The new right believes every new government program is one step forward on the road to serfdom. They’re winning. But I still don’t quite get it. Do they believe everybody in Sweden is a serf?well this is in the middle of a comic dialogue, but it really does show you what american liberalism is. there is nothing in it except increased government wealth and power. and it is amazing how ideology trumps reality: ok so gail collins looks squarely at history, and cannot detect any problems with too much government power, cannot associate that with oppression. gail collins seems like a bright, informed person. so i guess we just have to diagnose psychosis: she's not trying to become utterly detached from reality; she just is incapable of reaching the actual world from inside her delusory experiences. still, she's cute and funny!
anyway, you'd think it would be impossible for the american liberal to emerge from the bush administration and not be worried about ever-more government power and its abuse. you'd think that they'd look at the history of wars and genocides and oppressions performed under the aegis of the state, and they would hesitate before deploying a program to make it ever-more irresistible.
the position of the left with regard to the state is entirely a priori, immune to the actual world. it is - i am tempted to say literally - theological, and it laughs off the problem of evil. take a gander around you and then tell me this world is the product of a perfectly good and all-powerful being. well it doesn't look that way but let's make an incredibly elaborate, strained argument showing that it's not impossible. no amount of death or oppression is enough to make the leftist doubt the goodness of the state, or to really acknowledge that the state is a bunch of actual human beings rather than some kind of divinity: for example the consciousness of all of use rolled up together.
i don't know. go read your i.f. stone or something. gail collins's position isn't exactly that the impulse to reduce the scope of power of government is wrong; it's that it's incomprehensible. she has no idea how anyone could think that way. in the face of the real world, we can only call a position like hers an extreme, intransigent, irrational faith. well more power to her! just don't come back at me next week with some social-sciencey bullshit or refer to your own position as reality or evidence-based. it's exactly as evidence-based, say, as a member of the taliban's attitude toward the koran.
