Obamacare Is The Perfect Example Of The Williamson-Whittle Analysis At Work

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The Hayride:

We’ve been discussing here at the Hayride for a whole year now a concept we first saw forming in a speech given by James Piereson at the American Enterprise Institute last fall, developing in a lot of thevideos put out by Bill Whittle after the 2012 election and approached from a slightly different direction by Kevin Williamson in his book The End Is Near And It’s Going To Be Awesome earlier this year.

Namely, that American society is evolving beyond that which can be governed by the Industrial Age bureaucratic state the Democrat Party is so committed to, and this fact creates an opportunity for conservatives and the Republican Party to leave the Democrats in the dust.

If you have the time, this Whittle speech in Reno from a few months ago, which he uploaded to YouTube on Sunday, is a good statement of the case…

[youtube]http://youtu.be/DT9HKM5STfo[/youtube]

If you don’t have the time, the basics are these: there have really only been three truly consequential events in human societal history at the end of the day, and the organization and governance of human beings has followed those events.

The first was the Agricultural Revolution, when human beings stopped being hunter-gatherers and began cultivating crops. The transformation of human society from the nomadic tribe to the farming village enabled the development of commerce, as farmers could trade their excess crops and produce for needed items, and villages, towns and cities  emerged as centers for that exchange.

The ultimate product of the Agricultural Revolution, in terms of human governance, was the U.S. Constitution. What the Framers created was a document made for a nation of self-reliant, independent individuals who looked to the government to produce a navy to keep the British away, an army to keep the Indians away, courts to resolve their commercial differences and perhaps a paved road from their farms to the marketplace – and not a whole lot else. One of the primary criticisms the early Progressives made of the Constitution was that it was built for an agricultural society, and to some extent that criticism had merit.

Those early Progressives were products of the second great event, namely the Industrial Revolution – in which humans created the ability to mass-produce goods and to leverage machines to increase productivity on a large scale. An industrial society no longer revolves around the village and field; instead, it’s based in cities. As such, Progressive policies are based on solving urban problems. Mass transit, law enforcement, housing, health care, labor, financial regulation – all of those are primarily policy issues an urban society will encounter. Even the Progressives’ great overreach, Prohibition, was an attempt to solve an urban issue – farmers might drink like fish, but alcoholic farmers don’t present a social problem of such size anyone wants to amend the Constitution over it; it’s alcoholics harassing people on street corners and causing problems in cities and towns that would cause such a mobilization.

And so the Progressives built a different kind of government to reflect the new society. They built the Industrial Age bureaucracy, complete with things like public schools, the progressive income tax, Social Security and Medicare, government-owned mass transit and the DMV. It’s large, it’s coercive, it’s wasteful and it’s stupid – but it has the strength to compel the individual to conform to the collective, generally speaking.

That redistributive, Industrial Age semi-coercive state built by the Woodrow Wilsons, FDR’s and LBJ’s here in America is only the friendly face of all the terrible “isms” which surfaced in Europe in the first half of the 20th Century. There is only a matter of degree between the Progressivism of a Wilson or FDR, for example, and the fascism of a Mussolini, Nazism of Hitler or communism of a Stalin or Pol Pot. The basic principle – that society must be controlled by masterminds who know better than individuals how best to govern those individuals’ lives – remains. Only the method of that control and the aggression used within it are different.

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