The United States is becoming a broken society. The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged. Unemployment will remain high. It will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis.
This confluence of crises has produced a surge in vehement libertarianism. People are disgusted with Washington. The Tea Party movement rallies against big government, big business and the ruling class in general. Even beyond their ranks, there is a corrosive cynicism about public action.
But there is another way to respond to these problems that is more communitarian and less libertarian. This alternative has been explored most fully by the British writer Phillip Blond….
To create a civil state, Blond would reduce the power of senior government officials and widen the discretion of front-line civil servants, the people actually working in neighborhoods. He would decentralize power, giving more budget authority to the smallest units of government. He would funnel more services through charities. He would increase investments in infrastructure, so that more places could be vibrant economic hubs. He would rebuild the “village college” so that universities would be more intertwined with the towns around them.
Essentially, Blond would take a political culture that has been oriented around individual choice and replace it with one oriented around relationships and associations….
How about just following the Constitution?
Never happen. Silly suggestion.
This seems to be a variation of the idea that society will run great if we can just perfect government operations.
Adam 12 — word to you, so right.
Note that David Brooks calls the massive government-regulated monopolies granted by the state a “market” economy. What a hoot.
There’s nothing wrong with this society that a good couple of elections can’t fix with voters who care about the Constitution. I’m looking forward to seeing if a majority of those Americans exist as voters.
Contempt for the “political class” should come as no surprise since the “political class” and their media and sycophantic camp followers are utterly contemptible. They murdered rational discourse in Washington and state capitals, and the body’s stench grows stronger everyday.
“America has no native criminal class …. except Congress”
Mark Twain
The fact is, in the early days of the Republic Americas were communitarian precisely because their politics were libertarian. Read Alexis de Toqueville. The importance of local government, of (particularly Protestant) Christianity, of local civic associations (of individuals banding together to build schools, hospitals, roads), and of the family (including, to Toqueville, the freedom of American women to choose their own husbands and of the fidelity of American husbands compared with French husbands at the time!) were all part and parcel of the libertarian impulses of the founding and early days of the Republic.
One need not oppose the libertarian (read, constitutional) and the communitarian in order to have a flourishing society.
For an excellent summary of Toqueville and the current American political situation (admittedly, from a “conservative”, or constitutionalist perspective), see Peter Robinson’s (of the Hoover Institution at Sanford) conversation with Paul Rahe, a professor at Hillsdale College:
http://www.hoover.org/multimedia/uk/72025472.html
#2. The comment was ment as sarcasm towards Brooks nonsensical remarks but, if following the Constitution is really just a silly suggestion then America is truly finished as a free society. I sincerely hope all Americans don’t think like you. After all, defeatism only gets you – defeat.
Folks, as with TEC’s descent, we all own this problem, but we can begin to fix it this November 2nd.