There once was a time in Western society when conservatives at least had the decency to cover their indifference to society's assorted cruelties with the fig leaf of noblesse oblige. Throw some alms to those who lacked the good taste to be born at minimum into upper-middle-class circumstances, they would say (and on occasion even do), so that they, the spermatically judicious, could feel godly and compassionate and, above all, splendidly postpone for another few years any sensible, unwashed rebellions.
It was smart social policy for those who dispensed it; when the others had nothing, something seemed like a blessing, and, by and large, their gratitude was immense. Yet throughout modernity the ratio of gratitude-to-resentment--arm in arm with literacy and the franchise--has steadily flipped. The privileged smugly caressed the fallacy that poverty is due to shiftlessness and inherent class disadvantages are due to God's plan, but the impoverished and disadvantaged reasoned out the logical scam.
With the franchise and growing resentment, the latter demanded certain progressivities in governance. And bit by bit, beginning in Europe and spreading to North America, those progressivities came; they came in varieties of social insurance, market regulations, progressive taxation, workers' rights, and, in general, in government as a prime mover of the socioeconomic Good.
Some privileged conservatives--the more genuinely conservative ones--have accepted these sociopolitical metamorphoses as tolerable necessities of their own self-preservation. After all, they've been allowed to keep most of the toys, and the natives, through a kind of institutionally routinized noblesse oblige, have been kept reasonably quiet.
Yet still with us are the feckless, oblivious conservatives such as George F. Will, who has long since slipped to the nether-classification of "pseudoconservative," chiefly through writing such self-defeating slop as this:
Now [we conservatives] know that a quicker, surer method [to political dominance] is to have progressives wield power for a few years. This will validate the core conservative insight about the mischiefs that ensue when governments demonstrate their incapacity for supplanting with fiats the spontaneous order of a market society ...
... the cruel spontaneity of which only reminds the inherently disadvantaged that the game has been newly rigged through an unspeakable ruthlessness by those few who benefit from its "order." Thus more progressivity in governance is demanded. And in time it comes--its ever-accumulating layers coming largely from the blind arrogance of pseudoconservatives such as George F. Will.
Thank you, George. Thank you for once again writing that you really, really don't get it. Keep it comin'.
I heard something so stupid a couple weeks ago from some Fox panelist that was so startling that I never thought to identify them. Mind you this person was draped in Dumboflage and blended in splendidly with the other panelists so I claim an excuse. What this person said in effect was that hunger had largely been eliminated in America and that programs like SNAP were no longer necessary. How can you argue with that? When you have lost the power of speech.
Posted by: Peter G | December 28, 2013 at 10:09 AM
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." -- John F. Kennedy
Keep up the good work, George...
Posted by: shsavage | December 28, 2013 at 10:31 AM
Will and his ilk had better hope their prescriptions isn't carried to its logical conclusion. It was largely those "certain progressivities in governance" which he dismisses as "fiats" that prevented Marx's predictions from being borne out. France in 1789 and Russia in 1917 show what ultimately happens when the oligarchs are able to avoid such compromises.
Posted by: Infidel753 | December 28, 2013 at 12:57 PM