Era of permanent Armageddon
Meg Greenfield, the late Washington Post editorial page editor, counseled against writing in “High C” all the time. By this she meant that an editorialist or columnist who expressed equally noisy levels of indignation about everything would lack credibility when something truly outrageous came along.
We now seem to be living in the Age of High C, a period when every fight is Armageddon, and every issue is either the key to national survival or the doorway to ruin.
This habit seems especially pronounced in the way President Obama’s adversaries treat him. It’s odd that so many continue to see Obama as a radical and a socialist even as the Dow hits record levels and the wealthy continue to do very nicely. If he is a socialist, he is surely the most incompetent practitioner in the history of Marxism.
The reaction to Obama is part of a larger difficulty that involves pretending we are philosophically far more divided than we are. In all of the well-off democracies, even people who actually call themselves social- ists no longer claim to have an alternative to the market as the primary creator and distributor of goods and services.
But let’s dream a little and assume that the American left signed on to the proposals put forward by Lane Kenworthy of San Diego in his challenging (and, by the way, very promarket) book “Social Democratic America,” published earlier this year. Kenworthy’s argument is that we can “successfully embrace both flexibility and security, both competition and social justice.”
His program, he says, would cost around 10 percent of our GDP. Now that’s a lot of money. Yet would such a level of expenditure signal the death of our constitutional system? Would it make us like, say, Cuba? No, and no. It might make us a little more like Germany.
And when it comes to High C, there’s nothing quite like our culture wars in which disagreements about social issues are seen as battles between libertines and bigots.
The ideological resolution I’d suggest for the new year is that all sides stop fighting and pool their energies to easing the marriage and family crisis that is engulfing working-class Americans.
This would require liberals to acknowledge what the vast majority of them already prac- tice: that, all things being equal, kids are better off with two loving and engaged parents. It would require conservatives to acknowledge that many of the pressures on families are economic and that the decline of well-paying blue-collar work is causing huge disruptions in family formation.
Disagreement is one of the joys of freedom, so I am all for tough political and philosophical competition. But our democratic system would be healthier if it followed the Greenfield rule and reserved the harshest invective for things that are genuinely monstrous.