Celebrating My 40th Anniversary

The American Spectator | September-October, 2002 | Tom Bethell

[logician2u]

CAPITOL IDEAS

By Tom Bethell

Celebrating My 40th Anniversary

I write on August 28, which is the 40th anniversary of my arrival in these United States. It is a date I am always conscious of. The changes since 1962 have been immense, of course, and I won’t hazard any conclusions here. I am inclined to say that the changes have mostly been for the worse, but I am not confident of that. Our lives are so besieged by change that any contemporary judgment is likely to be ill advised. Old-timers in any event are notoriously inclined to look back on a past that is golden only in retrospect and to confuse personal with national decline. I know that if I had met someone in 1962 who told me that 40 years earlier America had been a better place, I would have ignored him.     The year 1962 was still part of the 1950s, but barely. Hippie gear would soon replace gray flannel suits and crew cuts. Autumn 1962 was the time of the Cuban missile crisis and the Second Vatican Council, the integration of Ole Miss and the beginning of the never-ending green crusade launched by Rachel Carson. Still ahead when I arrived: civil righteousness, the Kennedy assassination, "the Sixties," and the sexual revolution and its barren offspring, abortion and feminism. The population was 180 million, and the federal government spent $100 billion a year. Now there are 280 million of us, and the Feds spend $2 trillion. It has been an Age of Inflation, now perhaps coming to an end. Six dollars are needed to buy what a dollar bought in 1962. For years savers subsidized debtors.     Since then? Communism collapsed, and that was all to the good. Its demise was by no means anticipated at the time of my arrival. The Soviets had launched Sputnik, had they not? Central planning would prevail over free markets. The underdeveloped world would soon catch up with the West. But the Third World (a term not in use then) has remained mired in poverty and oppression. That was totally unforeseen. It turned out that those who presided over economic development knew almost nothing about the sources of wealth. They still haven’t learned.     In 1962, poverty was blamed on colonialism and a shortage of capital. Give ‘em independence and wads of cash, then. That would do the trick. Tyrannies were duly installed, seated at the United Nations, and things went from bad to worse. Nowadays we imagine that what poor countries need is democracy. But that will not be enough. Rachel Carson’s offspring, preaching "sustainable" development, are in any event doing their best to ensure that the poor countries stay that way. Welcome to the new colonialism.     One thing that has not changed, not just since 1962 but since the New Deal, is the intellectuals’ faith in the state. They believe that it can educate the masses, provide pensions for the elderly, care for the poor, stimulate the arts, mobilize the creative, vanquish foreign foes, conduct scientific research, feed the hungry and cure disease. The grounds for this faith have been greatly weakened in 40 years—Communism failed, government education turned into a shambles, welfare demoralized its "beneficiaries," public housing projects became crime centers—but the faith endures for one simple reason: The state confers power on the intelligentsia. Their ideas are the ones that percolate up through the newsrooms and the editorial conferences and dominate the television programs. Unintended consequences are of little moment compared to this agenda-setting power.     Someone—I have never been able to determine who—defined democracy as government by publicity. Then the intelligentsia, once suspicious of democracy, figured out that public opinion was theirs to manipulate. A most remarkable demonstration was the recent campaign finance legislation that depended for its passage on public ignorance (and presidential weakness). It directly flouts the First Amendment. When we disparage the "role of the media" what we are really talking about is the long-time ability of the intelligentsia to steer elected officials (nominally guided by their constituents) down the path of expanded state power.     But all is not lost. Over the past 40 years new technology has brought about tremendous changes, mostly good. In fact they have been comparable to the defeat of Communism, and related to it. I arrived in the Age of Cronkite, a time when the message to the masses was unified and only the Communists could achieve a greater degree of centralization. Old Walter himself is still hanging in there, but the age that should be named after him is now coming to an end, thank goodness, and the Internet will finish it off.     What is to be said about democracy? It is one of the great unexamined pieties of our time. As with an aged celebrity; praise is expected, criticism frowned on. Democracy’s advantages are assumed, its weak- nesses politely overlooked. Most people just quote Churchill and move on—"the worst form of government except for all the others." He was wrong about that. Constitutional government is better than the others. Those who quote him uncritically, if they think about the subject at all, slyly promote our current system of majoritarian expropriation.     We did have constitutional government in the United States for a while—some say until the Civil War, others say until FDR. But good habits persisted, and one way and another a government of (mostly) limited powers remained on the books until (say) the 1960s. But it has broken down now. One indication: The advocates of unrestrained government no longer feel any need to amend the Constitution when they seek blatantly unconstitutional laws (such as the restrictions on political speech embedded in the new campaign finance law).     Democracy unrestrained by constitutional limits was for a long time feared by conservatives who saw the danger: that the masses would indiscriminately redirect wealth into their own pockets. Democracy puts government into the hands of "men of low birth and no property," said Aristotle. Few conservatives question democracy today, however. (Hans Herrnann-Hoppe, an economist at the University of Las Vegas, and the author of Democracy The God That Failed, is an exception.) Even a good liberal like John Stuart Mill drew the line at the unrestricted franchise. Voters should not be allowed to receive welfare, he argued, lest they vote themselves excessive benefits.     I had the opportunity to reflect on these matters when I was back in England recently. The low estate to which the Conservative Party has fallen is now apparent to all. It resembles nothing so much as an uneasy social democratic remnant. When Tony Blair, the Labour leader, massively increased government spending, allocating additional billions to education and health care, the reasoned response would be to argue that everything would work better if the people were allowed to spend their own money. But the conservatives are too afraid of public opinion to say anything like that; and they are reasonably afraid, too, because they would dwindle away even further if they did.     Even after incontrovertible proof that government schooling and medical care don’t work anything like their private counterparts, the irresistible and unstoppable democratic urge is to spend more of other people’s money, and then again more. Shutting the whole thing down, returning taxes to the people and telling them to get on with the job of looking after themselves is simply not an option and will never be one in the current order, in which intellectuals desire a state that tries to solve all problems.     It would be interesting to see what happened if by some miracle we had an intelligentsia who were united in their hostility to collectivist solutions, who saw the danger that it presents and who used their influence over public opinion to oppose the ratchet-like dynamics of democracy. But we have had no experience of this in the Western world. The universal franchise so beloved of intellectuals has been with us only since the First World War (when women were given the vote—probably a big mistake) and in that relatively brief time the intellectuals have consistently seen the state as their path to power.     It may be that something new is coming, however. It will come first in Europe, where a conflict between modern, unrestricted democracy and the redistributive state seems inevitable. The key point is that European fertility is below replacement and has been for some time. The overall population is beginning to shrink. In Italy the situation will soon be dire. The welfare state has contributed to this outcome, because transfers from working people (of child-bearing age) to older retirees imposes a considerable tax burden on workers. They respond by having fewer children. France and Germany are already spending huge sums trying to overcome the problem. without much success. So the working population continues to shrink relative to the retirees, Welfare states will have to be sharply reduced, and soon, or they will collapse. (I am assuming that politics will keep out the immigrant hordes.)     Another possibility, and a grim one, is that the pressure for euthanasia, already strong, will grow stronger. The oldsters’ hordes could be thinned out that way. It’s already happening in Holland. Without God, all things are possible. This murderous course may be expected if intellectuals of the rising generation harden their hearts. We have been warned repeatedly in the past generation of the threat of overpopulation. Now we are beginning to appreciate that that was utterly wrong. Ponzi welfare schemes need expanding populations to keep going. In light of that, will the culture of death, as John Paul II has called it, retain its grip?     No one knew what lay ahead when the Queen Elizabeth was nudged by tugs into New York Harbor on August 28, 1962. So I won’t hazard a guess now. But there could be no more important question. I meant to say something about the post-Vatican II Catholic Church, which so sorely disappointed progressives by not changing with the times, and about the recent turmoil and bad publicity surrounding the American branch of the Church. But I have used up my space on boring things like democracy, so I will come back to that next time. MEDIA BIAS!     I caught The New York Times in a blatant act of misrepresentation. While I was in England, there were frequent leaks to The Times of London about the coming appointment of Dr. Rowan Williams as the new Archbishop of Canterbury He had earlier "spoken out" in favor of openly homosexual clergy, and of course women bishops. The Times reported that if he proceeds with these changes, perhaps 20 percent of the Anglican clergy will leave. Many will head to Rome. At the 1998 Lambeth Conference, Anglican bishops from across the globe had voted by 256 votes to 70 in favor of retaining the ban on ordaining practicing homosexuals.     How did The New York Times play this? Dr. Williams is considered "a unifying and inspirational presence," wrote Warren Hoge. Unifying! A comparable conservative action, driving liberals away, would have been called divisive, not unifying. I promptly sent off a letter to The New York Times but for some reason they didn’t publish it.

[logician2u]

Tom Bethell very well sums up where we've come from in the last 40 years and where we're, unfortunately, headed unless a major shift in sentiment occurs.

Technologically, we are much better off today than in 1962. If the progress we made in electronics, medicine and information technology could only have had a parallel in the area of social science, so the "intellectuals’ faith in the state" that Bethell criticises might have been replaced by a faith in individuals, in the capitalist system, in voluntary action rather than the compulsion inherent in statist programs.

Here's wishing Tom Bethell another 40 years on these shores to write his always-provocative columns in The American Spectator. By themselves, they're worth the price of the magazine.

[Valin]

Bump

[logician2u]

Thanks!