Ever since Hegel or maybe Plato, statists have been telling a story about government in which government itself is the hero in an epic struggle. At least for Hegel, the state was the mechanism by which God worked out His will. For Marx, the state was an expression of cold immutable forces. For the socialists who followed, control of the state was a kind of MacGuffin but over time it became the hero itself.
When Obama talks about the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice, the physical manifestation of that pie-eyed treacle is always government. When liberals talk about the progress we’ve made as a society, the hero is always the state (and the heroic individuals who bent it to their will). It doesn’t matter that the market, non-state institutions, and heroic individuals tend to solve most of the problems in life; the government is always shoe-horned in as the indispensable author of beneficence.
Of course, the often unstated heroes are the people who put their faith in government. When Obama says, “Government is us,” what he’s really saying is that we can be heroic on the cheap by letting the government do what liberals want. That’s the real moral of their story. And conservatives need to get better at telling a better one.
Jonah Goldberg, “The Goldberg File”, 2015-09-11.
May 18, 2017
QotD: The state as “hero”
Filed under: Government, Politics, Quotations — Tags: Morality, Progressives, Socialism — Nicholas @ 01:00
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