Bootstraps and conservatism

I've had an e-mail exchange this morning with a couple of smart conservatives, one of whom has a popular blog, so I won't quote him here, in case he wants to blog his own comments. The point of the conversation was that Rush Limbaugh isn't wrong to say that self-reliance is the only thing, ultimately, that can help anybody. But it is rather nervy, to say the least, for someone who lives in a Palm Beach mansion to lecture people who have had to move back into their mother's trailer because they're out of work.

More substantively, we have a system that has, with the support of both parties, dismantled the kinds of social values and local institutions that would have provided for stability and self-reliance. Instead, we have made people more dependent on both the state and on a consumerist state of mind that demands spending money one doesn't have to keep the economy going. Our leaders -- again, in both parties -- pursued policies that made it far too easy to get credit, and now that it's all come crashing down, the people who did as they were instructed are told, "Tough. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps." Which is, in a way, correct: you shouldn't have bought the lie of easy money, and cost-free living. But that is what both parties have preached! You expect that from the liberal party, but you expect the conservative party to be fiscally responsible, and to both preach and practice fiscal responsibility.

How are the people in southern Ohio supposed to pull themselves up by the bootstraps when the only jobs available to them are low-wage service sector jobs? Better than nothing, surely, but how do you raise a family on that? When globalized trading policies send manufacturing jobs overseas, and open-borders immigration policies keep wages for those jobs that remain low, how, exactly, is a working man or woman supposed to bootstrap their way out of that hole? I'm not asking rhetorically. I really want to know.

Additionally, how are people who have no choice but to work in a dynamic economy that requires them to be ready and able to move far from home to follow the jobs supposed to fall back on family support when their families live all over the country? How are the economic interests of working people bettered by a party -- the Democrats -- who pursue policies that more or less cast off all traditional social mores in pursuit of individual sexual fulfillment -- and expect the state to pick up the tab, indefinitely, for children resulting from libertine lifestyles?

All I'm saying is that the bills for our overindulgence are coming due, and neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have the answers. This goes back, I think, to James Poulos's remarks about the shallowness of the public's desire for change. The public senses intuitively that something has gone very wrong, and says it wants to change, but few people really want to make the changes necessary to fundamentally put our house in order. Rather, they want the therapeutic comforts of change. The appearance of change: Rearranging the furniture, so to speak, rather than remodeling the house.

Limbaugh said the other day, in his "The Era of Reagan Is Not Over" peroration:

Now, conservation is great, folks. Conservation is great, but conservation does not equal growth. To sit out there and say people need to buy less and less heating oil, okay. Buy natural gas furnace, or any number of things, but if this country has always been about: "You need heating oil? It's going to be there. You need gasoline? It's going to be there." The burden is not on you to conserve so that it's always there! It's economic. Capitalism is the greatest force for change in the world!

That, right there, is the problem. Capitalism is the greatest force for change in the world -- and our society's having made maintaining the consumer delights it's provided for us, and the individualist-consumerist ethic that undergirds it the telos of our politics, has gotten us into the condition that we're in. It is simply lunacy for Limbaugh to claim that conservatism is "about" the American people being able to live how they damn well please, no matter what the cost, and at no personal sacrifice to their own desires. That is what Limbaugh-style conservatism amounts to -- and I believe many Republicans agree with Rush. It is absoutely, unequivocally unconservative! And liberalism, with its emphasis on sexual liberty no matter what the social cost, represents the other side of the coin.