The Late Christopher Lasch on the Tea Parties

Team Sarah

This post, entitled Tea Party Has Elites on the Run, by Tony Blankley writing in Rasmussen Reports, is very much worth reading. It analyzes the Tea Party in light of the “remarkably prescient book, Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

Lasch described the emergence of elites who “…control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate.” These elites would undermine American democracy in order to fulfill their insatiable desire for wealth and power and to perpetuate their social and political advantages. Middle-class values, Lasch warned, would be hollowed out by a value-neutral educational system preaching multiculturalism. Their replacement would be narcissistic values based on self-gratification and worshipful of fame and celebrity as the ultimate values in a world devoid of deeper meaning.

This very similar to the argument of Angelo Codevilla, both book form and article form.

Blankley goes on:

The tea party movement will assert middle-class values, economic nationalism, patriotism and other concepts derided by post-modern elitists. The movement’s central tenets — small government, decentralization of power and end to profligate spending — are precisely what Lasch prescribed to restore American democracy.

RTWT.

BTW: This article about the Tea Party, by Jonathan Raban, from the usually Lefty New York Review of Books, from last February, is remarkable fair. Worth reading.

(I should mention that the NYRB’s review essays on historical subjects, including military history, are often very good. For example, this article about the French Foreign Legion by Max Hastings is very good. He warns “… only the foolish seek to romanticize this bleak, cruel fighting machine, loyal only to its own. ” But the foolish, myself included, continue to do so. And while we are at it here is Max Hastings’ list of the Ten Best Books About War. I’ve read five of them.)

[Photo credit: The picture above is from the Raban article in the NYRB.]

When will we stop spending?

The graph below compares American spending against other OECD countries. It comes from an article in the left-leaning American Prospect that basically argues that our spending isn’t really a problem.

OECD Spending
OECD Spending

A Million Here, a Million There ?
Why federal spending never goes down, and why that’s not a problem.

Politicians can fulminate all they want about the $2 million earmark or the silly sounding $150,000 research project. But the truth is that government spending is going to continue to rise, because neither Democrats nor Republicans really want government to get smaller — at least not badly enough to cut it in a meaningful way. It can rise at a slower or faster rate, depending on the decisions we make (the biggest source of future spending is Medicare and Medicaid, a problem the Affordable Care Act begins to tackle). But no matter who wins the election this year, or in 2012, or in any other year, it’s going to keep growing.

First, the comment that ObamaCare is going to “tackle” spending is absurd. Its tax and spending structure will move America way up on that graph. Next, the fact is that spending does matter for all kinds of reasons, particularly for a nation that doesn’t want to go down the path of sclerotic Europe.

No one knows if the Tea Party/Patriot movement is going to succeed in curtailing spending. I get the feeling that they just might. If the Republicans don’t curtail the rate of spending in some meaningful way, the loose network of activists will coalesce into a party.

For how long, and what level of success such a party has is an open question.

The answer need not be cutting spending below the previous year, but merely curtailing spending growth to a manageable number. Raise the retirement age, combine and means test Medicaid and Medicare, and outlaw public unionism at the state level.

Those 3 things alone will cure the spending problems. Get political power, and ram them through.

A Few Words About India and the Anglosphere (bumped, five years later)

[This post, inspired by this article provoked a conversation about the relationship between India and the Anglosphere. It seems like just yesterday I wrote about this (with Verity and I going back and forth in the comments) on Jim Bennett’s now dormant blog Albion’s Seedlings. My old post needed virtually no revision, so I am reposting it here. Setting the Way Back Machine for 2005 … .]

The comments to this post contained some vexation about whether or not India is part of the “core” of the Anglosphere. The implication seemed to be that one is either part of the Anglosphere or not, and that it was wrong therefore to suggest that India is not.

I think this is to misstate the issue. It is not “either/or” or “in/out” of the Anglosphere. It is a matter of degrees of participation. The USA, UK, Anglo-Canada, Australia, NZ are “core” areas because of very high degrees of commonality in language, law, business practices, cultural norms, etc. Jim Bennett talks about all this in his book, which you must all go and buy and read if you have not yet done so.

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Obama Visit to Madison

The President of the United States of America visits Madison today. As I write this I think I may have heard AF1 buzz over my place of business. We don’t get too many 747s (like, none) landing in Madison.

Also as I write this, some of the major roads are blocked off or are getting blocked off for the President’s motorcade. I honestly have no clue how I am going to get home, as my residence is on the other side of a highway that is blocked off. I believe the overpasses are also blocked. Obama’s speech is set for 6pm.

Some interesting anecdotal evidence for you. I made a point to be visible outside of my usual office area and to talk more than usual to guys who had things to pick up – from parts runners to technicians. Almost every single person is not happy about this – not only for the extreme inconvenience, but for the sheer waste of money. Many guys explicitly said “that’s my money they are wasting”. I know that some of these guys voted for Obama, but none of them are pleased with this show of bluster.

So if you see my town on the news tonight with a huge crowd on Library Mall in downtown Madison to hear the One speak, just remember that there is a seething underbelly of people who are major-league pissed off at this spectacle.

Games of War and Peace: III

This will be a brief one.

A veteran friend of mine, Thomas Brinson, wrote something recently about violent video games that I found to be painfully honest and admirable.

He began by saying:

one of the things that has kept me away from the computer games is the inherent “violence”, especially warfare violence, in many of them –> as a “vet for peace” I have a knee-jerk abhorrence of anything that I judge “glorifies” war and warfighting.

But that wasn’t enough – he carried on, as befits someone practicing self-examination:

That’s the ideal sentiment; the truth is that I enjoy the art of killing too much, and playing modern warfare games would reawaken how much I nostalgically miss the wargames, real and virtual, of my youth in Vietnam, as well as how much I envy, truth be told, the warfighting options available to youth today all over the planet …

I’d like to honor both sides of that statement – the visceral feeling of a warrior, and the restraint of the man of peace.

Both, its seems to me, are truths — and we humans are complex creatures.