Victor Davis Hanson: This old house [...facing a surreal world]

...But my children, the sixth-generation inheritors of the house, are facing a surreal world. The new leaders of the left, not much different in their lifestyles from those on the elite right, are now almost all multimillionaires. Their populism focuses on everything from gay marriage and unrestricted abortion to stopping Arctic oil exploration.

Jihadists don't wear uniforms. Even hostile countries that subsidize such terrorists deny doing so. Nazis and Stalinists never toppled an American office building; Islamists with far fewer resources have. And in a world of miniaturized weapons and easy global travel, they have a better chance of repeating their carnage than any of our earlier, more recognizable enemies.

...But the greatest difference is that those first four generations who lived and died in this house shared a certain tragic vision of man's limitations. Perhaps they lost too many crops before harvest. Or they grew to assume that optimistic weather reports and upbeat cooperative newsletters were hardly to be trusted as "intelligence." They considered the choices in their many wars only between bad or worse, and that the Americans who fought them did not have to be perfect to still be good.

Now this relic of a house has a TV dish on the roof and automatic garage doors. Yet otherwise it must look about the same as when someone, whom I seem to know but never saw, built it right after the Civil War. But while we can still recognize it as the familiar solid house of old, I wonder whether it would say the same of us now inside.

But the greatest difference is that those first four generations who lived and died in this house shared a certain tragic vision of man's limitations. Perhaps they lost too many crops before harvest. Or they grew to assume that optimistic weather reports and upbeat cooperative newsletters were hardly to be trusted as "intelligence." They considered the choices in their many wars only between bad or worse, and that the Americans who fought them did not have to be perfect to still be good.

Somewhere along the line way to many people have come to the conclusion that...
1 Nothing bad should ever happen to them. (No matter what they do).
2 IF something bad does happen it's not they're fault. It's someone elses fault and they must be made to pay.

Noam Chomsky, greedy capitalist
http://www.americanthinker.com/comments.php?comments_id=4699

And a hypocrite, too. Peter Sweitzer of Canada’s National Post points to Chomsky’s use of tax-avoiding trsusts, investments, and money-making schemes:

The iconic MIT linguist and left-wing activist frequently has lashed out against the “massive use of tax havens to shift the burden to the general population and away from the rich,” and criticized the concentration of wealth in “trusts” by the wealthiest 1%. He says the U.S. tax code is rigged with “complicated devices for ensuring that the poor—like 80% of the population—pay off the rich.”

But trusts can’t be all bad. After all, Chomsky, with a net worth north of US$2-million, decided to create one for himself. A few years back he went to Boston’s venerable white-shoe law firm, Palmer and Dodge, and, with the help of a tax attorney specializing in “income-tax planning,” set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets from Uncle Sam. [....]

Chomsky did say that his tax shelter is OK because he and his family are “trying to help suffering people.”

In my experience, liberals are often greedy and immoral in exactly the terms they denounce capitalism. It seems to me they project their own faults onto “the system” and then salve their consciences by adopting political positions to in theory compensate for their own faults.

I have nothing against capitalism, getting rich, or minimizing taxes. But I can’t stand people who criticize others for their own faults.

This is why we need to keep alive such places as Free Republic and continue to fight against the left.

Lots of grist for the mill here. Hanson is not the first Democrat to observe that his party left him although Reagan's famous lament still seems not to have registered with the current population of that party. But it's a lot more than that.

Two key differences between the generations that Hanson chronicles are increasing urbanization and increasing dependence on government redistribution of income to provide a buffer against the sort of vicissitudes that made country people wonder if they would eat. That latter was the upshot of the Great Depression, rather like treating a toothache with heroin. It's effective enough but when the toothache goes away the heroin habit remains, and so has the dependence on redistribution of income. The difficulty is that it really does provide such a buffer and that we have become so accustomed to it being there that absence is regarded as intolerable hardship. This is certainly true under the social democracies in France and Germany - the evidence is now undeniable - and the comfort level that resulted appears as addictive as a heroin habit and just as impossible to maintain.

I do not think a return to the days of uncertainty and widespread famine is necessarily either the answer or the picture of a better world, but inasmuch as the present nanny state appears to be unsustainable there is certainly room for a few better ideas. Unfortunately the Democrats appear only to offer more of the same. Socialism didn't work so let's try more, central planning didn't work so let's try more, regulation didn't work so let's try still more - at some point you can beat a dead horse into moving but it doesn't mean he's going anywhere.

Although there doesn't appear to me to be any particular theoretical justication for it a middle course between Randian laissez-faire and stifling social democracy has built the most free and successful society so far, a phenomenon that has only given rise to accusations of theft on the part of the less successful and envious. It is actually nothing of the sort. It is certainly untidy, untheoretical, ad hoc and disagreeable to the sort of mind who likes things all tied up in pretty packages with bows around them. These feel that they can command prosperity and force it by undoing a theft that never was. And they have found that offering this makes them electable. And it isn't just the Democrats and certainly not just the Americans.

Great post, especially heroin dependency analogy. Its right on money.

Two things I'd like to throw into the mix both working against the idea of proud self-reliance, and one in favor of it.

Many parts of the soft buffer of the nanny-state are possible thanks to the technological successes. We CAN feed many more unproductive people quite nicely. Progress made it easier, and will continue so.

Second, current trends of taxation remove more and more people from under the burden of paying taxes. But they can vote. When non-paying population gets to be more than 50%, what stops them to vote the increase of the nanny state for themselves?

The opposite trend is also courtesy of the technological development: Internet. Anybody willing to get knowledge can do it easier than ever. Information monopoly does not exist anymore. MSM try tell people what to think, but many not buying it, making that crucial step toward self-reliance.

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