The Twentieth Century was a contest between competing political ideologies. It is a gross oversimplification to say that it was just between Communism and Capitalism or Authoritarianism and Democracy. Politics exists on a spectrum and no matter how hard we try, there are too many issues to have even two people agree on every single one, let alone whole nation-states of people. But since I’m still not interested in writing a dissertation, we’ll settle for the generalization. The Twentieth Century was marked by the struggle between those who want government to serve sparingly and those who want government to do everything.
The government should do everything crowd sees government as a parent. It looks out for you. It does the hard stuff. It makes sure you don’t get hurt. It makes sure you eat your Wheaties. Then it drives your backside to school and makes you do your homework, but at least you don’t have to worry about where your next meal is coming from. If you fall down, it picks you back up, dusts you off and bundles you into enough paddling to stop a train, but you don’t have to worry about paying bills.
The government should serve sparingly crowd sees government as a pet. It fetches the paper. It barks when something is in the yard. It can save your life if the house is on fire by waking you up, but it also pees on the carpet, a lot. It has to be fed constantly. It has to be trained. It has to be taken care of and it has to have some room to play. Rolled up newspapers are an effective training device – even more so with the government. It can be useful and it can be a pain but it is always a responsibility. And it always needs something.
Obviously, there are gradients here. Not everyone that thinks government should solve social problems believes government should solve every problem. Not everyone that thinks government is more of a pain than a pleasure thinks government should be abolished. In fact, most folks fall in the middle ground.
We don’t want a world without a safety net. But we also don’t want a world where we aren’t allowed to try the trapeze. We want security and freedom. That is a tall order. That is the line we’ve been trying to find for a century now.
The political pendulum swung pretty hard toward government as parent for a few decades. Now it is swinging back. This is an opportunity to reevaluate government and to trim it down where necessary. It’s also an opportunity to do what humans do best – toss out the baby with the bathwater.
If anything, the modern American – that’s you young ‘uns – is the least able to handle navigating this political morass. The reason for knowing right from wrong is so that you can make good decisions when the answer isn’t so obvious. If you don’t know what black and white look like, you can’t make your way through the gray. Instead, we spent a few decades buying into this nonsense that because gray exists we should forgo black and white. Because the answer isn’t always obvious, we should just forget right and wrong and do whatever seems right.
Disney’s ‘follow your heart’ ideology is the dumbest crap on the face of the Earth. That heart of yours thinks you need a new Ferrari and there’s one just sitting there in that parking spot, all alone. Just follow your heart and steal other people’s stuff, because the human heart is pretty stupid if the brain doesn’t show up for work. But the brain needs facts to work with – so why was stealing wrong again?
Two generations have grown up with this garbage stuffed into their little heads. It doesn’t make for great material to sort out where the boundaries should be between freedom and security. Or why justice matters, for that matter.
Government is just the people with the authority to make decisions for a nation-state. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. There’s nothing magical or special about the folks in government – they are just the ones that got the job. Assuming they know what they are doing because they had connections and got hired is a bad assumption. Heck, even if they got elected it’s no guarantee of competence.
That’s where the due diligence thing comes in. We the People have a lot of homework.
The point is, the decision of how free we will be as a nation rests with each generation. Some come better equipped than others (seriously, Supreme Court, what were you thinking when you issued Plessey? Second stupidest thing you came up with – I still suspect Blackmon had it in mind when he had someone hold his beer while he wrote Roe) and none were perfectly prepared. Humans don’t come in that size.
So yeah, we have the blue haired Nazis this go around. I really didn’t think a generation would want to be dumber looking than hippies but there you are. But we grew out of the hippie thing (well, most of us) and they will grow out of dyeing their hair with Kool-Aid. You live, you learn, you grow up and then you spend the next few decades cleaning up the mess you made.
The hard part is not making a mess you can’t clean up. Don’t kid yourselves – people idolize the Sixties but that’s more nostalgia than sense talking. The Boomers left more than a few irreparable messes in their wake. These younger generations will, too.
What we need to do now is make sure that they don’t sacrifice freedom for some ill conceived notion of social justice. That’s a mess they won’t be able to fix.
That decision lies very much in what you think government is. Is it an all powerful parent that takes care of you from cradle to grave or is it a fairly dumb pet that needs a lot of training to be the great dog you know it can be? Should government control you or should you control the government?
That answer will define your generation. Make it a good one – and not one your kids will make fun of, or bitterly regret.
