It should come as no surprise that my eyes narrowed this morning in grim recognition when Matt Kibbe declared the following:
what’s important to note is that it’s indicative of Gerson’s worrisome approach to governing. In his world, it’s not just about creating policy that works, but policy that makes him feel good. He doesn’t want government to get out of the way; he wants to use it to help him find meaning.
So NR has life yet. But Joe Knippenberg called this piece a "hit job," and Joe Knippenberg seems like a good guy, so even if the compassion of my conservatism does not extend to helping Gerson feel good about his ruinous, attitude-driven approach to bundling a particularly round-edged group of therapeutic policies with a bow labeled 'conservative,' I do owe it to Joe to be clear of mind and follow this trail of breadcrumbs where it leads.
For among the many genius things Tocqueville observed, one of them was that the growth of government in the democratic age is driven by at least two distinct social forces -- only one of which is the wild expansion of vague fellow feeling at the expense of depth relationships among persons closely linked by hierarchical or what he called 'caste' relationships. The other is straight up necessity. As the fruits of the democratic age come to satisfy the people with increasingly commodious living, as the details of life in a fevered time when citizens attain and practice unprecedented levels of mobility, commerce, changing fortune, and dollar-chasing, and as the old structures of local care and civic responsibility that held together during the aristocratic age become delinked along with citizens themselves, the state becomes the only possible institution capable of providing the goods needed to keep things rolling along. Those goods are not just governmental, in Tocqueville's terminology (roads and foreign affairs) but administrative (extending into the everyday details of local life). And at the national level, those goods take on an increasingly national character -- one-size-fits all solutions look good because they're easy to implement and understand within a crazy, hectic world where there's no time to waste on formalities and curlicues.
Of course the government is very bad at streamlined efficiency, of course. But even the tax code, as heinous as it is, has an EZ form. And we all somehow seem capable of handling it. But by and large, the drive toward nationalizing and centralizing administration in the democratic age is, in Tocqueville's analysis, pushed on by the need for the details to be made simple and, when centralization makes them incredibly complex on account of the sheer size of the data, for the administrative experts in Washington to handle matters while we focus on, in the words of the new Cadillac slogan, 'the Pursuit.'
So as much as I would love to be right in tarring Gerson with the therapeutic feely-brush, he's off the hook insofar as extending government caretaker programs on a citizen-wide basis is sometimes an argument to be made simply on the merits: i.e. the alternatives are worse or unworkable. I happen to think they almost always aren't worse or unworkable, but we've been using the systems we've been using so long that we are somewhat trapped within them. One cannot simply order decentralization on Thursday and expect republican virtue on Friday. And to an extent, 'compassion' feeds into this recognition. One cannot cancel all our federal support programs without understanding that a lot of people on the dole are going to be stuck sucking wind until...one day...the old aristocratic habits of local charity, church solidarity, and family integrity come back to the fore in places where they have administratively been substituted under the delinking pressures of the democratic age. That day may be a long time coming, or at least an uncomfortable time coming, or at a minimum far enough away so that we feel true guilt in standing around as if we were making things better for people and not worse.
That said, the therapeutic drive that I do see in Gerson and Huckabee and others is as bad as it is because it exacerbates all these more-excusable qualities of the drive toward helpy government heroism for less-excusable reasons. 'Sense of' reasons. What matters is how we feel, not just about ourselves but about one another. We need to restore 'a sense of community,' a 'sense of patriotism,' a 'sense of honor,' a 'sense of unity,' a 'sense of sacrifice.' Matt Dowd captures it too in the 'sense' he conveys with the LA Times that 9/11 sparked in him a 'sense' that we needed to help foster a bigger 'sense of togetherness' or even 'sense of war' by selling war bonds, etc., etc. Not that on the merits this is a bad idea. But the point of it for Dowd seemed to be therapeutically fostering this emotional register that otherwise just ain't there. Government programs are not a good way to do this, I'm telling you. Except maybe for time-honored war. That one seems to work for a while. Government programs do this only for those who put them together and implement them. The people on the receiving end oscillate, as Tocqueville knew, between gratitude for their state master and chafing envy and irritation at being servile. Here, for once, the therapeutic approach offers to meliorate these mood swings but only contributes to them.
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