A mere year ago the notion that the government would take over General Motors would have seemed incredible. Yet here we are, with the president of the United States firing the CEO and personally calling the mayor of Detroit to assure him he has no plans to move the head office out of the city. Not literally, not yet. But in any practical sense it’s now headquartered in Washington. In another twelve months, I wonder what currently unthinkable scenarios will have become faits accomplis.
For those of us who have lived under jurisdictions where the government builds your car, the Obama presidency is already a kind of epic tragedy — 1970s Britain but on a Heaven’s Gate budget. Not just grey, humdrum, second-tier industrial decline — the kind that made Dundee, Scotland, just a plausible stand-in for Brezhnev-era Moscow when the BBC came to make a film on the Soviet retirement of the traitor Guy Burgess. No, this is a fabulous money-no-object plummet on caviar-greased skids. Millions and billions and trillions are shoveled into the hole, and leave no trace.
President Obama, in that rhetorical tic that’s already become a bit of a bore, likes to position himself as a man who won’t duck the tough decisions. So, faced with a U.S. automobile industry that so overcompensates its workers it can’t make a car for a price anybody’s willing to pay for it, the president handed over control to the very unions whose demands are principally responsible for that irreconcilable arithmetic. Presented with a similar situation 30 years ago, Mrs. Thatcher took on the unions and, eventually, destroyed their power. That was a tough decision. Telling your political allies they can now go on overpaying themselves in perpetuity is a piece of cake.
When the going gets tough, the tough get bailed out. Your car business operates on a failed business model? Don’t worry, the taxpayers will prop that failed business model up forever. You went bananas on your credit card and can’t pay it back? Don’t worry, we’ll pass a law to make it the bank’s fault. Your once golden state has decayed into such a corrupt racket of government cronyism that the remaining revenue generators are fleeing your borders faster than you can raise taxes on them? Relax, we’re lining up a federal bailout for you, too. Your unreadable newspaper has just woken up from its 96-page Obama Full Color Inaugural Souvenir bender to discover that its advertising revenue has collapsed with the real-estate market and GM dealerships? Hey, lighten up, Senator Kerry’s already been pleading your case in the Senate. Is it really so hard to picture President Obama calling the mayor next spring to assure him he has no plans to move the New York Times out of New York?
This is now a land that rewards failure — at the personal, corporate, and state level. And, as conservatives well know, if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. If you reward it as lavishly as the Obama administration’s doing it, you’ll get the Radio City Christmas Spectacular of Failure, on ice and with full supporting orchestra.
There is a phrase you hear a lot in Canada, Britain, and Europe to describe the collection of positive “rights” (to “free” health care, unemployment benefits, subsidized public transit) to which the citizens of Western democracies have become addicted: the “social safety net.” It always struck me as an odd term: Obviously, it derives from the circus. But life isn’t really a high-wire act, is it? Or at least it didn’t use to be. If you put the average chap — or even Barack Obama or Barney Frank — in spangled leotard and tights and on a unicycle and shove him out across the wire, he’s likely to fall off. But put the average chap in spangled leotard and tights out into the world and tell him to get a job, find accommodation, raise a family, take responsibility, and he can do it. Or he used to be able to, until the government decided he needed a “safety net.”
When did human life become impossible without a “safety net”? My neighbor’s family came to my corner of New Hampshire in the winter of 1767–68 when her great-great-great-whatever dragged his huge millstones up the frozen river from Connecticut to build the first gristmill on a swift-running brook in the middle of uncleared forest in a four-year-old township comprising a dozen families. And he did it without first applying for a federal business development grant. No big deal. Her family’s nothing special, my town’s nothing special: That’s the point. It was routine — in a pre–“safety net” society.
In his new book, Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, Paul Rahe writes, “Human dignity is bound up with taking responsibility for conducting one’s own affairs.” But today the state cocoons “one’s own affairs” so thoroughly as to remove almost all responsibility from modern life, and much of human dignity with it. And, if personal consequences have been all but abolished, societal consequences are harder to dodge. Sometimes great powers decline slowly, almost imperceptibly, as Britain did for much of the 20th century. Sometimes it’s more sudden and convulsive. Obama is attempting Euro-statism, but, unlike Europe, without the counterweight of America to preserve some approximate relationship to reality. Which is to say I do not think this decline will be genteel, for America or the world.
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