Hospice America

Blogger Doctor Zero with an astute observation:

Sadly, the America of new frontiers and bright mornings was long ago. Today we live in Hospice America, where caretakers with first-class temperaments and sharply creased trousers make us comfortable in the face of inevitable decline… and forward the bills for our end-of-greatness care to our children, who will go bankrupt paying them. . . .

Democrats may lie incessantly about the solvency of massive entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and ObamaCare, but you can rest assured they’re privy to the real numbers. Their long-term plans involve assuming control over an exhausted population, which will trade the energy and risk of prosperous capitalism for evenly-distributed mediocrity. Top Party officials, and their well-heeled admirers from Hollywood to Goldman-Sachs, will retain lavish lifestyles and platinum benefits… while sternly lecturing the little people about their moral responsibility to accept the end of the American century, and lie quietly in their socially just, environmentally sustainable deathbeds. . . .

Sort of like when the President tells us that we're not going to be able to eat what we want anymore, then imports $100 per pound beef for White House dinners and flies a pizza chef in, with suitcases full of pizza dough, for a staff meeting.

Michael Barone on the current clash between the culture of dependency and the culture of independence:

"Do you realize," CNN's Susan Roesgen asked a man at the April 15, 2009, tea party in Chicago, "that you're eligible for a $400 credit?" When the man refused to drop his "drop socialism" sign, she went on, "Did you know that the state of Lincoln gets fifty billion out of the stimulus?"

Roesgen is no longer with CNN, and CNN has only about half as many viewers as it did last year. But her questions are revealing. They help us understand that the issue on which our politics has become centered -- the Obama Democrats' vast expansion of the size and scope of government -- is really not just about economics. It is really a battle about culture, a battle between the culture of dependence and the culture of independence.

Probably unknowingly, Roesgen was reflecting the the midcentury sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld's dictum that politics is about who gets how much when. If some guy is getting $400, shouldn't he just shut up and collect the money? Shouldn't he be happy that his state government, headed recently by Rod Blagojevich, was getting an extra $50 billion?

Unfortunately, Lazarsfeld has been largely correct for several decades about Americans voting for their immediate economic self-interests.  Both Democrats and Republicans have fought to win "earmarks" to benefit their particular constituencies.  But the idea that morality (and politics) should be seen primarily  in economic terms is so pervasive among the highly educated on the Left that it is sometimes hard for them to imagine that people might have political concerns beyond their immediate financial interests.   President Obama recently mocked Tea Party participants for failing to thank him for pushing taxes to pay for his monumental spending programs into the future.  He got a big response from his progressive audience.  Barone again:

But public policy also helps determine the kind of society we are. The Obama Democrats see a society in which ordinary people cannot fend for themselves, where they need to have their incomes supplemented, their health care insurance regulated and guaranteed, their relationships with their employers governed by union leaders. Highly educated mandarins can make better decisions for them than they can make themselves.

That is the culture of dependence. The tea partiers see things differently. . . .

And, invoking the language of the Founding Fathers, they believe that this will destroy the culture of independence that has enabled Americans over the past two centuries to make this the most productive and prosperous -- and the most charitably generous -- nation in the world. Seeing our political divisions as a battle between the culture of dependence and the culture of independence helps to make sense of the divisions seen in the 2008 election. . . .

Interestingly, in the Massachusetts special Senate election the purported beneficiaries of the culture of dependence -- low-income and low-education voters -- did not turn out in large numbers. In contrast, the administrators of that culture -- affluent secular professionals, public employees, university personnel -- were the one group that turned out in force and voted for the hapless Democratic candidate. The in-between people on the income and education ladders, it turns out, are a constituency for the culture of independence. . .

As Roesgen discovered, tea party supporters are not in the mood to be bought off with $400 tax credits.

They have a longer time horizon and can see where the Obama Democrats are trying to take us. . .

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