop the juggernaut."

Nothing fuels the juggernaut like the embrace of indivdualism.

"Americans are more independent, rootless, and on their own than ever."

Sure, and that feeds into soft despotism. The reliance which people used to place in family and local community, they now place in the Federal government.

[John]

"It's Rugged Out There for an Individualist"

Americans have never been less individualistic than they are today. Don't confuse mobility with individualism.