"Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the "citizen" by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn't happen here because Americans aren't Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek's greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom is psychological: "There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought," he wrote with an immigrant's eye on the Britain of 1944. "It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one's neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority."
Two-thirds of a century on, almost every item on the list has been abandoned, from "independence and self-reliance" (40 percent of people receive state handouts) to "a healthy suspicion of power and authority" -- the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government "do something," the cost to individual liberty be damned. American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That's what happened in Britain."
Excerpted from Mark Steyn's column here.
Sunday assorted links
3 hours ago
Conor Friedersdorf, my new blogger crush, made some excellent points about a more recent Mark Steyn column (and he hit upon why I find the tone in the National Review so insufferable, even though conservative arguments themselves are not). See: http://trueslant.com/conorfriedersdorf/2010/04/04/rhetoric-the-right-should-repudiate/
ReplyDeleteFriedersdorf's post is pretty good. But a couple things:
ReplyDeleteHis list of "would American be more comfortable living in..." is kind of strange (to put it charitably). I saw nothing in Steyn's remarks that would suggest that he held some esteem for Napoleonic France, Monarchal Spain, or even 18th century Britain. (though it's worth noting that 18th century Britain was among the freeist places to live in the world at the time). And mentioning the Third Reich is just stupid.
Friedersdorf doesn't strike me as historically illiterate, though I've only read those few paragraphs. But Steyn was referencing Victorian Britain of the 19th century when it was the indisputed global hegemon (ie post Napoleon). That period has zero relationship to any of the (more odious) timeperiods that Frideresdorf mentions. So why exactly is he implying that Steyn has some affinity to them?
As for British colonialism...you and I have disagreed on this before. With the caveat that there were a number of horrible events perpetrated by British officials in places like India and British Africa, I still think it's without question that British colonialism was relatively benign as far as those systems went. And furthermore, that unlike it's European (and non-European cousins excluding the limited American colonies), British colonialism was ultimately a force for good in the way that it helped established liberal social values and other important developmental necessicities.
(I've got to run unfortunately, so I'll have to elaborate on other points later).