From the article:
The original noble lie, in Plato’s Republic, was an attempt to solve a fundamental political problem: inducing men, who are strongly inclined to advance their own interests, to sacrifice those interests for the sake of their country. The particular dilemma Socrates addresses is that cities need fierce guardians to protect them from foreign enemies, but are then left with no one to protect them from the guardians. His noble lie addresses that conundrum by convincing guardians that their own interests and the well-being of the city are one and the same. Specifically, if the guardians are tricked into thinking they were born of the earth they protect, they’ll regard the homeland as their mother and all its citizens as their brothers, and will never wish to abuse those they defend.
Classical liberalism (think John Locke, not John Rawls) offered a different way to reconcile individual interest and political duty. Self-interest, rightly understood and pursued, was the public interest. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations. We can reduce and ultimately eliminate the discord within and between nations by inducing people to focus on commerce and industry, which can make everyone who plays that positive-sum game better off. “He that encloses land, and has a greater plenty of the conveniences of life from ten acres than he could have from a hundred left to nature,” according to Locke’s Second Treatise, “may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind.”
Modern, Rawlsian liberalism is distinctly uncomfortable with this Lockean solution. Even though New Deal–era dreams about a centrally planned economy have been abandoned, liberals refuse to accept that a decent society can rest on the alchemy that purports to turn private interests into the public interest. Franklin Roosevelt hailed Irish and Hibernian societies around the country on St. Patrick’s Day in 1937 for their fealty to the motto “Not for ourselves, but for others.” That spirit, he said, should animate not just charity but private and public life, given that “selfishness is without doubt the greatest danger that confronts our beloved country today.” Similarly, Barack Obama’s equation of common purposes with higher ones signals that private purposes are inherently low. Progress, moving from the lower to the higher, consists of claiming successive arenas of life that have been private in the name of what should be public.
This project is well suited — to Europe. As Jonah Goldberg once wrote, Sweden’s cradle-to-grave welfare state “succeeds as much as it does because it governs Swedes.” Centuries of primacy by central authority have disposed Europeans to rely on government dispensations, and to defer to its decisions about who gets what, when, and how. American liberals see their work as a heroic struggle — both noble and arduous — because, in the words of The New Republic’s John Judis, “since the country’s founding, Americans have always had an abiding distrust of the federal government.” There have been occasional breakthroughs — in the 1930s and, more briefly, the 1960s and after Obama’s election in 2008 — but the default setting is the public’s robust skepticism of government.
Hence, the noble lie. Liberals deplore but cannot disregard a fundamental political reality: Americans don’t know or want what’s good for them. So many people suffer from correctable failings, Michelle Obama told campaign audiences in 2008, because our country is “just downright mean.” If the selfish, shortsighted voters are to be brought around to embrace the only remedy, the liberal agenda, liberal polemicists need to portray its benefits in maximal terms while insisting its costs are minimal or even negative. The only “price” people will pay is to enjoy more and more benefits. In order to get Americans to institute — little by little, but ultimately in its entirety — a Scandinavian safety net, one must assure them every step of the way that its benefits won’t require anything resembling Scandinavian taxes or regulations.
Source: William Voegeli, “Bait-and-Switch
Liberalism: Obamacare and the Politics of Deception,” National Review Online,
March 6, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment