Brooks seems to ignore a couple salient points. “The Man” in the 60s was certainly up to some obviously evil things like racism and sexism and some things that put the fire under otherwise complacent folks, like the prospect of joining the tens of thousands of dead American soldiers drafted into the Vietnam war.
Today’s protesters are protesting an economic situation brought on by “the elites” but they only seem to protest against half “the elites”, i.e. those with a “D” after their names. Might that change? I doubt it.
The other point Brooks seems to ignore is that the structure of right-wing think tanks, etc., which he acknowledges has been built with a great deal of money over the last few decades, supports the “grass-roots” protest movement. Would the movement exist without that support? I doubt it.
Should the protesters really turn into a bipartisan, get-the-elites movement targeting both left and right, I suppose we would find out if it could survive without the support of establishment conservative forces, cuz that support would dry up in a hurry.

Are not they the same people? The tea party people I know and see on TV are OLD! Old enough to be young in the late 60′s. And they both share the same irrational sense of entitlement.
As I tell one old tea bagger in my neighborhood who is convinced they will change the world. “Revolutions are not started by old men worried about their health care. They are started by young men hanging out on street corners with nothing to do and not much hope that tomorrow will be any different.” And given how high under-30 unemployment is and how long it is going to stay high, revolution may not be too strong a word.

Rod, you may have taken care to invite readers to comment about this Wal-mart hippies jive “on other blogs, left and right,” and you may think this is a post about “Morals, Religion,” as it’s tagged, and you’ve prudently included some red-herring boilerplate (“This is why I’m so alienated from politics these days”), but this is a political post. Put down the crack pipe, dude, and get back to the religious, the scientific, the Templetonian, and the personal. Or maybe you should reconsider your pledge to forswear political blogging given all the backsliding I’m seeing lately. I’m just saying.

I’ve been waiting for a while for public figure to make this core point. The flip-side of the mass innocence idea, is that it denies any personal responsibility, or responsibility of the populace in gernral for problems. It iust’s all “they’re” fault. “They’re” usually being government, hollywood, etc.
What we have is not just a government problem, or a big business problem, but these problems that take place within a larger cultural context, in a culture which has a problem, because a massive amount of individuals live outside their means, and have drastically lowered their commitment to and definition of personal responsibility. Were there excessive problems in the banks and in the government, yes. But many of these are enabled by the broader cultural mindset, of no accountability.
One quibble, Brooks definition of a conservative near the end of the article is general and vague enough that it almost sounds like a definition of a liberal, if you don’t read it carefully, and even if you do I don’t think its very clear. He should have gone into a little more detail about conservatives attitude toward institutions, etc. Leaving it as vague as he did confuses the issue. Even if it is a newspaper article, he could ‘ve a clearer description.

I don’t think this is ultimately a post about politics. I think it’s about religion, and morals. In the end, I think the problem Brooks identifies is not so much one of left or right (though he does single out the Tea Partiers) as it is a problem of our entire culture, which is saturated with emotivism (i.e., the belief that feelings are a sure guide to right, wrong and reality). I don’t want this thread to turn into a “blame the Democrats” or a “blame the Republicans” romp, because that’s beside the point I’m trying to make here.
I should say too that the flip side of utopian politics is something that I’m tempted by, which is total fatalism, e.g., “There’s nothing I can do, so I’m going to disengage.” I think that that’s not a morally respectable stance. So I’m stuck. Like a lot of people.

Gray is interesting but he is, I think, way off base when he calls the “new” atheists utopians. (even the term “new” atheist is, in my view, pretty silly.)
The so called “four horsemen” do not in their books posit a solution for all that ails society. There is no prescription to remodel society as utopians all have from the Nazis (why Rod calls a movement that was so powerfully religious “secular” is rather puzzling) to the Communists of the Soviet era to modern Jihadists. Nor do they outline, even in broad terms, what their utopian society would look like.
I mean, take the Jihadists as a good example. Bernard Lewis, in what went wrong, points out the origins of this particular utopian ideal, which says if only the world could be returned to the state it was during the day so of the prophet, everything would be great. Christian dominionists are much the same (albeit they don’t tend to blow themselves up) believing if only the west could be restored to some fictional prefect past when everyone was a believer and no one did bad things, everything would be great.
The Soviets and Nazis, too, both had a clearly defined “perfect” society (crazy as they were) and their path to get there. You do not see anything of the sort with the so called new atheists.
In terms of the new atheists, you don’t see this sort of wish thinking. Dawkins primary bone is that religion simple falls apart under the eye of scientific scrutiny. Harris looks at the consequences of particular kind of religious belief and regards them as dangerous, but ultimately is interested in what is going on in the brain of the believer (he just put out a new paper on this) Hitchens is anything but a utopian and is a direct critic of utopian thinking. And so on.
The one common feature of utopian thinkers is they always map out some kind of change for society that will bring it to some kind of perfect state. (Lenin’s vanguard for example) While the new atheists are aggressive in their critique of religion and clearly think we are better off without it, you do not find any sort of map or path to a religion free society. They do not even discuss the critical element of any sort of utopian thinking – that it what the so called ideal society would look like!!! It’s hard to be a utopian if you don’t even define what you supposed utopian is. Some of them even go so far to say, in essence, “yes I think religion is bad and crazy, but I would not suggest we use state power to wipe it out.” Hitchens and Dawkins both have conceded that a truley religion free society is not particularly likely.
The “new” atheists offer two things: a criticism of religion as something that is manifestly not true when the evidence is examined and a defense of secular and enlightenment values and ideas. They do not, however, posit a “perfect” society. They are not utopians of any sort. They are not even utopian with regards to human nature. If anything they recognize the utter imperfection of the human condition and that we are just as capable of doing horrible things as we are profoundly evil things. Unlikely a great deal of Christianity theology which makes utopian claims (we are “broken” because of original sin, will be only redeemed by belief and a perfect existence awaits the believer in heaven) the new atheists often point out that perfection does not exist at all.
These are not is not trivial distinctions. There is likely many ways to critique Hitchens et al, but saying they are utopians is to pretty well miss the boat. And on that count, is where Gray goes right off the rails.

HalSF, I don’t think this post by Rod is any more political than other ones which have tried to unravel why people generally act as they do. In fact, I think it fits in along the continuum of recent posts on people and how they respond to what is happening around them.
Along those lines, I believe here as in other areas, it is very difficult to figure out what motivates people. Anyone who has observed family members, friends and colleagues for any length of time realizes that people fall along various points along a spectrum of idealism and cynicism. And passion and detachment. And assessments of their own self esteem and self worth. And goals in life. I think some people react to the vicissitudes of life at the office or in the family circle by yearning for a utopia where one doesn’t feel so buffeted by forces beyond one’s control. I don’t happen to be one of those people although I am somewhat idealistic in some areas and somewhat pragmatic in others. But I do think that there are times in our nation’s history where people come together more than they do at other times to rail against forces they regard as overwhelming.
The motivations of the protestors in the 1960s and some of the protestors now are very different. I don’t think they necessarily are one and the same, that is, that young protestors who once were hippies morphed into elderly protestors now. But I do think they may share some temperamental characteristics in railing against The Man, the Elites, the powerful, those whom they regard as players on a stage onto which they have not been able to step, either through alienation or due to life choices that placed them in the audience rather than among the movers and shakers.
In the 1960s, a lot of the protestors were young. Some of them rejected aspects of their parents’ world in part because of a war which demanded a military draft. For some, there was a need to blame someone for the very real fear that they might end up killed in a war they didn’t support. So they blamed the President, his advisors, their parents for voting him into office, the Cold War generation. The fear we read about now is much more nebulous and hard to pin down. Now, many of the protestors are old, although there are some middle aged and younger folk among them. Where some of the ’60s protestors demanded a better future, many of the present day ones seem to be demanding a return to long distant past, before the Progressive Age of the early 20th Century and the New Deal of the 1930s. They yearn for something they never had but imagine is better and shinier than their lives turned out to be. Some even may have an inchoate yearning for a re-do of their lives and choices, but can’t admit it. Others may not, there’s clearly a sense among many of them that they played by the rules and were the good guys as providers and citizens and that someone now wants to change those rules beyond recognition.
The two groups do seem to share a sense of helplessness and detachment from a world which seems to operate differently than they want it to. And a sense that people they should have been able to rely on messed things up. What is hard to unravel for the current group, however, is whether that comes from how they view government or “the elites,” or whether it reflects disappointment in how their lives turned out with government and “the elites” making convenient scapegoats. For many, I suspect it is a combination of the two, although the proportions are hard to ascertain. They’re going to tilt differently for different ones. The hippies didn’t trail that type of baggage, their futures lay ahead of them and they thought they were creating a new world, not reconstituting a far away and somewhat mythical past. There’s something psychological and emotional in yearning for Utopias then and now, not necessarily political. It’s just very hard to separate what stems from neediness, even hidden regrer, and what from principles and idealism. It’ much easier for pragmatists to roll along than those who seek Utopia.

Here’s what I thought was most important from Brooks’ column this AM:
Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings.
All this talk about original sin and our fallen condition is such a fuddy-duddy downer, isn’t it?
Today’s conservatives are all neo-Rousseaueans. It’s “freedom” this and “freedom” that 24/7, right down to our freedom fries. Brooks is totally correct, the tea-partiers came late to the baby-boomer toga party, but here they are!

I can’t remember who (maybe Phillip Jenkins?), but someone pointed out that much of the activism on the right is a natural outgrowth of 60′s leftism such as the SDS / Port Huron statement vision. The left of the 60′s decried a bland amoral politics and called for a new morality. What they got was the New Right post 1973. Now the shoe is on the other foot: the left calls for a bland amoral politics and the right is all about morality in politics (in a sense).

Rod, there are two reasons I wonder about unacknowledged regret at life choices among some protestors now. Both have to do with the question, why rage, of all the reactions? One is because I’ve been following the posts about your sister, Ruthie, who seems to be facing truly tough battles with serenity and courage. She’s facing a real challenge but seems to have good coping skills which help not just her, but seemingly all who know her (I unfortunately don’t) and love her. I’m not hearing much sense of rage filled “life is unfair,” “why me,” in your posts about her. She sounds balanced, grounded. For some that comes from religion, but that need not be the only source.
The other reasons is that although I’ve seen it among people on tv and quoted in news accounts, I don’t know myself know anyone personally who rages against the government or corporations or other sources of power and authority. I know plenty of people who gripe or are angry or frustrated. But most people have a sense of balance or proportion and some understanding of context. That is, they’re able to distinguish between outcomes, processes, and individuals. Their world isn’t divided starkly into “we the people” (who are good) and “they” in Washington or on Wall Street or in the church hierarchy (who are marked as all bad). Their anger is directed more at situations than anything else. So what is it that drives others to pick up a paint brush and broadly paint “everyone” in a church, a legislature, the office of the executive, as evil or bad? Why must their lives have a “they” to blame in it? I don’t know.
Are these issues of temperament? Or something else? It was the same way in the 1960s. From what I’ve read in books such as Tom Brokaw’s Boom!, there were plenty of people who were uneasy about or hated the Vietnam war. Not all dropped out, tuned out, or became hippies. Some fought within the system and then outside it (Daniel Ellsberg, who used to work at Rand and at the Pentagon). Others stayed outside and never tried to connect or understand those on the inside.

There was more than a little playful tweaking in my earlier comment, but I guess if I had a serious point it would be that pegging these generational inversions and millenialist-utopian frameworks is a way of talking politics by proxy, and it provides you with a comfy promontory above the fray. That’s where you generally find the great demographic deconstructionist David Brooks hanging out. Or maybe meta-politics is more accurate, since getting mesmerized by the radical options — where doomed utopian engagement and impotent otherwordly detachment cancel each other out — is a strategy for avoiding sweaty policy and dirty governance and the business end of democracy.

It’s good to foreswear utopianism, but remember that dystopianism is simply the inversion of the illusion, and just as addictive.

Rod, This is why I’m so alienated from politics these days. It’s fine and indeed necessary to be visionary, and to have an agenda for effective, positive reform. But that’s not the same thing as utopianism, which by definition is a philosophy built on an impossible dream….But to declare them as an entire class “evil” is not only to be unserious about the challenges facing us, but it’s also to run the risk of a kind of utopian thinking that can destroy lives and whole societies.
1) If you think “effective, positive reform” can be had in the US circa 2010, it’s you who is utopian, and while this thinking won’t “destroy the whole society” like revolutionary types can (just look at what the American revolutionaries did, for example), it does prevent moving forward by accepting the utter failure of the culture, which is the really first step to healthy change.
2) I’m alienated from politics these days, but more as a realist. Trying to build an open, engaged community while fighting this dark age, a culture of death, is an utter waste of time. One is better off retracting from the mess and building something that can be kept whole amid the decay. Like a military general retreats to fight another day, the time to reengage is when things become so bad people are willing to confess the errors of this progressive culture. Until then, there is lots of work to be done building a safe, whole culture for our families, far away from the stink. It’s the realistic approach. One can’t save the world until they safe themselves.

Trying to build an open, engaged community while fighting this dark age, a culture of death, is an utter waste of time.
mdavid: I could not disagree more. Today is the opportune moment, NOW is the time. If we wait until the darkness passes to turn on the lights what good are we?
Building an open and engaged community is a matter of who and how we choose to be in the world, not of engaging in endless “win at any cost” political battles. The example of Rod’s sister is preferable to the idiocy of Glenn Beck, and I guarantee that she’s had a greater effect on her community than he’s had.

I find the rhetoric, the talking points, the sound bites, the ever more extremist ranting from the fanatics on both sides of the aisle all extraordinarily tedious. I don’t think government is evil unless we’re talking about the banality of evil. They’re far too inept and the people are too interested in covering their own butts and looking out for their own interests. I didn’t vote for Obama because I thought he was the Second Coming or that we’d get a “post-racial” society or that he’d end the war in Iraq immediately and try “Darth Cheney” and his minions and scream “Off with their heads.” I took a calculated risk that Obama and his administration would have a better chance of getting done some of the things I want them to get done, mainly about health care. What happens to a person in your sister’s position if they have no health insurance and put off going to see the doctor for years because they can’t afford the deductible? I know people that has happened to and sometimes they can’t be treated because the disease has progressed too far by the time they finally get to the doctor. That is what I am passionate about and what I think government can and should do something about. I don’t trust the goodwill of the people to provide enough money for charities for people “not like us” or “the undeserving poor.” We need safety nets. I want the idiots in charge to stop screaming about socialists and Nazis long enough to do something about health care. That is not a utopian dream. It should be very doable.

Belief in the fallen, irredeemable nature of man is also a religious idea. An idea that requires an all-seeing, all-knowing ‘god’ (political priesthood) to govern every aspect of the lives of such fallen men.

Most Americans understand that Utopianism leads directly to the gulag, the concentration camp oven, and the guillotine. What Mr. Brooks is about, however, has nothing to do with decrying Utopianism in the Tea Party or elsewhere. Rather, he’s desperately trying to preserve the authority of elites in the federal government, the GOP and the conservative movement, among which he unfortunately numbers.
To do this, Mr. Brooks in his latest column exploits a slick trick: Lumping the established institutions of government and society together with the people running them. By doing this, Mr. Brooks argues that the Tea Party wants to bring down the institutions of government along with the political class infesting them. What dishonest pablum.
I don’t think there’s a single Tea Partier who wants to overthrow the US constitution, which established the federal government’s institutions. No, the Tea Partiers want to restore the US constitution to its original purposes by shoving the federal government back inside its original confines. To do this, they understand that the power of the political class, whose insane arrogance, greed and power-lust have morally and fiscally bankrupted the federal government, must be broken. Therefore, the Tea Partiers are not only conservative, but far more conservative than any politician who currently calls himself a conservative.
I’ve been reading Mr. Brooks’ stuff for a few years, now, and I can confidently state that he’s not a conservative. Rather, he’s a feudalist who hides the distinction between the government’s institutions and the people who run them, and who doesn’t want to understand that authority betrayed is authority undermined. Worse, his feudalism displays a Utopian streak in that it proposes the capacity of the government’s institutions to define the characters of those who run them. To illustrate, the president is of the same character as his office, i.e. elite, intelligent, powerful, commanding, decisive. But we nobodies with limited intellects and disaggregated power understand that the man must measure up to the office, and when he doesn’t, we’ll throw him out and give the office to someone else. Therefore, we conservatives don’t have much use for Mr. Brooks or suchlike feudalists.

“What they got was the New Right post 1973. Now the shoe is on the other foot: the left calls for a bland amoral politics and the right is all about morality in politics (in a sense).”
I don’t know about that. Ever heard of the health care plan that is now going through Congress? lol.

Lavaux, I disagree with your take on Brooks. He is a conservative, but he is a contextual conservative. That is, he looks at issues within the context, whether it is political, social, economic, whatever. To do otherwise would be Utopian and that he is not. I don’t know if he is based in New York or Washington but he clearly knows the cultures of those cities well but retains what sounds like a genuine interest in understanding how other people live and work, as well.
Aren’t most of use contextual in our judgments, just as Brooks is when he writes about politics, voters, econimics, etc. Consider, for example, the difference between a Christian who works for a company in public relations or sales and one who works for another company in a bookkeeping function. We don’t say the former is a bad Christian because his job requires him to interact with the public in such a way as to pass on a message that makes the company and its products look good, attractive and desirable. We don’t say the latter is a good Christian because his job depends is empirical and dependent on hard data. We consider context when we look at them as people. We consider what their jobs require of them, what the standards and goals are. We take into account the environment in which they work and judge whether they are ethical or liars accordingly. The bookkeeper who cooks the books has strayed from empiricism, the salesman who emphasizes what a product does well without revealing its drawbacks isn’t amoral, he’s doing what his profession requires.
I think where many of the Utopians fall short, whether hippies or Tea Party folks, is in trying to apply a general template to situations without trying to understand the processes that lead to the outcomes they don’t like. It’s easier to cry “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” than to work through how the U.S. got entangled in Vietnam. And easier to say “Hands off my Medicare” or “taxed enough,” without working through why reducing the deficit is so hard, why there is a culture in Washington where legislators feel compelled to do things such as respond to a President’s demand in 2003 that they pass the Medicare prescription drug benefit the year before he runs for re-election even when they know it is a budget busting move, and why the voters lap up the gimmes that result from such actions. By railing against the outcomes, and not studying up on why they occur and facing what their own roles have been, a lot of voters simply are confirming their “economic immorality,” to use Brooks’s all too appropriate phrase. Yelling “hands off” is much easier than figuring out the complicated, torturous web of hands in Washington and working out which need to be made stronger and which weaker or out of the tangled web altogether. Just like the drop out hippies, it sounds to me as if they some of them are taking the easy way out.

Re: Belief in the fallen, irredeemable nature of man is also a religious idea.
Maybe, but what religion teaches that humankind is unreedemable? That’s pretty much the whole point of Christianity: that we are redeemed through Christ.

Brooks’ column is very interesting but ultimately I’m not sure how well the comparison works out. Amidst the upheavals of the 60s was the underlying theme of re-making the world in a liberal, progressive image. And there was a lot of nihilism in it as the passion to destroy “establishment” institutions overtook any desire to reform them.
The Tea Party movement, if you can call it a movement, is about calling government employees and institutions to account. They are harnessing a lot of anger and frustration at how poorly our system is working, period. In my neck of the woods Tea Partiers are not right-wing knuckle draggers but independents who are disgusted that no matter who they elect, principles and promises are quickly abandoned in favor of political expediency.
A healthy thing about the Tea Party is that it is getting people to look at candidates and positions holistically rather than the usual sort of checklist voting. Some of my state reps (R) have made such fools of themselves and promoted illogical legislation that clearly pays back political promises with no benefit to people that I will probably vote for any candidate other than them. It’s prompted me to ask myself some serious questions about the people running for office rather than just which party they belong to.
That’s a good thing. Accountability is good. And – sorry for the long post – like a lot of other Americans I occasionally wonder at what point people should rebel against incompetent and unresponsive authority. It’s very American, and maybe it needs to happen every 200 years or so. But I’m under no illusions that the next government will go rotten, too – it’s the nature of fallen man. Most utopians think they really can remake the world and all will be well.

Richard, did you see the Letters to the Editor in today’s New York Times which responded to Brooks’s column? One supported the anti-tax folks, two did not. One which did not included this assessment, “chaos and disorder may mark both, but the 1960s worldview was one of a just society: challenging institutions that perpetuated things like the growing gulf between rich and poor, health care disparities, and racism and gender inequality. Today, Tea Partiers rail against efforts to take on these inequities and, instead, extol the virtues of selfishness.”
Earlier this week, I wrote here under another post that I am lucky to be doing well and if I still am in that situation financially when I retire (some time yet in the future, of course), I wouldn’t mind being means tested for Medicare. I’m an Independent, as my handle here suggests, but not a Tea Party type. I support fiscal prudence but also see the need for a social safety net in some areas. What I don’t want is a net that helps those, like me, who don’t necessarily need assistance, even from programs into which I’ve paid. I don’t insist on getting back the same amount as a poorer person might.
And then there is the lack of past pushback. Perhaps I’ve missed it in the reporting, but I haven’t seen much sense of accountability among anti-tax people for their own actions. In my view, it is hypocrtical to rail against “incompetence” while taking applauding actions that bust the budget when they benefit themselves instead of urging people to act as deficit hawks. Simply put, I believe the Tea party folks drove a lot of the past spending.
Where were the Tea party people when Bush sought to privatize Social Security and link retirement benefits to their investing acumen, a few years before the markets crashed? Although we no longer were in the go-go 1990s, few in 2005 seem to have foreseen the type of market crash that occurred in 2008. Were there conservative leaning seniors who thought, hey, we believe in self sufficiency, shouldn’t we support detachment from entitlement programs and place responsibility for our personal well being in our own hands? Did they put pressure on legislators to support the president’s efforts to privatize Social Security in 2005, when his party still controlled both houses of Congress? I saw few signs of that. What about the new Medicare Part D entitlement passed in 2003, for which the 2009 ten year spending estimate is $1.2 trillion? How many of the current Tea party activists pushed back against passage of that legislation? If they didn’t, why not? As Jacob Weisberg noted in an article in Slate, “In 2003, Karl Rove was pushing the traditional liberal tactic of solidifying senior support with a big new federal benefit, don’t worry about how to pay for it.” Did Tea party folks recognize that and push back? Why not? That’s what makes their rhetoric so confusing to me now, and why I wonder about their real goals. It hurts the Tea party movement when writers say “they extol the virtues of selfishness.” But a lot of those folks trapped themselves in that image, warranted or not, through their past behavior as voters. Because they weren’t there to do the heavy lifting while the Republicans controlled two branches of government, and seemed to contentedly consume what they could get, the current rhetoric about accountability sound hollow.

tsc, mdavid: I could not disagree more. Today is the opportune moment, NOW is the time. If we wait until the darkness passes to turn on the lights what good are we?
Exactly – now is the opportune time, to rebuild what is lost. Unfortunately, it doesn’t start with your easy solution, one that reaches for media or “community building”. Rather, it starts with the person, then the family, then the church, and only then to the broader community. If you’ve got the first three whipped, God bless you and best of luck. As for myself and mine, we’ve got a ways to go.
I certainly see tons of people out there trying to change the whole world through politics, or push media, or the internet, and it produces little serious change from my vantage point. It really can’t, because it is so shallow and easy. Yet I see very few who take building strong families seriously, and who are making real progress rebuilding what was lost.
I would argue that a mother raising a large family well, with religious underpinning, without media input, away from the social mess, eating sit-down, homemade meals, has 1000% more effect on the world than all this media blitz or “community engagement” (no offense to the witness of Rod and his sister, nor the witness of Glenn Beck, nor even to the witness of folk like Obama or Pelosi). I’m sure they are all doing the best they can, and have various effects. I am merely making a logical cost-benefit analysis, based upon the era we live in, where the most bang for the buck lies. I know a ton of families who are “engaged” in their community, prayer groups, or prayer chains, all the while their own house is in a perpetual decay from trying to play footy with a culture that serious Christians would find very dangerous. They are living out (and passing on and supporting) a culture of chaos and unsustainable consumption and passing this on to their own families and community as their legacy. And I’ve seen literally dozens of so-called cultural warriors laud the benefits of community engagements, all the while watching the effects of their own personal lifestyles – divorces and decay, obese children and porn, abortion and materialism – plow through their their own homes unabated.

Belief in the fallen, irredeemable nature of man is also a religious idea. An idea that requires an all-seeing, all-knowing ‘god’ (political priesthood) to govern every aspect of the lives of such fallen men.
Actually, only half-right. The understanding that we needed limits in order to survive as a species predated rationalism and Augustine by about 30,000 years. What Brooks (and Augustine) calls “our fallen condition” in theory was what early humanity faced for real.
Eduardo Galeano put it this way:
To be mouth or mouthful, hunter or hunted. That was the question. We deserved scorn, or at most pity. In the hostile wilderness no one respected us, no one feared us. We were the most vulnerable beasts in the animal kingdom, terrified of night and the jungle, useless as youngsters, not much better as adults, without claws or fangs or nimble feet or keen sense of smell. Our early history is lost in mist. It seems all we ever did was break rocks and beat each other with clubs. But one might well ask: Weren’t we able to survive, when survival was all but impossible, because we learned to share our food and band together for defense? Would today’s me-first, do-your-own-thing civilization have lasted more than a moment?
Long before we conceived of God as all-seeing, all-knowing we had to become civilized or, in the words of Albert Brooks, become lunch.

Another relevant, if longer winded, observation from Chesterton:
“The whole modern world has divided itself into conservatives and progressives. The business of progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”
More directly, I don’t think the problem is shooting for a Utopia; it would strike me as irrational in the extreme to not strive for perfection. The problem lies in the fact that there are probably at least twice as many Utopian ideals as there are people, and thats bing generous and not trying to count “What would actually make a person happy” vs “What person thinks would make them happy.” Everyone wants a society that conforms to their ideals, and those ideals are in conflict everywhere, even the ones built on the same principles. And even if those ideals and principles are held by the same person.
When you get down to it I think the US has a pretty unified foundation across the board for what our Utopian condition is- a society that provides the most freedom to its citizens. But from there the nuts and bolts are all over the table. The most reactionary members of the Tea Party hold up the Founding Fathers as paragons of economic liberty worthy of dogmatic adherence, while the Greens might have finally distanced themselves from such radical concepts of the minimum wage but still work to advocate positions that they feel trade some economic liberty for greater degrees of personal autonomy. Have we corrupted their ideals or are we working to correct their later reveal oversights? And all the while all sides are picking and choosing from their foundations, consciously or not, those principles that match their biases while brushing the others under the rug.
Civilization, politics, technology, religion, etc…- we have all of these things because of that fundamental desire for an ideal, but at some point everyone needs to step back and say “We will never reach my Utopian ideal. In fact, even if we did, I might find that it’s not exactly what I imagined it to be.” and instead look for a way to create a system where they can at least peacefully coexist with other ideals.

Mdavid, there are risks in every choice, even the one you describe of a stay at home mother. I don’t know if you saw Rod’s posting a while back about a friend, reportedly a good and decent man, who died suddenly in a car crash which made his wife a widow with four dependent children to support. My understanding is that he was the primary wage earner, although I could be wrong and she may have been working at least part time to keep her hand in her field as a professional and contribute to the family’s income. Is she ready now to plunge back into the workforce, assuming she once trained to be a part of it, and to find a way to make up for the lost income her husband once brought in? Does she need job retraining, assuming she once was a productive member of the workforce who dropped out to raise a family?
How am I as a voter supposed to look at that situation? Shrug and say, tough luck lady, you made your choice to be dependent on a sole source of income? Do what women did until the 20th century, try to find another husband and build a new relationship, based on love or expediency, as quickly as possible. That seems cruel and callous, in my view, given that she seems to have married for love in the first instance. Should I look at her as no different from the never married single mother with the same number of dependent children? That’s not right, in my view. That she may be in the same financial situation is not the result of her choices, and heedless actions, as it is with the unwed mother, it’s the result of terrible, bad luck. Rod’s friend’s widow played by the rules and acted decently and morally, as far as I can see. As have many of the people who now are unemployed and dependent on federal help with unemployment.
Bad things sometimes happen to good people, we need to think about what proportion of our tax dollars should go to re-training efforts for people who have to re-enter the workforce, to aid to families with dependent children, and to providing a temporary safety net to those who need help in getting back on their feet after blows not of their own making. Not everyone has relatives and friends and links to private charities that can sustain them in those situations. That’s just not the way it works. The widow who now has four kids to support on her own is in the mix just as much as the people in the Norman Rockwell painting of the intact family. Just because I’m doing well and my family is very comfortable doesn’t mean I think only of what benefits me.

This is actually really reall really OLD news. Back in the early to mid 1970s a study was done of activist students, left and right and to the amazement of the person doing the study, it turned out that they basically had the same personality traits.
Of course government is not evil in and of itself. What is evil is the notion of Authority, the idea that anyone should somehow know how other people should live their lives.

“Today, Tea Partiers rail against efforts to take on these inequities and, instead, extol the virtues of selfishness.” Well, OK, Indy, but just because some letter writer says it, it must be true?!
You don’t have to identify with the Tea Party movement to see some good coming of it. The fact that they weren’t around in the “go-go 90s” or whatever has nothing to do with why they’re here now. I am not going to waste my time trying to defend GWB, Rove et.al. – that’s for someone else to do.
And your point about the 60s the post: they were indeed trying to re-order society on a utopian vision. It’s like washed-up hippies singing ‘Imagine’ – fine, imagine there’s no whatever – but guys, it’s not going to work.
And, as for timing, “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them…”

Richard, dude, I’m not saying something is true because a letter writer said it. That simply isn’t there in my letter. I’m saying the letter appears to be the result of the public image of the Tea party, for that person. It was published today and supplements the Brooks column, along with the other two letters published. If you look at online forums, you’ll see a lot of criticism of the Tea party folks as being “I got mine, the hell with you.” I still haven’t heard anyone explain how best to counter that, tactically. Once you enter the political field, you have to start thinking about how you come across, whether you believe the image is fair or not.
You miss my larger point. The Tea party people weren’t sitting around helplessly while “stuff happened” during the Clinton and Bush administrations. Most of them seem to be old enough to be eligible to vote back then. They need to find a way to explain why they voted the way they did. Without that, it’s hard to take seriously their calls for accountability, as they seem to exempt themselves. That’s part of the economic immorality Brooks has described. It is fundamentally Utopian to say, I want stuff without paying for it, I want gain with no pain. At least the Hippies largely were young and naïve. A lot of the Tea party folks seem older but also naïve. Both Hippies and Tea party activists seem to have good intentions but little understanding of how the pieces fit together. If Lennon’s Imagine exemplifies the hippies, it also exemplifies the Tea party. “Imagine no taxes!” What we don’t see is, “Imagine, no entitlements, no federal highway funding, increased real estate assessment and sales taxes as our states and localities try to pick up what the feds once provided, oh and no consumer protection, no food safety, no unemployment benefits, oh what a wonderful world it would be.”
Look at the college students protesting tuition hikes in California this week, they combine both sensibilities. “I’m young, I want an edjumacation, I don’t wanna pay high tuitition, but I’m not gonna yell at Mom and Dad for voting down bond issues and revenue increasing measures or not demanding fiscal prudence and cutbacks in other services before the budget situation collapsed. No, I’m gonna cry about the administrators of the state universities – who are stuck trying to clean up after “low taxes, high services” folks. Boo hoo hoo.”

The fact that they weren’t around in the “go-go 90s” or whatever has nothing to do with why they’re here now.
The members of the Tea Party Movement™ were absolutely “around.” They’re not innocent babes, after all, they’re mostly Karl Rove’s “base,” one is hard-pressed to find a single Gore or Kerry voter in their rallies.
If they’ve done any good at all, it is to demonstrate clearly and loudly how incoherent the right really is.

Indy, Not everyone has relatives and friends and links to private charities that can sustain them in those situations.
Yep. And one of the reasons for this is that the government has replaced the family and community as the new “sugar daddy”. There is no need for people to help their relatives anymore, nor worry about their kids taking care of them in their old age…the state will do it! So everyone lets their families fall apart and doesn’t care to build relationships with their community. Cause and effect.
Just because I’m doing well and my family is very comfortable doesn’t mean I think only of what benefits me.
Nobody said otherwise. The difference between you and I is that I think government does more harm than good, and I prefer to give charity directly to individual people, not to some agency or the government.
But this is a moot discussion. Your welfare state is now bankrupt, generally by doing exactly what you suggest, and there soon won’t be any money left for the welfare state once we go bust. Just like the USSR thought they could eliminate poverty but instead ruined the entire country, that’s our path, too. I note nobody seems very willing to give their own money to help poor families, but everyone wants to give OPM to help everyone else. We give money directly and do not rely upon the government, and I would advise other to do the same.

Mdavid, you’re describing a Norman Rockwell painting when you describe situations in which families should take care of their own.not everyone has children to care for them in old age or relatives to help a widow or someone else who needs help with child care so she can re-enter the workforce. Some couples are sterile. Some people never marry, especially in this day and age where job opportunities are less linked to gender than they were before the 20th century. Some people are gay and not drawn to opposite sex partners. I know elderly people who have no one left to care for them, their children died young or they never had them, although they wished for such. God doesn’t grant everyone the same bounty.
You may prefer private giving but keep in mind, the type of rhetoric that now surrounds our politics can have an alienating effect, as I noted earlier this week. If you were running a private charity, I might worry that you would dispense funds based on the extent to which recipients’ voting habits mirrored yours. There’s no way for you to assure me that you would only used need to assess what you pay oout. Given the extent to which people seem to judge each other based on broad stereotypes, I don’t think people should be dependent solely on whether individuals reach into their pockets or not. I don’t want to take a chance that some people will end up as outcasts and rejects based on personal prejudice. Nor do I believe that assistance be tied to whether one morally approves of a person’s life choices, it should be based on need. That is the one area where government does better than individuals, who, if you follow comboxes long enough, you realize can be a real bundle of contradictions and biases. Just among the readers of Rod’s blog, I can pick out to whom I would give authority and to whom I never would. You and I might well trust different people. That’s the beauty of NOT living in the old USSR, we get to diverge in how we view these things.

GrantL argues that in no way can the new atheists be considered utopian. I disagree, at least with this characterization of Dawkins, the only one I’ve read.
Dawkins believes that humans either have or can acquire sufficient knowledge to thoroughly craft their own future with regards to bioethics, genetic engineering and so on. Wendell Berry takes him to task for this in one of his articles (help: which one? Can’t remember now), by basically claiming that we can never know enough to make certain kinds of engineering safe or acceptable, and that such a sense of control violates human reality.
In his optimism in this regard, Dawkins shows a profoundly utopian streak. The belief that human knowledge will make all better, that “rationalizing” everything from production to the shaping of human society, is at the core of utopian movements, from the French Revolution to Nazism to Stalin’s and Mao’s versions of communism. The reverse of this impulse is not dystopianism, but humility, based on the fact we will never know enough, and that received wisdom has its basis in a set of limits that we should at least consider respecting.
Wes Jackson’s article “Towards and Ignorance-Based World View” is an antidote to this kind of streak in Dawkins and similar thinkers. Humility before the future and the past seems necessary, more now than ever.

Given that Brooks ignores some substantial differences tween the New Left circa ’60′s and the Tea Party – I think he makes a relevant point about innocence and utopianism. Perhaps the limitations in his article are due to it being a newspaper column of short length?
I think too that hippies, New Left, boomers and Tea Partiers are not all one and the same. Hippies were the tune in turn on and drop out folks – rejecting the culture of materialism and conformity – political action was not their “bag” – they weren’t new lefters in the political action sense. I grew up in those heady days – and the hippies and leftists were a distinct minority – although Kent State radicalized a lot of college kids. A lot of conflict that went right down into one’s every day life in those days – literally arguements at the dinner table. For a high school kid some of it was scary and even exhausting. If you wore say hippie beads – when you went into a store or even just walked down the street – you’d get nasty remarks from even young people who were more conservative. The long haired got seriously hassled (boy my 60′s vocabulary is making a comeback with this post). Even music tastes were very politicized. So not all boomers were new leftists or hippies. I don’t think it is remotely accurate to characterize tea partiers as ageing hippies or new leftists. I’d bet they are the folks who kept their hair short and did not listen to Cream or Dylan back in their youth.
I suspect that what made the anti war movement so huge eventually was the draft – if we had a draft today I would count on mass demonstrations against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I recall the genuine fear people had about getting drafted- I am pretty sure that fear of the draft is what prompted a lot of my generations embrace of grad and law school.
In retrospect – it does seem the rejection of consumerism and the emphasis on living sustainably that was the hallmark of the hippie creed was right on. LOL – don’t follow leaders, watch those parking meters.
As for the tea party right – I don’t really see this as a populist movement – it is rather demographically limited. But I do think that part of how we got to where we are now is because of political apathy and just ignoring the implications of what was going on for so long. So I don’t think continued apathy is apt to be much of a cure for our current dilemna.

Mdavid, I don’t want to bigfoot the board, I’ve had a lot of time on my hands this morning while waiting for a repairman to show up at the house. He finally showed up and did the repair so I don’t have to hang out. I’ll post one more observation and then head out to run errands now that’s I’m free to do so.
Just to follow up on outcasts and rejects. The tide can turn on these things. There are plenty of old, white men who were racists in the 1950s and 1960s who ended up helpless and dependent invalids in nursing homes, cared for by black attendants or brown skinned people from Third World countries. That was beyond their control. Nothing they did in life, no heated rhetoric they once spouted prevented that from happening. The world changed and jobs once restricted to whites became open to anyone, as they should have been all along. If I remember correctly, the aged, long crippled George Wallace eventually took back some of his past rhetoric. But not everyone did.
I noted that purity tests can be a problem with charitable giving. Demographics suggest that young people (18-39) lean Democratic while seniors (65 and older) lean Republican. The latter pool is going to shrink, obviously. Whether some of the young people will turn Republican in middle age depends on a number of things, including party building efforts and policy platforms. How confident are you that progressive leaning younger people in charge of private charitable funds will ignore conservative lifestyle choices and distribute equally to older people whose views don’t align with theirs on “culture war” issues and also to other needy people who are more like them? Aren’t you basically saying, let’s hope they are more tolerant of us for our divergence from their view points than I am right now of them? The saintly thing to do is to forgive those who harm one verbally and to do the right thing, regardless. And I dare say many of those making decisions on charitable disbursements in the future would do so. But isn’t that harder to do if someone has whipped someone verbally for years as being evil, destructive, and unworthy? Let’s say the entitlement systems collapse. If you were to die ten years from now and leave your family dependent on charities run by people who didn’t share your values on culture war issues, would you feel confident that they would receive help? Or would you hope that enough people who think like you will be around to help them? What would guarantee the type of non-biased, blind, needs based outcome that federal funding now is more likely to ensure?
What I’m saying is, people are frail, weak, prejudiced, and often blind to the longterm effect of their actions. As Brooks said, in some areas, politicians seek to keep them from bumping into each other too abusively. But lots of folks struggle with anger, bias, and lack of charity, regardless of whether they are religious (as I am) or not.

Indy, I just don’t understand your point. Maybe it’s me. I’m willing to look at the Tea Party for what it is now, not what it might have been if it had existed in Bush 1, 2 etc.
Here is a good analysis of Brooks’ column by (gasp!) Jonah Goldberg:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjNkNmE0YzM4MzNmYWRlY2ViZTcyOTZkZTkwMmY4NWU=
And I think he’s right on most points.

Richard, Jonah adds an interesting perspective, and I think he’s right to say David Brooks’ aversion to the culture war is a key (though I wouldn’t say the key) to understanding him. One thing that irritates me about the way the media talk about the culture war is that it’s almost always a matter of irrational right-wingers making guerrilla attacks on the forces of right order. It takes two to fight a culture war. That’s not to say the rightists are correct (though obviously I sympathize with them more often than not), but simply that ending the culture war is not simply a matter of Bible believers in Texas and Alabama giving up. Then again, it could be that David is equally exasperated by culture warriors on both sides. I dunno.
But look, I think is more accurate than Jonah’s. I’d be interested to know what you think.

Indy, Nor do I believe that assistance be tied to whether one morally approves of a person’s life choices, it should be based on need.
Your ideas are exactly what we see today. And this is why the welfare state is bankrupting the US – actions have consequences, and the welfare state has removed the consequences from destructive actions. Unwed mothers get full acceptance, whose children then fill our jails in statistically high levels, that cost even more money. And so it goes.
My model is traditional: nobody has a right to other people’s work. I don’t expect anybody else to help me when I fall; I merely hope they will, and understand I have zero rights to this charity. Nobody owes me a thing. My model deliberately encourages discrimination – I believe people should be less likely to help somebody who refuses to change their destructive behavior. I believe people should keep close ties with their family, and for the very few who have none, with their close neighbors. Today, nobody bothers, because they know they can always sponge off the government. We fund destructive, immoral behavior.
But again, it doesn’t matter. Your model have been tried now for at least 40 years, and the results speak for themselves. As I said, the discussion is moot, because we are in debt up to our ears from entitlement spending and it will be cut. Viciously. Ideas have consequences, and we are about to reap the consequences of progressive thinking, just like the USSR did a few decades ago.

Mdavid, you are not listening. You have no idea how I have voted in the past and what policies I have supported. Don’t jump to conclusions.
You must not have read everything I wrote. I am not talking about supporting only mothers who have had multiple children out of wedlock. I am talking about how to assist, also, mothers who made traditional choices, lived morally, and lost their revenue producing husbands due to tragic accidents. We cannot and should not roll back the clock to the time of the Founders. I do not believe their only option should be to trade sex for financial support from a new husband, which basically is what the case was in the 18th century. Or hope for private charity. I would like to see them get AFDC and other dependable benefits temporarily until they can get their feet on the ground again. They shouldn’t be forced into loveless marriages, you can’t predict how long it will take to fall in love again. I wouldn’t know about it personally but it don’t rule out the fact that many bereaved spouses would need a period to grieve before they can open their hearts to a new spouse. I distinguish between temporary benefits for people in that situation and full, lifelong welfare for those who never have worked and have no intention of entering the workforce.
You’re right that entitlement spending will be cut. I’ve already volunteered to be means tested on Medicare, if it even is around still when I retire. My question for you is, why wasn’t it cut or means tested during the 1980s when Reagan wasn’t president? Didn’t he run on a “government is not the solution” platform? Why wasn’t it cut during the Bush years? Didn’t he run as a conservative? Why did the voters who now are 65 and over act so selfishly with no sense of stewardship by not holding Reagan’s and Bush’s feet to the fire (and that of their party in Congress)? Why did they let the government run up the credit cards so badly? You can see why I roll my eyes at the way this talk now has started, when the Democrats took charge.
Richard, my point about the Tea party can be summed up this way: why am I seeing signs that say, “Hands off my Medicare!” rather than “Means test my Medicare, I want it to last in some form into my children’s retirement.” I did read the Goldberg column but largely shrugged because I know he is Lucianne Goldberg’s son and that he works for a magazine which seems to force out people (David Frum, Christopher Buckley) who are independent thinkers. In other words, he comes from the political elite and performs what seems to me a propagandist function. So I don’t look for fresh ideas from columnists who are published there.
Rod, Brooks does seem to hate the culture wars but it may be for the same reason I roll my eyes at the way they played out. It’s not the principles held by people on both sides. It’s the silly, schoolyard rhetoric. And the way disputes were blown up to get people on the left and the right to puff out their chests and point to their own righteousness in a way that masked sober discussion of real problems affecting the government, like widening gaps in federal revenues and outlays. A lot of the culture war stuff was only peripherally governmental, if that. Would you care to elaborate on what you mean by Bible believers in Texas and Arkansas giving up? What are they supposed to give up that we East Coast urban Christians aren’t required to give up? I’m missing something there.

Woo hoo, there’s some fightion’ words in that link Rod! I think it makes many good points against the Tea Party as a movement but not necessarily Tea Partiers themselves. I mean, most populist movements can’t be defined by inside-the-Beltway terms which is what TAC is using.
“But in reality, the Tea Party is not Pepenella’s mysterious vehicle of democratic will, nor does it signal the emergence of an alternative to Republicans and Democrats. It’s a leaderless coalition of conservative activists who for all their revolutionary vim look less likely to take over the GOP than to be taken over by it.” I would agree with that, and don’t see it as a negative as long as things stay as they are.
But “the Tea Party is nothing more than a Republican-managed tantrum” is where I think hyperbole has gotten the better of evidence.
I can’t speak for Tea Partiers elsewhere, but here in my neck of the woods you’ll find as many Reagan Democrats as you will Republicans among the crowds. They’re not Republican shills: a state delegate and a senator here – both R – are in big trouble this fall because they haven’t stuck to the center-right positions they campaigned on. There’s a young Democrat running against one who is a genuine pro-life fiscally responsible Democrat who’s going to get my vote and those of a lot of Repubs.
I like TAC, but I think Jonah’s take is better even if he is more sympathetic to the Tea Partiers.

That should be when Reagan was President, not wasn’t. Too much family hubbub, I was distracted.
Once people engage politically, they’ve got to think about public relations. And think tactically. Persuasion is the key, not repelling people away from their positions. Grassroots groups, with perhaps some small astroturf elements, don’t always have that in their skillset.

PDGM that is a pretty odd view of Dawkins, I have to say.
If you read his work one of the things that comes up again and again – and very powerfully in his last book – is that perfection doesn’t exist. It just doesn’t. The process by which we came to be, evolution, does everything rather jim crack. It works with the materials at hand with no particular aim or direction. He shows example after example of just how imperfect nature is and how imperfect we are. This is the total opposite of a utopian thinker. Those with a utopian bent are essentially obsessed with some future state of perfection and generally have some sort of prescription to get there. This is not what Dawkins is on about at all. Hitchens likewise when pointing out obvious imperfection of existence, including the human brain, will often say “some design, huh?”
And yes, he puts a great deal of stock in science because is by far and away our most powerful tool for understanding the universe and improving the human condition. Prayer didn’t wipe out small pox, blessings don’t feed the hungry, and holy water doesn’t put a man on the moon. Dawkin’s point is that science at the end of the day has done more good for humans than any other single endeavor we as a species have attempted, and its pretty hard to argue against that.
In fact, again if you read his work, Dawkins is often repeating that while yes, we know a huge about the universe now, vastly more than we know when every major world religion was formed, there is still a huge amount we don’t know. We don’t understand the origins of the universe, the exact nature of human cognition, to say nothing of bizarre hints we get from string theory. Dawkins is fond of repeating the line “if you think you understand string theory, you don’t understand string theory.” The point being he never makes a claim that our knowledge is prefect. He says our knowledge is impressive and growing. That is a fact. Acknowledging that we know vastly more than the people who wrote the bible, and that we have to start grappling with the questions our science has raised – like the use of genetics for example – is not being utopian.
Dawkins, for example, tells a story about an old professor when he was in school who had spent years invested in a particular scientific idea. The guy built his career on it. But he was shown to be totally wrong by another scientists and this is appalled as the way science works at its best. Evidence over all else and the key recognition that we don’t know everything and even things we think we do know can turn out not to be true at all.
Again, you don’t find the halmarks of utopian thinking in the “new atheists” books. Chris Hedges, a very astute and brilliant journalist, makes this same error in his book “I don’t believe in atheists,” putting political ideas into the mouths of men who never spoke them. I think this is possibly because most religion – particularly for our context Christianity – is a utopian exercise to one degree or another. The assumption is, I think, that the atheist thinks along a similar vein. This is why some of the faithful will erroneously try make one to one comparisons with what they imagine atheists “believe”. So they have a bible and therefore will say some ridiculous things like the Origin of Species is the atheist bible, or one has “faith” in science etc etc. It is just impossible for these folks to accept that one can live a life without anything that really equates to religious belief at all.
So, I suspect, that given that Christianity posits what can only be called a utopian end state – a perfect state of being in a perfect place governed by a perfect deity – that the non-believer must have some similar “secular” utopia (although you’ll notice no one can actually say what this alleged utopia is. They just cobble together stuff they imagine the atheist believes.) Most atheists would regard any sort of utopian project as just wish thinking, the new atheist authors included.
You sure can have utopian atheists – the communists of the Soviet era sure were – but the new atheists are not utopians. You could not even articulate what their utopia would look like….because they have never suggested one. You might find people who admire or try to ape Dawkins et al and end up with a utopian approach to things, but the authors themselves are not.

mdavid.
“The Welfare State” is one of the largest financiers of our government over the past 20 years. Blaming it for the collapsing house of cards that we now face is like blaming our borrowing from China for the Iraq War.

Re: I wouldn’t mind being means tested for Medicare.
That would be very foolish (absent major healthcare reforms). How could you get insurance otherwise? Eldely people are uninsurable except at rates that would make Bill Gates blink twice. And if we did switch to a privatized system, but regulated it that the premiums were affordable, the money would ultimately come out of younger people’s pockets anyway, via much higher premiums for their own insurance. So we can either pay in taxes or pay in higher premiums, but one way or another we will be paying. I reall ywihs al the latter day scrooges would just quite begrudging the poor and the elderly their survival.
Re: not everyone has children to care for them in old age
If everyone had to support their elderly kin, our birth rate would crash, making Italy’s look stratospheric, because no one except the rich could afford children. Supporting the elderly off a universal levy is the best way to do this: you tap both the wealthy and people like me whose parents have died.

DavidL,
Dawkins is utopian insofar as he believes that, through the kind of understanding that humans can gain through science, humans can “govern” the world in a positive way.
In your scenario, you ignore the idea (I’d say the fact, but you might not agree with that wording) that there are more kinds of knowledge than those that science comes up with. Science’s knowledge is always based upon radical oversimplifications, as were the calculations of a Stalin or a Mao. The point that Wes Jackson (himself a respectable scientist, with a degree in plant biology) and Wendell Berry, not a scientist and proud of it, both make is that we can never know enough to predict many consequences of our actions, so humility is fitting, and (in Berry’s case) this humility is related to a kind of knowledge that religions teach.
I suspect we’re talking past each other because you think that scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge, while I don’t at all think this is true. I think it is “a” form of knowledge, but it fits into a reality in which many other forms of knowledge are also real.
Again, Dawkins is not a utopian in some Stalinist sense of having some plan for a perfect future. He is a utopian in his to my mind unjustified optimism about humans being able to anticipate and even more solve problems brought about through scientific technologies. This optimism–this epistemological optimism or sureness, if you will–is why I categorize him as utopian. Again, the Wendell Berry essay that begins with Dawkins’ claim that we can fix and or anticipate the bad things that scientific technologies bring about (maybe it was in an open letter Dawkins wrote to Prince Charles, IIRC) is very much to the point.

Jon, I’m not nearly as rich as John McCain, but I am well off. I understand why McCain said of the prescription drug benefit Bush pushed through Congress in 2003, “why should government be paying for my prescription drugs?” If people have enough money to handle that themselves, they shouldn’t use Medicare Part D. McCain should be able to opt out; if I’m doing well after 65, I should be able to decide if I put in for Medicare reimbursement or not. If I can pay for my own prescriptions, I’d rather the money in the fund go to helping the poor who can’t, even if I paid into it. Call it my own person redistribution, the giving up to the less fortunate of some of what I paid in out of my earnings, if you will.
Richard, I am not entirely unsympathetic to people who support fiscally prudent actions. I’m just not sure they understand how everything works. There are many reasons why people “go Washington” despite what they say on the campaign trail. Without unraveling them, and by focusing only how “they betrayed us,” the Tea party folks never will be able to affect real change. To change Washington, they would have to be able to affect campaign financing, the dependence of legislators on corporate donors, the influence of special interests on legislation, and so forth. Most of that goes on behind closed doors, out of public view. That means it is vulnerable to being spun. The activists are going about it the wrong way. It’s not the quality of the candidates, it’s the environment they face in Washington. If you don’t give people in office the means to resist all the negative forces, they will succumb to them, no matter what their intentions are. It’s like taking a job as a salesmen and being asked to convince consumers that a product is great when it really is shoddy. If you can’t lie, you lose your job. So you adapt to the environment – or leave the job voluntarily. Again, I recommend Elizabeth Drew’s book about Fred Thompson’s efforts at campaign finance reform, The Corruption of American Politics: What Went Wrong and Why.
The government has been borrowing from the public. In 1981, Reagan cut taxes on corporations and on the highest earner. In 1983, the payroll tax rate for Social Security paid by Americans was raised in order to meet the project retirements of baby boomers starting at the end of the century. Each year since then, the U.S. Treasury has spent any surplus funds in Social Security (the difference between what current workers paid in and existing beneficiaries received) on other programs. Without doing that, the deficits run up starting in since the 1980s would have been even higher. So entitlements have financed a lot of other goodies, they haven’t just benefited those who’ve paid into it. Deficits have been masked. The Treasury has put in IOUs into the Trust Fund. Those will come due as more and more people retire. While the Trust Fund is projected to remain solvent until 2040, there will be a lot of temptations to cut benefits before that date in order to push it back. The Medicare Trust Fund is in even worse shape in terms of projected unfunded liabilities. The options basically are to raise the retirement age, to increase taxes, or to cut benefits.
It is because future generations won’t have it as good as the older Tea party members that the movement faces somewhat of a public relations problem. For many, I don’t think the dissonance is intentional. I’m not even sure it is on their radar screens, given how little most Americans know about how the trust funds work, what the projections are, what proportion of the federal budget is discretionary (about a third) and what is mandatory. To say nothing of on and off budget items and various gimmicks. I do think TAC largely is right that Republican politicians will sell many of the Tea party folks on voting for them. But without fixing the underlying structural problems, it’ll just be exchanging one set of faces for another.

Jon- Consider the possibility that means testing wouldn’t say that you didn’t get Medicare, but only evaluated whether or not you should pay a scaled premium for Medicare services. That way, even if you did allow for choosing to go a private route, the cost of those private plans would have to align to the Medicare cost.

mdavid – even if your assertions about the failure of Welfare were accurate, saying that it’s a 40 year failure and so we should return to a system that failed even more spectacularly for thousands of years doesn’t seem to be a rational response.
But we do have the fact that your claims of failure aren’t really accurate. You example- unwed mothers- is a perfect example of one of the misleading statistics in the mix. The actual total number of children born out of wedlock declined, but the ratio of outofwedlock births to total births increased because the total number of births dropped (since the number of children a woman has declines as she moves up the economic ladder) The issue is discussed fairly well here:
http://www.openleft.com/diary/17655/the-myth-that-conservative-welfare-reform-workedpart-3
Really, the whole series that that comes from is worth reading as it digs pretty well into the real statistics around Welfare.

If you’ve watched American politics for sufficiently long with a bit of a scientific eye, it becomes rather clear that it’s always running on two rails: one in the present, the other at some point in the past. That second rail amounts to a continuous reviewing, revisiting, and rearguing of major issues in American public life of that time.
Under Carter and Reagan that second rail passed through the New Deal and arsenal of democracy days, i.e. FDR’s Presidency. The Bush Sr. and Clinton terms pretty much reviewed the Truman and Eisenhower years. Bush Jr. started his Presidency with a revisiting of the very close election of 1960 and the Gary Powers affair in form of the E-3 downing on Hainan. In 2004 we were reviewing and arguing about all things 1968. The 2008 election campaign rather resembled the one of 1976 in quite a few respects.
In the form of Scott Brown we’ve now even had a recapitulation of the result of the midterm elections of 1978. At the clip things are now going on that rail- about 2 years of the past getting rehashed in our public life per year of the present- we’ll be revisiting the events and arguments of mid/late 1980 by the end of this year. Iran and a painful long recession seem to figure in both then and now.
From this perspective it’s pretty easy to adduce what the Tea Party represents: it’s a revisiting/revival of the movement that championed Reagan and the Reagan platform during the Carter years. I’d say that fits pretty well with what they want and who they are.

But again, it doesn’t matter. Your model have been tried now for at least 40 years, and the results speak for themselves. As I said, the discussion is moot, because we are in debt up to our ears from entitlement spending and it will be cut. Viciously. Ideas have consequences, and we are about to reap the consequences of progressive thinking, just like the USSR did a few decades ago.
During the 1960s it seems we made the de facto decision to socialize the economic costs that were going to arise from the unwinding of the accumulated social damage of generations of segregationism. Not just segregation and maltreatment of black Americans, either.
It seems Christian to me, frankly, to admit, atone for, and pay restitution for one’s sins and those of one’s community/society.

Rod, a comment I submitted Saturday (late afternoon or early evening) is being held in moderation. Could you check for it please?

It seems Christian to me, frankly, to admit, atone for, and pay restitution for one’s sins and those of one’s community/society.
Fine. Do that. I even agree with you. But you cannot impel atonement at the point of a weapon.
Paul tells us that it is in the nature of rulers to oppress, and Christians should regard this as simply another of the burdens we bear on Earth to test our faith. Where the Church went wrong was in assuming from that that the oppression was God’s work, and the rulers went to Heaven as a reward for doing His bidding.
Now we have democracy and republicanism, rule by the People. Christians need to remember as rulers that we are compelled to oppress by the very nature of the process, and to keep it to a minimum and humbly beg forgiveness for it. Communitarian measures using the Sword of the State to compel people to atone or to otherwise behave nicely not only don’t work, the constitute the sin of oppression.
Regards,
Ric

Rod, don’t bother looking for my comment from Saturday in moderation. I’ll try to split and shorten my earlier comment to see if I can get it in.
Part One: Jon, I’m not nearly as rich as John McCain, no where close, but I am well off. I understand why McCain said of the prescription drug benefit Bush pushed through Congress in 2003, “why should government be paying for my prescription drugs?” If people have enough money to handle that themselves, they shouldn’t use Medicare Part D. McCain should be able to opt out; if I’m doing well after 65, sometime in the future, obviously, I should be able to decide if I put in for Medicare reimbursement or not. If I can pay for my own prescriptions, I’d rather the money in the fund go to helping the poor who can’t, even if I paid into it. Call it my personal means testing, the result of which is giving up to the less fortunate some of what I paid in out of my earnings, if you will.

Richard, I am not entirely unsympathetic to people who support fiscally prudent actions. I’m just not sure they understand how everything works. There are many reasons why people “go Washington” despite what they say on the campaign trail. Without unraveling them, and by focusing only how “they betrayed us,” the Tea party folks never will be able to affect real change. To change Washington, they would have to be able to affect campaign financing, the dependence of legislators on corporate donors, the influence of special interests on legislation, and so forth. Most of that goes on behind closed doors, out of public view. That means it is vulnerable to being spun. The activists are going about it the wrong way. It’s not the quality of the candidates, it’s the environment they face in Washington. If you don’t give people in office the means to resist all the negative forces, they will succumb to them, no matter what their intentions are. It’s like taking a job as a salesmen and being asked to convince consumers that a product is great when it is not, or in worst case scenarios, really is shoddy. If you can’t lie, you lose your job. So you adapt to the environment – or leave the job voluntarily. Again, I recommend Elizabeth Drew’s book about Fred Thompson’s efforts at campaign finance reform, The Corruption of American Politics: What Went Wrong and Why.
There’s also the impact of belonging to one of two parties. That means they face demands for party discipline. That’s how Medicare Part D, with its budget busting characteristics, was rammed through in 2003. There’s a carrots and sticks approach, with punishment (loss of chairmanship opportunities) doled out to those who deviate. So not only do they face pressure from lobbyits and special interests who control huge chunks of the money needed to campaign, they face pressure within their own caucus to fall in line.
The government has been borrowing from the public. In 1981, Reagan cut taxes on corporations and on the highest earner. In 1983, the payroll tax rate for Social Security paid by Americans was raised in order to meet the project retirements of baby boomers starting at the end of the century. Each year since then, the U.S. Treasury has spent any surplus funds in Social Security (the difference between what current workers paid in and existing beneficiaries received) on other programs. Without doing that, the deficits run up starting in since the 1980s would have been even higher. So entitlements have financed a lot of other goodies, they haven’t just benefited those who’ve paid into it. Deficits have been masked.

Jullian, It seems Christian to me, frankly, to admit, atone for, and pay restitution for one’s sins and those of one’s community/society.
Ric Locke, Fine. Do that. I even agree with you. But you cannot impel atonement at the point of a weapon.
Well said, Mr. Locke, well said. Modern progressives are basically moral authoritarians; it’s all about control, not about morality.
But again, there is no need to argue about it. A welfare state soon plunges into debt and fails (as families and culture collapse from the resulting moral decay and the money vanishes). But while I wouldn’t worry about it, I would prepare for the “point of the weapon”…never underestimate progressive angst as their welfare state does collapse, as moral authoritarians have historically shown little restraint.

Ric Locke, I don’t know if you lean left, lean right, or stand in the center politically, as I do. I doubt most conservatives view progressives as moral authoritarians any more than most progressives view conservatives as such, John Dean’s book Conservative Authoritarianism nothwithstanding. Dean has argued that modern conservatism has come to show signs of over reliance on strongly intrusive government and demands for obedience to daddy figures, in contrast to conservative standard bearer Barry Goldwater’s more libertarian approach in the 1960s. There are people on the right who have said similar things about the left. Most of that is hot air.
There are people on both ends of the political spectrum who are drawn to authoritarian approaches. On the right, it often shows up in attempts to control what people, especially women, can do with their bodies, such as obtain birth control pills from pharmacies. (That’s a battle fought only by a tiny handful of people, from what I can tell by browsing news sites. Personal choice in family planning – with individuals themselves deciding whether to use it or not – seems to be widely accepted in the U.S.) Progressives also can come across as moralistic scolds, just as the bedroom meddlers do. On the left you see efforts to make people do things “for their own good,” through mandates such as buying health insurance or regulations requiring the wearing of crash helmets, prohibiting smoking indoors in public buildings, etc. Both try to control behavior through legislation with scolding admonitions as to what people may or may not do.
Neither the right or the left can occupy the high ground here because both must cope with the extremists. There isn’t much that can be done about fringe moral authoritarians. I think that it is because the desire to control others (within a family, a church, a community, a nation) has more to do with personality types than with ideology. Tackling it involves asking a person to drop his or her security blankets. So ideological cries tend to fall flat. I don’t rule out that some people might project on others what they seem to be themselves. A lot of screeching on political messages boards involves bravado which seems to mask deep anxiety. We moderates are mystified by it. I think we just have to learn to live with the fact that there are people on the left and the right who are bewildered that everyone is not just like them, and who feel compelled to handle the dissonance by trying to pound others into submission instead of saying here I stand, there you stand, cool, let’s talk about why we see things as we do and then walk away. Pounding others into submission is inherently undemocratic, of course. But I don’t think there are that many of them, although there are times when their goals are mirrored in political demagoguing. A lot of that is just posturing for the base. Most Americans are more sensible.

I misremembered the title of John Dean’s book, it is Conservatives Without Conscience.

PDGM- well all I can say is that you are pretty well redefining what a utopian is. What are you saying is that Dawkins doesn’t believe in the Christian idea that human beings are born broken and need to be saved. Well of course he doesn’t. Having a positive outlook on the species’ future, and a view of human nature that does not reduce us all to being “sinners” (in the theological sense) a utopian does not make. If a utopian is just someone with a positive outlook on the future, well then, the word has pretty much lost all its meaning.
And yes, science does in fact allow us to anticipate future events to a degree. That is what science does. Part of what science does is to figure out enough about a thing that you can predict what it does next. That is what Dawkins is talking about. It just part of the power of the scientific method. This, combined with the fact that you cannot name a single other human endeavor that has done more to improve the lot of the species, is the heart of the optimism of someone like Dawkins. But this is hardly a utopian vision of any sort
And when it comes to “knowing” yes there is art and philosophy and music and other modes of human experience. I do not claim, as you seem to think I do, that science is the only way of “knowing.” But that said, theology can tell us nothing about the nature of the universe. It cannot find ways to grow crops to feed millions, cure diseases, enable space flight, examine our genetics, or even have this discussion online. This is the result of science. When it comes to figuring out how the universe works, and why things are the way they are, science is by far and away our most potent, accurate and powerful tool. And given the increasingly complex nature of the world we live in, it is going to be a necessary one.
As I noted above, no one is claiming science knows everything or can predict all outcomes. Dawkins sure isn’t. The fact that what we don’t know often dwarfs what we do is at the heart of scientific inquiry along with the knowledge that what we think we know might not really be the case at all. But the proven ability of science to allow us to learn more at an exponential rate does mean we are better equipped to handle the future than ever before.
It is for that reason I cannot take seriously this idea that religion teaches “humility” with respect to human knowledge. Religions are built on beliefs that have really no real evidence to support them, but are nonetheless accepted as true and unchanging. Even among very liberal Christians, for example, you will find a belief in an all powerful, all good, all knowing god (who is male) created the universe, that we are all part of a “plan.” that we go to a utopia after we die (provided we believe properly) and so on. These are taken as indisputable facts. You might say “well the humility part is that we don’t know what the plan is.” but the point is how on earth do you even truly know there is a plan in the first place? You don’t. You can’t.
No, hubris is part of the human condition. We all share in it. But religion is built upon certainties that are regarded as unquestionably true. Science holds even well supported facts and theories as ultimately provisional. Religion is not humble with respect to human knowledge because it claims to know all the important facts – what god is, what god wants, what happens when we die and so on. That is the opposite of humility. It is an unwarranted certainty in things that cannot be demonstrated at all.

One thing that irritates me about the way the media talk about the culture war is that it’s almost always a matter of irrational right-wingers making guerrilla attacks on the forces of right order. It takes two to fight a culture war.
It takes two to fight a valid war. It takes one to declare a frivolous war, especially when the “other side” just wants to be allowed to exist.

Indy, I find your comments re “contextual conservatism” incomprehensible because I can’t casually abandon objectivity, principle, fact or reason.
Taking your example of Christian employees as an illustration of muddying the waters with inapt analogies, an employee is an agent of his principal, acting under the direction and control of the principal. So long as he does so within the confines of the law, who’s to say he’s a bad Christian? I’ve represented some pretty dodgy characters in my career, but always strictly according to my ethical and professional obligations. If I were to do otherwise, I would bear the entire burden of the mandate’s risk on my own shoulders. That’s the black and white line whereby I practice my profession, which I couldn’t do if the line weren’t there. Where does context come in? Because I’m a Christian? How so? But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect.
Now to Mr. Brooks. He regularly lumps together apples and oranges when intellectual honesty requires distinctions. That’s the game he plays so that he can argue that “throwing the bums out” is the same as ripping up the US constitution.
It’s clear to me and most other Americans that the overwhelming majority of politicians in D.C. don’t measure up to the standards of their offices, and the situational rigors of the job offer them no contextual excuses. Therefore, putting them out and replacing them with others has nothing to do with Utopianism unless the standards are Utopian. But are they?
Is it too much to ask Congressmen not to sell their votes for campaign contributions? Is it too much ask that they tell the truth at least as often as they spin and lie? Besides Sens. Bunning & Gregg, when was the last time you saw a member of Congress point out that Congress isn’t really serious about containing spending growth or cutting deficits or paying down the national debt? How does Congress’ endemic dishonesty fit in with “contextual conservatism”? Is it your contention that the American people can’t handle the truth?
You wrote: “I think where many of the Utopians fall short, whether hippies or Tea Party folks, is in trying to apply a general template to situations without trying to understand the processes that lead to the outcomes they don’t like.”
I interpret statements like this thusly: Average Americans, particularly Tea Party folks, are too stupid to think through complicated political issues or understand their nuances. What rubbish.
Worse, such statements negate the validity of every principle. E.g. “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with inalienable Rights, that among these Rights are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Well you know, I can think of a lot of contextual arguments that this text really means the opposite of what it plainly states, and maybe as evidence I can introduce a letter from Dolly Madison to her husband, which, when subjected to the rigors of textual and historical deconstruction post-modern style, can be made to support my arguments as well as any others. No thanks, Indy: I’ll stick with the plain language.
In parting, consider this: Why do you desire to project Utopianism onto the Tea Party movement? Is because you’d like to make the claim that the desire to return to the good old days is just as Utopian as the desire to remake the world in the image of progress?

In parting, consider this: Why do you desire to project Utopianism onto the Tea Party movement? Is because you’d like to make the claim that the desire to return to the good old days is just as Utopian as the desire to remake the world in the image of progress?
Which “good old days” would those be?

Indy, you can’t condemn Jonah Goldberg ad hominem on one hand and then tell us to read a book by John Dean!
If nothing else (and it’s a lot else), it’s too easy a shot…

GrantL,
You don’t have to believe in a fall to think there’s a need for epistemological humility. You’re confounding very different things. I did not express my concerns in terms of theology, or of Christian theology, or of a fall. You did. You’re putting words, and inaccurate ones, in my mouth.
People who do not have epistemological humility (and it can come from a bunch of different views of the world) are on a utopian path, because they think through good planning and empirical knowledge (which is “enough”) we can make the world continuously better. I agree, we can make parts of it better in very real and concrete ways; but to extrapolate outward from these limited betters to a universal and endless better? Well, that does not fit with my experience of the world.
You write, “theology can tell us nothing about the nature of the universe. It cannot find ways to grow crops to feed millions, cure diseases, enable space flight, examine our genetics, or even have this discussion online.” What you’ve just done with your examples is knock out philosophy, literature, and most other fields not based upon empirical and quantifiable knowledge. Moreover, I think your assertion is false: theology does tell us very real things about the world, but not in a quantifiable way. No, it won’t make jet airplanes, routers, or the internet; but it has its own sphere of expertise, a sphere I would argue contains and informs that of science–or at least it should. There are no intrinsic reasons for science to *ever* limit what it does; but there are reasons for science to limit itself. Some of these come from philosophy; some come from theology; some come from other “soft” humanities subjects; and all these reasons tell us something about the world. Theology–whether Christian, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist–can tell us a lot about the nature of the universe. “Desire is the root of suffering” tells us something incredibly profound about the nature of reality; it’s a basic truth of a religion as well.
Now it may well be that what these subjects tell us are things that you don’t want to hear, and that you don’t think are “valid” because they’re from “soft” subject areas that don’t use empirical methodologies and number. This does not make them unreal; it just means you disagree. But that’s a completely different issue. And it isn’t limited to theology; it’s equally true of philosophy and probably of literature as well.

Very funny, Richard. But I didn’t tell people to read a book by John Dean. In fact, I said his theories, like those of a lot of the people who wring their hands about the other side, sound like a lot of hot air. Or that both paint a scarier picture than either party deserves.
@Lauvaux, it’s not that I think the Tea party folks or the hippies are/were too stupid. As I said in another post, it’s not that I don’t sympathize with some of what they wish for, such as a balanced budget. But they being simplistic out of ignorance. And yes, they are afraid to handle parts of the truth, such as their own roles in voting as the have in the past. Better to project themselves as heroic than to admit how intertwined some things, including their own choices, have been.
They simply don’t/didn’t know how all the levers turned and all the things worked behind the scenes. It’s easy to demand purity or Utopia when you project a place where things are pretty straightfoward. But it’s hard to achieve it when you find out how complicated it is. Again, although it’s set some 15 years ago, I recommend Elizabeth Drew’s book, quite an eye opener. It explained to me why a lot of good men in both parties gave up, decided not to run for re-election, and didn’t stick around Washington.

@Lavaux, I disagree that “an employee is an agent of his principal, acting under the direction and control of the principal.” That leads to situational ethics, although it sounds as you’ve avoided ending up in situations where you had to do bad things because your employer demanded. I’ve been in positions vis a vis my employer where I have thought the path upon which a principal was embarking was wrongheaded, risky, and potentially damaging. I’ve been able to turn the principal around to a better path, not only one that was more principled, but which preserved the integrity of the enterprise. One does not always give up free agency in action or submit and bow to an employer’s direction and control. I’ve found that now as a senior employee but also as a junior. If one can find a way to get a principal to do better, it actually is possible to nudge them to a better outcome. You just have to know how and when to spend your professional capital. And, sometimes, when to step out onto the high wire and just take a chance. (Of course, all principals, as we are, are human, weak, flawed, etc. I’ve never worked for anyone who walked on water and never have claimed to do so, myself) There are jobs where we can help set the standards, not just follow what others say.

In re-reading my last two posts, I realized that my last two posts sound contradictory – it’s hard to change Washington versus employees don’t have to blindly follow the direction of their principals. I don’t work in politics and neer have. But I have read a lot about it. So I thought I would throw out some things that Tea party people would have to change. Lauvaux, keep in mind that one of the people you mentioned has said he won’t run for office when his term is up. Most of the others still face future campaigns. I don’t know how people in your company act once they’ve announced they’re going to retire, but I’ve seen people become more outspoken once they have one foot out the door.
Unlike the place where I have worked, or most of yours, I imagine, Washington doesn’t have codified principles and standards and an HR office and organizational lawyers (one of whom might be an ethics expert) with whom to hash out the past course of action. Washington has an incredible amount of moving parts. The worst ones involve cash. To disentangle officials from the influence of money, Tea party voters need to tackle things such as the influence of television. Special interests and corporate donors really began to rule after campaigning moved from the slow pace of whistle stop tours and running for office from the front porch to the widespread use of tv. Television campaign spots cost a lot of money, both in production and in purchase of air time. The rule of thumb nowadays is, a candidate is in trouble if he can’t get air time because he has blown his budget. That’s why the constant scramble for cash for donors occurs, as Drew vividly describes in The Corruption of American Politics: What Went Wrong and Why.
So how can voters send a message that they don’t want television to be so important to campaigns? It’s hard to see how they can. Sure, we could write to candidates and say we mute the tv when campaign ads (especially negative ones) come on, even ones for candidates we’re leaning towards supporting. That we’re tired of rah rah appeals to emotion and chest thumping patriotism (let’s face it, most everyone is patriotic regardless of how they vote) or silly name calling which characterizes most of the ads. (Seriously, what can anyone really learn from an ad that runs less than 60 seconds? Nothing that I can see.) Even if we banded together and said, “cut them out, don’t treat us like you’re trying to sell us hamburgers or cars or allergy medicines,” candidates would know there are people who do watch them. And who can be reached through them. So they’ll keep running them. And they keep making those calls to donors. Who often represent special interests such as Big Pharma or trial lawyers or unions.
I understand why little guys feel helpless and want something better. But unless they can find a way to reduce the pressure to respond to the big money folks, they’re just going to keep sending changing faces into a place that chews them up and forces them to adapt to the existing culture rather than being responsive to voters’ ideals. It’s like a parent who has a choice of home schooling his kid or sending him to a good private school or sending him to a neighborhood public school in a poor, underperforming environment. Some kids survive the latter, as a commenter on Rod’s essay about kids in small towns explained about his inner city school. But the ones in good private schools, public schools in areas with high property values and involved parents, or in properly handled home school settings have a much better chance of doing well. Environment does matter, not just the kid and his or her innate abilities.

Nobody has said anything about Malcolm X. I wish he were still alive today, and famous as ever.
Do you think Malcolm would have tolerated the kind of filthy misogynistic lyrics that rap stars were putting out in the 1990s and earlier and to this day? He would have ripped their throats out. Don’t you EVER talk about a woman that way in Malcolm’s hearing. It is true that the Nation of Islam taught women to submit to their husbands, and other patriarchal figures — not unlike some present day Christian sects. But Malcolm, for one, treated his wife with the deepest respect.
Malcolm also would not have tolerated young men wallowing in the notion “yeah, I’m black, so I’m supposed to be dumb, lazy, unemployable, and out hustling.” He knew the hustling side of life, he could talk to people in it, but his whole point was getting people out of it — industriously, and with pride. In an era where use of the word “nigger” is more common in a conversation between two people of dark complexion than out of the mouth of anyone else, I would love to have Malcolm around to remind them “Nigger is a slave name.” (Not a direct quote — but a likely distillation for today of what he DID teach).
The riots of the 1960s came AFTER Malcolm was murdered. There were contemporary news accounts of young men saying “There was only one man who could have walked these streets and said ‘Brothers, cool it.’ That man was Malcolm X.” If only the kids who are intimidated about “acting white” could hear an actual speech by Malcolm X: the cool, erudite, voice, the perfect diction and impeccable grammar of the man who spent his time in prison memorizing the entire dictionary…
Anyone bemoaning the degeneration of the family in America, or specifically the black family, should be praying for another Malcolm X. In short, we need a lot more education going out on the real Malcolm, to overcome the petty, misinformed, trivialized caricature of the man, which is what most people know today.

As for reforming Washington- I think a good place to start is by trying to build support for the current proposal that CO’s Senator Bennet has announced:
http://bennet.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/?id=3B89B24A-C81E-4D6D-A4EC-0D3F5B91E728
There’s no perfect fix for all the problems, but I think the terms here would go a long way to reminding the Senate at least of its priorities and minimizing direct corruptive influences.

” Even among very liberal Christians, for example, you will find a belief in an all powerful, all good, all knowing god (who is male) created the universe, that we are all part of a “plan.” that we go to a utopia after we die (provided we believe properly) and so on.”
I think part of the error here comes in assuming a human perspective on power, knowledge, love, etc… as if God were a superhuman of some sort rather than an all encompassing divine force or entity. (I do even find the concept of assigning “a plan” to God somewhat absurd, because that implies that God operates on (super)human mental processes as opposed to being something so far outside of our rational ken that the best we can do is present metaphorical approximations to try to capture it.
(And on the male part, the Presbyterian Church (USA), at least, makes open the option of feminine or even fully nongendered references as needed or desired – (eg: “Creator, Word, Spirit”, “Mother, Child and Womb”, “Rock, Redeemer, Friend”) so there’s a fiar of of spread to how much room the more liberal denominations cover.

“Besides Sens. Bunning & Gregg, when was the last time you saw a member of Congress point out that Congress isn’t really serious about containing spending growth or cutting deficits or paying down the national debt?”
Look how much money we’re saving by not fixing that gas leak in our kitchen.
You leave yourself wide open to the question here of whether they’re really being serious about such, or are putting on a penny-wise, pound-foolish display of such to please their base.
Really, when you get down to it, balancing the budget isn’t that hard. But few people want to go down in history as the next Herbert Hoover, sitting on a balanced budget while an economic negative feedback loop wreaks havoc.

Karl G., thanks for the link. From what I’ve read, the biggest barrier to reform is the fact that everyone gripes about it but no one wants to give up anything or, in some cases, even admit that there are problems. That seems to be the case inside and outside. This particularly is a problem for the right, which typically decries regulation and argues that market forces can work things out and keep them in balance. Including on issues such as whether money equals speech. The big problem for a lot of Tea party folks is that to provide the support structure that enables the people they want to send to Washington to resist negative forces, they may have to support more rules and regulations to prohibit certain behaviors. And Republicans usually argue against regulation and “nanny state” actions. So there’s an inherent conflict in calling for better behavior but not recognizing what causes lapses in the first place.
I recently read an account of an ethics report about lobbyists and earmarks which was issued this month in which a Common Cause official said of donations, “It is hard to say it does not work the way the business community thinks it works when you can show, time after time, that they seem to be getting value for their campaign dollar.” The report showed that staffers frequently attend fund raising events and interact with donors and also provide input into earmarks. Of course, earmarks only make up one percent of the budget but the way things are set up, you have to prove a direct quid pro quo between donations and benefits received. That standard rarely is met.
To return to my school analogy, it’s like sending your kid to public school and simply admonishing him or her to “do the right thing” without learning about the pressures (such as fitting in with cliques, handling real life and cyber bullying, etc.) that kids face. A hands off approach that consists of pontificating about a world one doesn’t really understand is much less effective than studying the world of “mean girls” and jocks and nerds and geeks and how they interact. And trying to look at things through the eyes of an angst ridden child rather than one’s adult perspective. There are a lot of books out there about helping one’s kids through middle school and high school but even if you read them, it’s a challenge to know when to push your kids and when to learn to step back and let them work through (or not) the problems they face. (Helicopter parents do their kids no favors, especially when they keep interfering in high school and college and beyond.) Getting reliable data is very, very difficult. The reality is, most kids stop talking to their parents about their problems at some point. What we see with Congress are a lot of people in the same position as middle and high school kids who mask what they are struggling with from mom and dad—folks who don’t feel they ever can level with voters about the environment they face after they leave the house each morning.

Indy- what you say is why it was nice to see several government officials over the past few years take the food stamp challenge and actually try to live for a week to a month only on the $21/week that people on that program get for food. Even those that were generally sympathetic came out with a much better understanding of some of the stresses and outright disability that affects people living in poverty.
“This particularly is a problem for the right, which typically decries regulation and argues that market forces can work things out and keep them in balance.”
There’s another of those secular dogmas on display- selecting the convenient part of a truth and blindly attempting to force the whole world to conform to it. The Utopian “free market” requires completely ignoring the context in which it was described- the primary regulations which Adam Smith was talking about removing were those that created corporations and allowed them to exist as anything both short term, limited purpose entities. In contrast he also advocated strict regulation of actuarial businesses like banks and insurance, and paying professions whose perceived benefit was equal at all levels, regardless of peoples ability to pay for services our of the public pocket (eg: military, doctors, performers, priests)

wow. you couldn’t be more wrong in your analysis of the tea party movement. The Tea party movement in the U.S. is about FREEDOM..about our GOD GIVEN inalienable rights…which are protected by our Constitution! Talk to anybody in the tea party movement and they will tell you that government is a necessary evil, and the founding fathers spoke of that themselves! Please read up on your country’s history- it took several years for the founders to arrive at the constitution as we know it. They had to strike a balance between the rights of individuals, state and federal goverment. Too little oversight by the government results in anarchy, too much is tyranny. The beauty of our Constitution is it’s perfect stance between these three. The number one role of the government is to provide protection for it’s citizens. The current actions and legislation being pushed through by Congress and the Obama administration are, if enacted, going to push us into the realm of tyranny. When the government can fine you and put you in jail if you do not buy a product (health insurance for now, next year some “green” appliance- who knows!), you, sir, do not have rights. And you sir, are a serf, a slave to an oppressive government who will take your hard earned money to waste as it sees fit, and also control your very life. Please learn your history, the foundation of our country, it’s underpinnings in Judeo-Christian ethics, a belief in God and His role in the creation of our Constitution. And then recognize that the Tea Party movement is NOTHING like any leftist, marxist movement thats main goal was and has continued to be the destruction of individual freedom and rights. We simply want a return to our constitutional form of government, and a reduction and removal of the harmful entitlement programs that are literally bankrupting our country, and will enslave our future generations for decadees to come because of massive debt.

Such a claim that both movements were based on a ‘mass innocence’ is innocent itself of America’s history of class-conflict across wide ranging issues and movements, and thus any attempt to tie two fantastically different movements upon opposition to disproportional elitist influence is weak and untenable.
Furthermore, assertions that the ‘core commonality’ revolved around mass innocence is taking innocence in a derogatory fashion. Essentially tying ‘innocence’ with an ignorance to an inevitable failure. The truth is the New Left did win on major issues, winning concessions on personal freedoms, challenging the boundaries of personal and political relationships, and certainly its legacy of feminism and environmentalism. Its failure was not inevitable, for its aims were never solid. This was a mass movement in a minority, with an anchored relationship to the emerging counter culture. It influence in such a short time, in such a hostile climate, by so few was a success in itself. Its failure in the general consensus of changing America is not an ‘innocence’ but an administrative qualm, centred around a wide ranging consensus and various interests groups which caused its split.
Finally, the Tea Party is not ‘innocent’ for largely it is not new. The reactionary character of the movement, and it’s ‘Old Style’ have little to do with the exciting and new frontiers offered by the New Left. While arguably it has an innocent character in its perceptions of such a multi-cultural society, the New Right in the 1960s had a disproportionately higher sway than its contemporary rival in the left. Their ideas may seem farce to many, but, historically, have great potential. In such harsh economic times, those conservative ideas reaching back to the countries undeniable periods of affluence, cannot be denounced and ‘innocent’ and certainly cannot be simplified in its associations with a popular leftist upsurge 40 years its senior.