{"id":28392,"date":"2015-10-09T01:00:12","date_gmt":"2015-10-09T05:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28392"},"modified":"2017-11-02T12:00:27","modified_gmt":"2017-11-02T16:00:27","slug":"qotd-populism-and-the-nanny-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/10\/09\/qotd-populism-and-the-nanny-state\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Populism and the Nanny State"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cDemocracy,\u201d or populism, has always delivered the Nanny State \u2014 which to my understanding is something more than a centralized bureaucracy. The Communists tried to deliver it by force, but politicians in our parliamentary free markets advance it by appealing to the lowest common denominator. The two systems \u2014 falsely contrasted \u201csocialist\u201d and \u201cfree market\u201d ideologies \u2014 are animated by the same Enlightenment ideals. Both claim to speak for the mute and anonymous \u201clittle man\u201d: to stuff him with material goods, and inflate him with rhetorical gases. Both play, directly and indirectly, on the envy in that little man, and his resentment of his betters. Both are thus effectively in opposition to the natural hierarchical ordering of society (which made and would make most politics unnecessary). Both promise, as a matter of course, what the serpent offered to Eve and Adam: the fruit that will make the little men \u201clike gods.\u201d<\/p>\n

The purpose behind this is not to build the bureaucracy, as an end in itself, but bureaucracy as the means towards moral debilitation. The excellence of bureaucracy, from the diabolical point of view, is that it reliably punishes the good, and rewards bad behaviour. Its weakness remains an inability to predict that human behaviour, including sudden manifestations of the \u201chostile inflexibility\u201d mentioned in my last post.<\/p>\n

For there is in nature something besides the original sin that felled our first parents, and has been the trickster of history ever since. There is also a positive, which I\u2019m inclined to call \u201chuman decency,\u201d or in its most extreme and inflexible form, Love. This cuts across all diabolical intentions, and in moments of grace even faces them down. It should be said that the free market approach to moral debilitation leaves rather more scope to this human decency, though it tends to draw the line at Love. Violent tyranny leaves no scope at all, but as a consequence of plugging every vent, triggers the response of pent-up forces. At some point, the signal from a fracture spreads, and in a kind of earthquake, Berlin Walls come down. The genius of the rival consumer democracy is that it releases the pressure, one riot at a time.<\/p>\n

But democracies, too, are fated \u2014 like every material aspiration on this earth, to die and leave no traces. When they deny the immortal dimension of man, the unchanging reality of creature and Creator, they become dry husks. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and in every direction the dry husks are scattered away. Only by God is the living implanted, and only on God\u2019s terms will it grow. That jealous God, who will have no other gods before Him; against Whom we have, in truth, opposed our little \u201cdemocratic\u201d pie-in-the-sky.<\/p>\n

David Warren, “Ottawa in the news”, Essays in Idleness<\/em><\/a>, 2014-10-23.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cDemocracy,\u201d or populism, has always delivered the Nanny State \u2014 which to my understanding is something more than a centralized bureaucracy. The Communists tried to deliver it by force, but politicians in our parliamentary free markets advance it by appealing to the lowest common denominator. The two systems \u2014 falsely contrasted \u201csocialist\u201d and \u201cfree market\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,84,53,41],"tags":[766,322,1171,76],"class_list":["post-28392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-government","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-democracy","tag-nannystate","tag-populism","tag-socialism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7nW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28392"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28393,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28392\/revisions\/28393"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}