Charles Krauthammer has helpfully ignited a conservative discussion about the welfare state. Do we accept it – at least in its original New Deal form – and try to reform it? Or do we declare it unconstitutional and start over, as Andrew McCarthy at National Review argues?
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Krauthammer seemed to go with the Republican establishment in his remarks to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. But Andrew McCarthy makes the constitutional objection: you can’t have a welfare state and honor the constitution.
Are both of them wrong?
The reform argument is probably moot because the welfare state will soon run out of money for entitlements. It doesn’t matter what we think of the New Deal, there will soon be no more money.
And the problem with simply going back to the Constitution and the founders is that the world has moved on since Locke and Montesquieu. F.S.C. Northrop decided it for me in The Meeting of East and West. As I wrote in 2005:
F.S.C. Northrop pointed out 50 years ago that Anglo-Americans cannot expect to win the battle of ideas solely with the seventeenth-century ideas of Locke and the eighteenth-century ideas of Burke, while our opponents are fighting with the ideas of every European thinker since, from Rousseau to Heidegger.
But can all those continentals be made to argue for a conservative world? I believe they can.
Let’s start with The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno, German neo-Marxist Jews writing in the U.S. in the middle of World War II. These Frankfurt School stalwarts realized that it was enlightenment and the rule of reason that led to Stalinism and Nazism. Why? Because “What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men.” And this: “Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men.”
Hey you liberals in the ruling class: how does all that domination over the healthcare system feel right now?
If you were a young conservative firebrand outraged at the domination of the liberal ruling class you may feel inspired to write something like this about the liberal era:
In one word, for domination, veiled by religious and political illusions, liberalism has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal domination.
That’s what liberalism, from the New Deal to today, reduces to: a mechanical dominating system in which we are just cogs.
Jürgen Habermas, student of Adorno and lifetime lefty, has tried to find a way out of the iron cage of domination in his Theory of Communicative Action. The idea is to balance the power of enlightenment system with the lifeworld of face-to-face interactive communication.
Conservatives have a word for this intersubjective lifeworld freed from the domination of government system. We call it “civil society.”
But does it really matter what anyone thinks about the welfare state, when Obamacare is collapsing all around us?
Not yet. Today, all we need to do is hammer away at Obama’s lies and his pathetic attempt to blame the insurance companies for everything.
But tomorrow we had better start the decades-long project of persuading the American people that the government systems that dominate our lives are bad for us as individuals, bad for our aging parents, bad for our children, and bad for America.
Oh, and bad for the planet.
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