The all-pervasive state “does not tyrannize, it gets in the way.” It “enervates,” but nicely, gradually, so that after a while you don’t even notice ...

But once in a while even the mellowest hippie emerges from the stupor. In 1969, George Harrison of the Beatles, in the course of a wide-ranging ramble, briefly detoured out of the Hare Krishna chants into some remarks about the Monopolies Commission (the British equivalent of the U.S. government’s Antitrust Division):

These days America’s government is doing a lot of monopolizing. If it were a private company such as Kodak (to use George Harrison’s quaint example), it would be attracting anti-trust suits. By 2008, the governmentsponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had a piece of over half the mortgages issued in the United States.² As a result, a government-mandated form of pseudo-ownership came close to collapsing the world economy. Which the politicians then, naturally, blamed on capitalist greed. Fresh from their success in undermining the property market, the government went on to seek a monopoly in college loans, plus control of the automobile industry and health care.

In his dissenting opinion on United States vs. Columbia Steel Co. (1948), Justice William Douglas wrote:

These days, the Number One example of the Curse of Bigness is government. It doesn’t just create “gross inequalities” against existing or putative competitors, it passes laws and drives them out, as it’s done to everything from genuinely private health-care arrangements to non-state-licensed kids’ lemonade stands. In Justice Marshall’s words, it’s a “social menace” because of its “control of prices.”

How does it control them? Michael Fleischer, the owner of a small company in New Jersey, explained to readers of the Wall Street Journal that in order to put $44,000 in his employee’s pocket and give her an additional $12,000 worth of benefits he has to pay $74,000: Big Government imposes a 30 percent surcharge on the cost of providing employment to Sally.⁴ It “controls the price” of hiring Sally, and it massively distorts it. Which is one reason the unemployment rate is stuck where it is.

How else does it control prices? In 2009, something called the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia decided that studios offering yoga teacher instruction had to be “certified.”⁵ So what else is new? Everything’s certified these days. Why not yoga? It’s just a $2,500 certification fee, plus annual charges of at least $500, plus state audits, plus a ton of paperwork. But don’t worry, with a bit of practice, you can multitask and fill in all the forms in the lotus position. In the Fifties, one in twenty members of the workforce needed government permission in order to do his job.⁶ Today, it’s one in three. So Big Government “controls the price” of your yoga lesson. Look on it as a twofer: all the purifying benefits of yoga, now with the dead weights of Big Government.

Government today has a monopoly of monopoly. If you were to update the board game of the same name to reflect reality, every square you land on would require you to pay a fee to government before you can do anything—occupational license, commercial-use permit, processing fee for a license to permit you to collect sales tax. You’d go straight to jail without passing “Go” for putting up a yoga studio on Atlantic Avenue and being delinquent in your meditation-accreditation application, but the government would let you plea-bargain it down to a $3,000 fine. If you land on “Go,” you’d have to pass a “Go” impact-study inspection before being allowed to go.

There’s your Curse of Bigness, and the only one beyond the jurisdiction of the Antitrust Division.

Alas, the monopolizers don’t see it as a curse. Before he became Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner (by his own admission) failed to pay the United States Treasury the taxes he owed because he couldn’t follow the yes/no prompts of elementary TurboTax software. Undaunted, by early 2009, he and President Obama, two men with no business management experience whatsoever, who have never created a nickel of wealth between them, were “managing” more money than any individuals anywhere on the planet have ever done. Fans of Big Government take it for granted that Obama, Geithner, and a handful of other guys can “run” the financial sector, and the auto industry, and the insurance industry, and the property market, and health care, and even the very climate of the planet. The Barackracy assume that a few clever people in Washington can direct trillions of dollars more productively than the companies and individuals from whom they confiscated it. There are many people who can run businesses worth a million dollars. The ability to run a billion-dollar corporation is the province of very few individuals. The skill-set required to run a multi-trillion-dollar enterprise is unknown to human history.

In Justice Marshall’s words:

You can see where power lies in the very landscape: go to a steel town six decades after Marshall’s warning. The burg’s shot to hell. The handsome Victorian homes on the tree-lined avenues are worn and crumbling, with cracked clapboards and sagging porches, and cheaply partitioned into low-rent apartments. The railroad halts that sent the products of American industry across the nation and around the world are dead, their depots converted into laundromats and pizza joints or, worse, “community centers,” with the track removed and its weed-strewn path redesignated as a “heritage trail.” Where do wealth and power gravitate today? In 2009 Reuters reported:

As George Harrison warned, “the government’s monopolizing”: it has a monopoly of law, of licensing, of regulation, and when it abuses that monopoly then eventually you can’t move without encountering government at every turn. Even before the Obama spendaholics got to work supersizing the state, all levels of government, federal to local, were already sucking up over 40 cents of every dollar American workers generate.¹⁰ (European nations were able to go beyond even that dismal figure only because the United States has relieved them of the responsibility for their own defense.) The assumed rationale for an ever more intrusive superstate is that, thanks to technology and globalization, the world is far more complex and interconnected than in the days when hardscrabble farmers in New England townships could be trusted to run their own affairs. There is little objective evidence to support this argument, but it conveniently bolsters the political class’s belief in its own indispensability. Willie Whitelaw, the genial old buffer who served as Margaret Thatcher’s deputy for many years, once accused the Labour Party of going around Britain stirring up apathy. Viscount Whitelaw’s apparent paradox is, in fact, a shrewd political insight, and all the sharper for being accidental. Big Government depends on going around the country stirring up apathy—creating the sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting headache it’s easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that only government can deal with them.

Take health care. Through all the interminable health-care “debates” of Obama’s first year, did you read any of the proposed plans? Of course not. They’re huge and turgid and indigestible. Unless you’re a health-care lobbyist, a health-care think-tanker, a health-care correspondent, or some other fellow who’s paid directly or indirectly to plough through this stuff, why bother? None of the senators whose names are on the bills ever read ’em; why should you?

And you can understand why they drag on a bit. If you attempt to devise a health-care “plan” for over 300 million people, it’s bound to get a bit complicated. But a health-care plan for you, Mabel Scroggins of 27 Elm Street, didn’t used to be that complicated, did it? Let’s say you carelessly drop the ObamaCare bill on your foot and it breaks your toe. In the old days, you’d go to your doctor (or, indeed, have him come to you—that’s how insane it was back then), he’d patch you up, and you’d write him a check. That’s the way it was in most of the developed world within living memory.

When did it get too complicated to leave to individuals? “Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System—or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.

Ah, but government health care is not about health care, it’s about government. That’s why the Democrats spent the first year of a brutal recession trying to ram ObamaCare down the throats of a nation that didn’t want it. Because the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make small government all but impossible ever again. In most of the rest of the western world, it’s led to a kind of two-party one-party state: right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless. All such “technocratic” societies slide left, into statism and stasis.

Many Americans are happy with the government monopoly. The monarchical urge persists even in a two-and-a-third-century-old republic. So, when the distant Sovereign from Barackingham Palace graciously confers an audience on his unworthy subjects, they are eager to petition him to make all the bad stuff go away. “I have an urgent need,” one lady beseeched King Barack at a “town hall meeting” in Fort Myers early in 2009. “We need a home, our own kitchen, our own bathroom.”¹¹

He took her name—Henrietta Hughes—and ordered his staff to meet with her. Hopefully, he didn’t insult her by dispatching some no-name deputy assistant secretary of whatever instead of flying in one of the bigtime tax-avoiding cabinet honchos to nationalize a Florida bank and convert one of its branches into a desirable family residence, with a swing set hanging where the drive-thru ATM used to be. The audience roared their gratitude. “Yes!” they yelped, and “Amen!” and even “Gracious God, thank you so much!”

As Bing Crosby said to Bob Hope in The Road to Utopia, “Leave your name with the girl, and we may get to you for some crowd noises.” That’s the citizen’s role on America’s road to Utopia: Leave your name with the girl and, after the background check, you may qualify for the crowd scenes.

Early in his term, President Obama called in some fellow smarties to test out some slogans. FDR had a “New Deal,” so Obama thought he’d wrap up his domestic innovations under the umbrella title of “New Foundation.” The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin cautioned against it. “New Foundation,” she said, sounds like a lady’s girdle.¹² Actually, it’s more like a whalebone corset. When the American citizen climbs into the “New Foundation,” the stays get cranked tighter and tighter, but incrementally—so you barely feel it, till you realize the bottom’s dropped out, and you’re coughing up blood, and they’re still cranking.

FDR was the first American president to pass off Big Government as technocracy. He had a so-called “Brains Trust.” As with so many pious liberal concepts, the term started as a throwaway joke. Back in the trust-busting days of the 1890s, a wag at The Daily Star of Marion, Ohio, mused: “Since everything else is tending to trusts, why not a brain trust ... ? Our various and sundry supplies of gray matter may as well be controlled by a central syndicate.”¹³

That’s how America’s ruling class now regards itself: a central syndicate of gray matter. Which brings us back to George Harrison and the Monopolies Commission. The Big Government “brains trust” is a trust like any other: it exists to monopolize, to prevent free trade, to rig the market. Specifically, it exists to enforce a monopoly of ideas, and squash all alternatives. You’ll recall that, during the 2008 primary season, Barack Obama was revealed, at a private fundraiser in San Francisco, to have belittled his own party’s voters in rural Pennsylvania as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”¹⁴ He subsequently “apologized” by explaining that “I said something everybody knows is true.”¹⁵

“Everybody”? Well, maybe at a swank Dem fundraiser in California—and, if that’s not “everybody,” who is? This was an even more revealing remark than the original bitter-clingers crack. It deserves to be as celebrated as the famous response to the 1972 election results by a bewildered Pauline Kael, doyenne of the New Yorker, that nobody she knew voted for Nixon. Just as “everybody” knows “we can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees,”¹⁶ so nobody we know voted for Nixon and everybody we know agrees that those crackers are embittered fundamentalist gun-nut bigots. Oh, c’mon, I said something everybody knows is true.

“Everybody” knows this stuff, especially if he reads the New York Times or listens to National Public Radio. “Everybody” knows that raising taxes is responsible, and “everybody” knows that cutting spending is just crazy talk. “Everybody” knows that the governmentalization of health care—the annexation of one-sixth of the economy, the equivalent of the U.S. taking over the entire British or French economy, or the Indian economy twice over—“everybody” knows that that’s sober, prudent, technocratic, reasonable. And “everybody” knows that wanting to repeal ObamaCare is extremist, radical, dangerous. “Everybody” knows that serious proposals to address a looming shortfall in obligations of tens of trillions of dollars puts you in wide-eyed nut territory, just as “everybody” knows that massively increasing government spending is a moderate, centrist approach to stimulating the economy. Why, it’s in the Washington Post! As the paper reported, after yet another anemic quarter:

Who are these everybodies who know instinctively what’s true and what isn’t? The idea of a technocracy—a “central syndicate of gray matter”—is vital to Big Government’s sense of itself. It’s not about tired outmoded concepts of left or right, it’s about “smart solutions” from smart guys—starting with the president. “He’s probably the smartest guy ever to become president,” said Michael Beschloss the day after Obama’s election.¹⁸

Really? Other than demonstrate a remarkably focused talent for selfpromotion, what has he ever done? Even as a legendary thinker, what original thought has he ever expressed in his entire life? And yet he’s “probably the smartest guy ever to become president” says Beschloss—and he’s a presidential historian so he should know, ’cause he’s a smart guy, too.

Lending a hand, another smart guy, the New York Times’ house conservative David Brooks, cooed over the credentialed-to-the-hilt smarts of the incoming administration: “If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.”¹⁹

He’s right. Over a quarter of Obama’s political appointees had ties to Harvard; over 90 percent had “advanced degrees.”²⁰ And yet we’re screwed anyway, with or without the Harvard-Yale game. If the smart guys are so smart, how come we’re broke? How come those Americans who aren’t tenured New York Times columnists or ex-legislators parlaying their Rolodexes into lucrative but undemanding “consultancies” or cozy “private-sector” sinecures as Executive Vice-President for Government Relations, are going to end their days significantly poorer? And how come those European social democracies that blazed the trail to Big Government are already poorer, and in several cases insolvent?

Unlike less sophisticated creeds, the statist ideology denies it’s any such thing. Why, they’re way beyond that: just as the political class are merely technocrats, so our educators are not leftist ideologues but impartial scholars, and the media establishment are objective reporters who would never dream of imposing their own biases even if they had any. Because, if you accept the idea that your worldview is merely that—a view—it implicitly acknowledges there are other views, against which yours should be tested. Far easier to pronounce your side of the table the objective truth, and therefore any opposing argument is not a disagreement about policy or philosophy or economics, but merely evidence of Nazism, racism, or mental retardation. Contemplating a hostile electorate on the eve of the 2010 election, John Kerry bemoaned the ignorance of the voters: “Truth and facts and science don’t seem to weigh in,” he sighed.²¹

Senator Kerry is so wedded to “truth” and “facts” that, like his fellow Massachusetts patrician Ted Kennedy, he spent the Bush years disseminating a fake Thomas Jefferson quote (“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism”). ²² Barack Obama is so smart he had a fake Martin Luther King quote sewn onto the Oval Office carpet (“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”).²³ Barbra Streisand is so smart she sonorously declaimed to a Democratic Party national gala a fake Shakespeare quote she insisted was from Julius Caesar (“Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor...”²⁴—poor Will must have been having an off day). Hundreds of leftie websites are so smart that, after the 2011 shootings in Tucson, they all blamed it on Sarah Palin by using the same fake Sinclair Lewis quote from It Can’t Happen Here (“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross”—er, no, as it happens that’s not in It Can’t Happen Here or any other Sinclair Lewis novel).²⁵ But why quibble over the veracity of mere sentences? Liberals are so smart they teach a fake book in college (I, Rigoberta Menchu).

In a culture so convinced of its truth, facts, science, and smarts, even the Cliffs Notes are too much like hard work. As Shakespeare said to Sinclair Lewis at a Friars’ Club roast for Thomas Jefferson, when conformity comes to America, it will be wrapped in torpor and bent in the arc of portentous banality. The United States has not just a ruling class, but a ruling monoculture. Its “truth” and “facts” and “science” permeate not just government but the culture, the media, the institutions in which we educate our children, the language of public discourse, the very societal air we breathe. That’s the problem, and just pulling the lever for a guy with an R after his name every other November isn’t going to fix it. If Hollywood’s liberal, if the newspapers are liberal, if the pop stars are liberal, if the grade schools are liberal, if the very language is liberal to the point where all the nice words have been co-opted as a painless liberal sedative, a Republican legislature isn’t going to be a shining city on a hill so much as one of those atolls in the Maldives being incrementally swallowed by Al Gore’s allegedly rising sea levels.

In such a world, the Conformicrats think of themselves as a meritocracy, a term coined by the sociologist Michael Young in 1958 for a satirical fantasy contemplating the state of Britain in the year 2032.²⁶ And, as with “brains trust,” a droll jest got taken up by humorless lefties for real. By the time Tony Blair started bandying the word ad nauseam as a description of the bright new talents running the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century, Lord Young felt obliged to object. Six decades earlier, he had written the party manifesto that swept the Labour Party to power in 1945, and he reminded the Blairite generation of two of the most powerful members of that government: Ernie Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, and Herbert Morrison, Lord President of the Council (and deputy prime minister). Morrison had left school at fourteen and become an errand boy, Bevin at eleven to work as a farmhand. Against considerable odds, they rose to become two of the most powerful men in the land. There were no such figures in Tony Blair’s “meritocratic” cabinet—nor in Barack Obama’s. But there used to be, even in the Oval Office.

Yet today, whene’er such a person heaves on the horizon, the so-called meritocrats recoil in horror. Remember the early sneers at Sarah Palin? Not for her policy positions or her track record as governor but for her life, where she came from, where she went to, her frightful no-name schools: My dear, who goes to North Idaho College? Or Matanuska-Susitna College, wherever and whatever that is. “Celebrate diversity”? Well, yes, but good grief, there are limits ...

Imagine what the new Condescendi would have made of candidates from Allegheny College (William McKinley, for one term), or, despite its name, Clinton Liberal Academy (Grover Cleveland, but he left to support his family). Why, Truman didn’t even have a degree! And Van Buren left school at fourteen! And Lincoln only had eighteen months of formal education! And Zachary Taylor never went to school at all! Since the departure of Ronald Reagan (Eureka College, Illinois), America, for the first time in its history, has lived under continuous rule by Ivy League—less a two-party than a two-school system: Yale (Bush I), Yale Law (Clinton), Harvard Business (Bush II), Harvard Law (Obama). In an America ever less educated but ever more credentialed, who wants to take a flyer on autodidacts like Truman or Lincoln? And, even if you went to the right schools and got higher scores than John Kerry, as Bush Jr. did, the slightest departure from the assumptions of the conformocracy will earn you a zillion “SOMEWHERE IN TEXAS A VILLAGE IS MISSING ITS IDIOT” stickers.²⁷

Our new elite have more refined sensibilities than the old aristocracy: just as dowager duchesses would sniff that so-and-so was “in trade,” so today’s rulers have an antipathy to doers in general. How could Sarah Palin’s executive experience running a state, a town, and a commercial fishing operation compare to all that experience Barack Obama had in sitting around thinking great thoughts? In forming his war cabinet, Winston Churchill said that he didn’t want to fill it up with “mere advisors at large with nothing to do but think and talk.”²⁸ But Obama sent the Oval Office bust of Sir Winston back to the British, and now we have government by men who’ve done nothing but “think and talk.”²⁹ There was less private-sector business experience in Obama’s cabinet than in any administration going back a century.³⁰

If you sit around “thinking and talking,” the humdrum responsibilities of government are bound to seem drearily earthbound. Hence, the political class’ preference for ersatz crises, and the now routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it’s President Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans³¹ or the Prince of Wales saying we only have ninety-six months left to save the planet.³² Time magazine ran a fawning cover story on Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, and Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York: “The New Action Heroes.”³³ So what action were they taking? Why, Bloomberg was “opening a climate summit” and “talking about saving the planet.” All of it, including the bits west of the Holland Tunnel. And Schwarzenegger was “talking about eliminating disease.” All of them. “I look forward to curing all these terrible illnesses,” he announced.

As Madame Cornuel observed, no man is a hero to his valet. But fortunately it’s a lot easier to be a hero to your typist, especially when it’s Time’s Michael Grunwald. These action heroes are “doing big things.” Bloomberg, cooed Grunwald, “enacted America’s most draconian smoking ban and the first big-city trans-fat ban.”

Wow!

Back in the real world, a couple days after Christmas 2010, a snow storm descended on New York, and the action-hero mayor, relentless in his pursuit of trans-fats, was unable, for more than three days, to fulfill as basic a municipal responsibility as clearing the streets.³⁴ His Big Nanny administration can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger, but he can’t regulate it on to Seventh Avenue. Perhaps, if New Yorkers had appeared to be enjoying the snow by engaging in unregulated sledding or snowballing without safety helmets, Nanny Bloomberg could have scraped the boulevards bare in nothing flat. But, lacking that incentive, he let it sit there.

In Governor Schwarzenegger’s state, over one-third of the patients in Los Angeles County hospitals are illegal immigrants, and they’ve overwhelmed the system: dozens of emergency rooms in the state have closed after degenerating into a de facto Mexican health-care network.³⁵ If you’re a legal resident of the state of California, your health system is worse than it was a decade ago and will be worse still in a decade’s time. Fortunately, by then your now retired action-hero governor will have cured “all these terrible illnesses” and there will be no need for California’s last seven hospitals.

The illegal immigration question is an interesting test of government in action, at least when it comes to core responsibilities like defense of the nation. Enforcing the southern border? Too porous. Can’t be done, old boy. Cloud-cuckoo stuff. Pie-in-the-sky.

But changing the climate of the entire planet to some unspecified Edenic state? That we can do. Politicians incapable of clearing snow from city streets three days after a storm are nevertheless taken seriously when they claim to be able to change the very heavens—if only they can tax and regulate us enough.

On the eve of the 2010 Massachusetts election to fill what the Democrats insisted on referring to as “Ted Kennedy’s seat,” the president came to town to help out his candidate, a party hack named Martha Coakley. He had nothing to say, but he said it anyway. All those cool kids on his speechwriting team bogged him down in the usual leaden sludge. He went to the trouble of flying in to phone it in. The defining moment of his doomed attempt to prop up Ms. Coakley was his peculiar obsession with the emblem of Scott Brown’s campaign—the Republican candidate’s five-year-old pickup: “Forget the ads. Everybody can run slick ads,” President Obama, standing alongside John Kerry, told an audience of out-of-state students at a private school. “Forget the truck. Everybody can buy a truck.”³⁶

How they laughed! But what was striking was the thinking behind Obama’s line: that anyone can buy a truck for a slick ad, that Brown’s pickup was a prop—like the herd of cows Al Gore rented for a pastoral backdrop when he launched his first presidential campaign. Or the “Iron Chef” TV episode featuring delicious healthy recipes made with produce direct from Michelle Obama’s “kitchen garden”: the cameras filmed the various chefs meeting the First Lady and wandering with her ’midst the beds picking out choice organic delicacies from the White House crop, and then for the actual cooking the show sent out for stunt-double vegetables from a grocery back in New York.³⁷ Viewed from Obama’s perspective, why wouldn’t you assume the truck’s just part of the set? “In his world,” wrote the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, “everything is political and everything is about appearances.”³⁸

Howard Fineman, the Chief Political Correspondent of Newsweek, took it a step further. The truck wasn’t just any old prop but a very particular kind: “In some places, there are codes, there are images,” he told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. “You know, there are pickup trucks, you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another.”³⁹

Ah, yes. Scott Brown has over 200,000 miles on his odometer.⁴⁰ Man, he’s racked up a lot of coded racism on that rig. But that’s easy to do in notorious cross-burning KKK swamps like suburban Massachusetts.

Whenever aspiring authors ask me for advice, I usually tell ’em this: Don’t just write there, do something. Learn how to shingle a roof, or cultivate orchids, or raise sled dogs. Because if you don’t do anything, you wind up like Obama and Fineman—men for whom words are props and codes and metaphors but no longer expressive of anything real. America is becoming a bilingual society, divided between those who think a pickup is a rugged vehicle useful for transporting heavy-duty items from A to B, and those who think a pickup is coded racism. Unfortunately, the latter group forms most of the Democrat-media one-party state running the country. In perhaps the most explicit testament to the ever widening gulf between the metaphorical class and the simple-minded literalists they reign over, the liberal reaction to a murderous attack in Tucson by a deranged nut of no political affiliation was to blame it on the right’s “extreme rhetoric”—all this talk of “targeting” marginal seats and having your opponent in the “crosshairs.” Liberals can be expected to understand sophisticated concepts such as figures of speech, which is why they can safely name their Clinton campaign documentary The War Room and why Democratic Congressman Paul Kanjorski can recommend, re: the Republican Governor of Florida, “put him against the wall and shoot him.”⁴¹ Liberals exist in a world of metaphor, so it would be unlikely for them ever to rouse themselves to act on their rhetorical flourishes. But simple, embittered red-state types are too stupid to be entrusted with such potentially lethal weapons as literary devices.

Obama himself is not about “doing.” Why would you expect him to be able to “do” anything? What has he ever “done” other than publish books about himself? That was the story of his life: Wow! Look at this guy! Wouldn’t it be great to have him... as Harvard Law Review editor, as community organizer, as state representative, as state senator, as United States senator. He was wafted ever upwards, staying just long enough in each “job” to get another notch on the escutcheon, but never long enough to leave any trace—until a freak combination of circumstances (war weariness, financial meltdown, divisive incumbent, inept opponent, the chance to cast a history-making vote) put Obama in line for the ultimate waft. If only Hogarth had been on hand to record a very contemporary Fake’s Progress. No rail-splitting, like Lincoln. No farm work, like Coolidge. No swimming-pool lifeguard duty, like Reagan. Upward he wafted without breaking a sweat, except perhaps when briefly blocked on his whiney Valley Girl autobiography—as who wouldn’t be blocked? It’s tough to write an autobiography when you haven’t done anything.

The new “meritocratic” elite, wrote Michael Young just before his death, “can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism.”⁴² As Young had foreseen in his original essay, a cult of (pseudo-)meritocracy absolves the ruling class from guilt. They assume not, as princes of old did, that they were destined to rule, but that they deserve to. Which is wonderfully liberating. They “actually believe they have morality on their side,” said Young of Britain’s Blairites. The bigger government gets, the more transformative, the more intrusive, the louder it proclaims its moral purity/virtue. Thus, as Peter Berkowitz puts it, the ostensibly impartial concept of “fairness” is now no more or less than “the name progressives have given their chief policy goals.”⁴³ This is politics as a form of narcissism: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? In the name of “fairness,” they grant privileges to preferred identity groups over others—that is, they treat certain people unfairly. Yet, if you oppose “fairness,” you must be on the unfair side.

And who wants to find themselves hanging with that crowd? So, in government, in the dinosaur media, in the faculty lounge, in the community-organizing community, in the boardrooms of connected corporations, America’s rulers are conformicrats. They have the same opinions, the same tastes, the same vocabulary. They think the same, and they expect you to do likewise. As Michael Tomasky, former editor of the lefty mag The American Prospect, explained it: “At bottom, today’s Democrats from [Senator Max] Baucus to [Congresswoman Maxine] Waters are united in only two beliefs, and they demand that American citizens believe in only two things: diversity and rights.”⁴⁴

By “rights,” they mean not “negative rights” as understood by the U.S. Constitution—the right to be left alone by the government in respect of your speech, your guns, etc—but “rights” to stuff, granted by the government, distributed by the government, licensed by the government, rationed by the government, but paid for by you. In the Orwellian language of Big Government, “rights” are no longer individual liberties that restrain the state but state power that restrains you. And by “diversity,” they mean the state ideology of stultifying homogeneity. Hence, the peculiar spectacle of American “artists” from George Clooney to Stephen Sondheim to Green Day congratulating themselves on their truth-telling courage by producing films, plays, CDs, TV shows, and novels with which everyone they know is in full agreement. In such a world, to disagree with the liberal agenda is not so much an act of political dissent but, worse, a ghastly social faux pas. To take Mr. Tomasky’s own profession, the average American newsroom ostentatiously recruits for diversity of race, sex, sexual orientation, and every other diversity except the only one that matters—diversity of ideas. To achieve its own propaganda goals, the Soviet politburo had to smash printing presses and jam radio signals. America’s nomenklatura achieved the same level of dreary conformity just by leaving it to ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Which is why, as the first industry to prostrate itself before the deeply unAmerican idea of enforced uniformity, America’s moribund monodailies are on life support and openly auditioning for a government bailout.

The advantage of life in the self-flattering conformicrat cocoon is that you never have to address anybody’s arguments. All those tea parties and town halls with ordinary citizens protesting governmentalized health care? Oh, don’t be so naïve. As the New York Times assured its readers, “The Rage Is Not About Health Care.”⁴⁵ “It’s merely a handy excuse,” Frank Rich explained. “The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964....”

Ah, in the Democratic Party it’s always 1964 and Selma, Alabama. Except that now it’s not the Democrats who are the redneck racists, it’s you—yes, you. As Frank Rich explains:

You may think you object to ObamaCare because it will lead to a massive shortage of primary care physicians as has already happened in Massachusetts, ⁴⁶ but it’s really because you’d like to slap around that Nancy Pelosi the way Bogey does Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon ’cause that’s the only language these lippy broads understand.

You may think you object to ObamaCare because the Federal Government forcing you to make health-care arrangements that meet the approval of the state commissars is unconstitutional, but it’s really because you think that that wise Latina on the Supreme Court should be turning down your hotel bed and leaving a complimentary hazelnut truffle on your pillow.⁴⁷

You may think you object to ObamaCare because its absurd bureaucratic insistence that you need a doctor’s prescription in order to pay for your Tylenol from a health savings account will waste untold hours of doctors’, patients’, and pharmacists’ time, but it’s really because Barney Frank reminds you that you’ve always been slightly confused about your own sexuality and at the back of the desk drawer you’ve still got the phone number of that guy who wrote back when you put the “Bi-Curious Male Seeks Similar” ad in the classifieds, and to be honest when Congressman Frank gets butch and beats up on those bank executives it kinda turns you on.

I can’t speak for the rest of you racists, sexists, and homophobes, but I’ve opposed government health care in Canada, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, and anywhere else I’ve been on the receiving end of it. And in Britain no blacks, women, or gays were involved in its introduction, just pasty-faced white blokes. In Canada, it was just pasty-faced white blokes with a pronounced hint of maple. In Bulgaria, it was swarthy Slavic blokes with impressively hirsute monobrows. Okay, that is racist, but only mildly so. And in any case when it comes to Slavic monobrows I prefer the women. Okay, that’s racist and sexist, so I’ll quit while I’m behind. But the point is, throughout most of the western world, government health care has been the creation of white males of drearily conventional orientation.

Yet, if you write for the New York Times or teach race and gender studies at American colleges for long enough, it seems entirely reasonable to conclude that a difference of opinion over health-care policy is being driven by nostalgia for segregated lunch counters. Invited by National Public Radio to expound on the use of “racial code words” in “the current opposition to health care reform,” Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton, informed her listeners that “language of personal responsibility is often a code language used against poor and minority communities.”⁴⁸

“Personal responsibility” is racial code language? Phew, thank goodness America is belatedly joining Europe in all but abolishing the concept.

“Code language” is code language for “total bollocks.” “Code word” is a code word for “I’m inventing what you really meant to say because the actual quote doesn’t quite do the job for me.” “Small government”? Racist code words! “Non-confiscatory taxes”? Likewise. “Individual liberty”? Don’t even go there! With interpreters like Professor Harris-Lacewell on the prowl, I’m confident 95 percent of Webster’s will eventually be ruled “code language.”

Faced with public discontent about the statist agenda, the Condescendi look out the window at the unlovely mob in their “Don’t tread on me” T-shirts and sneer, “The peasants are revolting.”You oppose illegal immigration? You’re a xenophobe. Gay marriage? Homophobe. The Ground Zero mosque? Islamophobe. If that’s the choice, I’d rather be damned as racist and sexist. The evolution from -isms to phobias is part of the medicalization of dissent: the Conformicrats simply declare your position a form of mental illness. After firing commentator Juan Williams for some insufficiently politically correct observations about Muslims, NPR exec Vivian Schiller suggested her longtime colleague needed to see a psychiatrist.⁴⁹ That’s the polite version of dismissing him as just another one of those “fucking Nascar retards,” the elegant formulation Eric Alterman (Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism) used on the in-house “JournoList” to describe those Americans who disagree with him and his fellow media professionals.⁵⁰ Juan Williams seems an unlikely Nascar retard. He is not only liberal but black. Had a conservative hinted that an eminent African-American Democrat had mental health issues, he’d be the one headed for the funny farm. But, of course, in briefly wandering off liberalism’s ideological plantation, Mr. Williams had behaved so irrationally that, as in the Soviet Union, only a medical condition could explain it. Don’t worry about it, Juan. Just let the men in white coats get the straps around you, and shoot the needle into your arm, and you’ll soon be feeling much better, and thinking just the same as everybody else.

On most of these issues, from illegal immigration to the Ground Zero mosque, the Conformicrats are losing the battle for public opinion by as much as 70/30. Yet even that isn’t enough to persuade them to mount an argument. So much liberal debate boils down to Ring Lardner’s great line: “‘Shut up,’ he explained.”

Fewer people know the line that precedes it (in Lardner’s story, The Young Immigrunts): a kid asking, “Are you lost, daddy?” The rulers think we’re kids, they’re the daddy, and it takes a village to raise a fuckin’ Nascar retard child. The ruled think we’re lost, and being driven farther and farther off the map.

But the disparagement of dissenters as racists, sexists, homophobes, and retards is not entirely an act of misdirection. It reflects the so-called technocracy’s priorities: for Big Government bent on social micromanagement, ideological enforcement takes priority over any other activity. When Hurricane Katrina swept in and devastated Louisiana and Mississippi, volunteer firemen—whoops, “firefighters”—from across the map headed south to help with disaster relief. FEMA dispatched them to ...

New Orleans?

Gulfport?

No, to Atlanta—for diversity and sexual-harassment training.⁵¹

Which most of them had already undergone back home. But you can’t be too careful: Heaven forbid that a waterlogged granny should be rescued by an insufficiently non-homophobic fireman.

FEMA is supposed to be the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not the Fairyland Equality Makework Agency. But so it goes. Government agencies created to demonstrate the laser-sharp problem-solving skills of the elite technocracy in the end mostly just enforce conformity with the state ideology. Thus, the “enhanced patdowns” of U.S. airport security are less about preventing terrorism than about preventing the acknowledgment of inconvenient truths at odds with the diversity cult. Contemporary Big Government is like a widget factory that no longer makes widgets but holds sensitivity training sessions all day long. And, if you’re a nonagenarian spinster at LaGuardia with a TSA agent’s paws roaming ’round your bloomers while the Yemeni madrassah alumnus sails through the express check-in, the involuntary sensitivity training isn’t all that sensitive.

If it were just Good King Barack and Henrietta Hughes, rulers and subjects, all would be well. But America still has a citizenry: the productive class—the ones whose labors have to fund both the swollen state bureaucracy and its dependents. It’s tough if you happen to fall into this third category. Most of the time, such as at that town hall meeting in Fort Myers, you’re not even part of the national conversation: you live in the Flownover Country. In 1945, Hugh MacLennan wrote a novel set in Montreal whose title came to sum up the relationship between the English and the French in Canada: Two Solitudes. They live in the same nation, sometimes in the same town, sometimes share the same workspace. But they inhabit different psychologies. In 2008, David Warren, a columnist with The Ottawa Citizen, argued that the concept has headed south:

Increasingly, America’s divide is about the nature of the state itself—about the American idea. And in that case why go on sharing the same real estate? As someone once said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The Flownover Country’s champion ought, in theory, to be the Republican Party. But, even in less fractious times, this is a loveless marriage. Much of the GOP establishment is either seduced by the Conformicrats or terrified by them, to the point where they insist on allowing the liberals to set the parameters of the debate—on health care, immigration, education, Social Security—and then wonder why elections are always fought on the Democrats’ terms. If you let the left make the rules, the right winds up being represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches. If you want to get rave reviews for losing gracefully, that’s the way to go. If you want to prevent Big Government driving America off a cliff, it’s insufficient.

The Conformicrats need Flownover Country to fund them. It’s less clear why Flownover Country needs the Conformicrats—and a house divided against itself cannot stand without the guy who keeps up the mortgage payments.

According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009, 47 percent of U.S. households paid no federal income tax.⁵⁵ Obviously, many of them paid other kinds of taxes—state tax, property tax, cigarette tax. But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it’s national defense, or interest payments on the debt, or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don’t ask me why).⁵⁶ Furthermore, if you pay local tax but no federal income tax, you’re more easily seduced by the most malign of Big Government’s distortions: its insistence that more and more aspects of life have to be regulated by a centralized regime in Washington rather than by varieties of state, county, and municipal bodies. As a general principle, if you pay nothing for government, why would you want less of it? More specifically, if you pay nothing for federal government, why would the relentless centralization of American statism bother you?

In 2009, Ken Rogulski of WJR Detroit reported on a federal aid “giveaway” at the city’s Cobo Center:

By contrast, if you fall into the taxation category and you’re stuck with the tab for Obama’s stash, you’re not only paying for groups that get a better hearing in Washington, but ensuring that the socioeconomic conditions of the republic will trend, mercilessly, against you. The small business class—men and women in unglamorous lines of work that keep the Flownover Country going—are disfavored by the Conformicrats. They are occasionally acknowledged by our rulers with rhetorical flourishes—“tax cuts for working families”—but, on closer inspection, these “tax cuts” invariably mean not reductions in the rate of income seizure but a “tax credit” reimbursed from the seizure in return for living your life the way the government wants you to, and expanding the size of the dependent class.

United States income tax is becoming the twenty-first-century equivalent of the “jizya”—the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens. In return for funding the Caliphate, the infidels were permitted to carry on practicing their faith. Under the American jizya, in return for funding Big Government, the non-believers are permitted to carry on practicing their faith in capitalism, small business, economic activity, and the other primitive belief systems to which they cling so touchingly.

In the Islamic world, the infidel tax base eventually wised up. You can see it literally in the landscape in rural parts of the Balkans: Christian tradesmen got fed up paying the jizya and moved out of the towns up into remote hills far from the shakedown crowd. In less mountainous terrain where it’s harder to lie low, non-Muslims found it easier to convert. That’s partly what drove Muslim expansion. Once Araby had been secured for Islam, it was necessary to move on to the Levant, and to Persia, and to Central Asia and North Africa and India and Europe—in search of new infidels to mug. I’m not so invested in my analogy that I’m suggesting America’s Big Government shakedown racket will be forced to invade Canada and Scandinavia. For one thing, everywhere else got with the Big Government program well ahead of America and those on the receiving end long ago figured out all the angles: in the Stockholm suburb of Tensta, 20 percent of women in their late forties collect disability benefits.⁵⁸ In the United Kingdom, five million people—a tenth of the adult population—have not done a day’s work since the New Labour government took office in 1997.⁵⁹

America has a ways to go in catching up with those enlightened jurisdictions, but it’s heading there. As Congressman Paul Ryan pointed out, by 2004, 20 percent of U.S. households were getting about 75 percent of their income from the federal government.⁶⁰ As a matter of practical politics, how receptive would they be to a pitch for lower taxes, which they don’t pay, or for lower government spending, of which they are such fortunate beneficiaries? How receptive would another fifth of households, who receive about 40 percent of their income from the feds, be to such a pitch?

But for the productive class, the ongoing government shakedown leads to demoralization and disincentivization. In 2002, 61 percent of Americans believed their children would enjoy higher living standards. By 2009, that was down to 45 percent. This is a hole in America’s soul, and it’s growing bigger every day.⁶¹

In the Nineties, the “culture wars” were over “God, guns and gays.” The overreach of the statists has added a fourth G: Government itself is now a front in the culture war, and a battle of the most primal kind. Is the United States a republic of limited government with a presumption in favor of individual liberty? Or is it just like any other western nation in which a permanent political class knows what’s best for its subjects? In California, the people can pass a ballot proposition against gay marriage, but a single activist judge overrules them. In Arizona, the people’s representatives vote to uphold the people’s laws, but a pliant judge strikes them down at Washington’s behest. It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the Constitution unconstitutional.

Some schlub in Fresno might wonder why a gay judge who seemed a more militant advocate for gay marriage than the plaintiffs were didn’t recuse himself from the case. But that just shows how little they know: it’s the voters of California who should have recused themselves. Their bigotry makes them unqualified to pronounce on the subject. They should be grateful Judge Walker didn’t mandate re-education camp.

It is never a good idea to send the message, as the political class now does consistently, that there are no democratic means by which the people can restrain their rulers. As the (Democrat) pollster Pat Cadell pointed out, the logic of that is “pre- revolutionary.”⁶²

Once you’ve secured the other levers of power, elective politics becomes a kind of sham combat to distract from the real battlegrounds. There are degrees of dissembling: the presidential candidate running as a “fiscally responsible post-partisan healer” provides the cover for an agenda crafted by far more explicitly left-wing legislators, such as Pelosi and Frank. Behind the legislators are the judges, behind the judges the regulatory bureaucracy, and behind the bureaucracy the union muscle: left, lefter, leftest.

Of all the many marvelous Ronald Reagan lines, this is my favorite:

Today, in Reagan’s own country, we are atrophying into a government that has a nation.

In the eighteen months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, over seven million Americans lost their jobs, yet the number of federal bureaucrats earning $100,000 or more went up from 14 percent to 19 percent.⁶⁴ An economic downturn for you, but not for them. They’re upturn girls living in a downturn world. At the start of the “downturn,” the Department of Transportation had just one employee earning more than $170,000 per year. Eighteen months later, it had 1,690.⁶⁵ In the year after the passage of Obama’s “stimulus,” the private sector lost 2.5 million jobs, but the federal bureaucracy gained 416,000.⁶⁶ Even if one accepts the government’s ludicrous concept of “creating or saving” jobs, by its own figures four out of every five “created or saved” jobs were government jobs. “Stimulus” stimulates government, not the economy. It’s part of the remorseless governmentalization of American life.

What sort of jobs were “created or saved”? Well, the United States Bureau of the Public Debt is headquartered in Parkersburg, West Virginia—and it’s hiring! According to the Careers page of their website: “The Bureau of the Public Debt (BPD) is one of the best places to work in the federal government. When you work for BPD, you’re a part of one of the federal government’s most dynamic agencies.”⁶⁷

I’m sure. They’re committed to a working environment of “Information, Informality, Integrity, Inclusion & Individual Respect.” In the land of the blind, the five-I’d bureaucrat is king. Alas, no room on the motto for the sixth I (Insolvency). At some point in the near future, Big Government will have reached its state of theoretical perfection and all revenues will be going either to interest payments to China or to lavish pensions liabilities for retired officials of the Bureau of Public Debt.

When the subject of the leviathan comes up, the media and other statism groupies tend to say, “Oh, well, it’s easy to talk about cutting government spending, until you start looking at individual programs, most of which tend to be very popular.”

“Programs” is a sly word. Regardless of the merits of the “program,” it requires human beings to run it. And government humans cost more than private humans. In 2009, the average civilian employee of the United States government earned $81,258 in salary plus $41,791 in benefits. Total: $123,049.⁶⁸

The average American employed in the private sector earned $50,462 in salary plus $10,589 in benefits. Total: $61,051.⁶⁹

So the federal worker earns more than twice as much as the private sector worker. Plus he has greater job security: he’s harder to fire, or even to persuade to take a small pay cut.

Experts talk about the difficulty of restructuring entitlement programs, or of carving out a few billions in savings here and there. But here’s a thought experiment: imagine if federal workers made the same as the private workers who pay their salaries. Imagine if they had to get by on 61K instead of 123 grand.

Ah, but such fancies dwell purely in the Land of Imagination. In theory, Americans govern themselves through elected representatives. In practice, the political class are no longer the citizen-legislators of a self-governing republic but instead the plump, pampered Emirs of Incumbistan. Hawaii’s Daniel Inouye has been in Congress as long as the islands have been a state, which means he’s been in office longer than the world’s longest-running dictators-for-life. Lest comparisons with Colonel Gaddafi seem a little unkind, Inouye has been in Washington almost as long as the five monarchs of the Kamehameha dynasty ruled over a unified kingdom of Hawaii. If that’s what Hawaiians are looking for in a political system, why bother overthrowing Queen Lili’uokalani? John Dingell Jr. has been a Michigan congressman since 1955. For the twenty-two years before that, his constituents were represented by John Dingell Sr. Between the first Duke of Dingell and the second, the Dingell family has held the seat for a third of the republic’s history. If that’s what Michiganders are looking for in a political system, why not stick with the House of Lords?

The late Robert C. Byrd sat in the Senate for half-a-century while the world transformed, and strung along: a former Klan leader (“Exalted Cyclops”) and recruiter (“Kleagle”) who opposed civil rights, he ended his days as a hero to Moveon.org for opposing the war on terror. He doesn’t seem to have been a principled Klansman or a principled Moveon.orgiast. He simply moved on as required. You gotta know when to change the sheets. He did what was necessary to maintain himself in power. Everything in West Virginia apart from the Bureau of Public Debt and the Klan lodge is named after him. When he turned against the war in Afghanistan in 2002, I suggested that maybe if we agreed to rename the place Robert C. Byrdistan, he might see his way to staying onside for a couple more months. (I’m still in favor of that: his view of power was no less primitively tribal and venal than your average Pushtun village headman’s.) Apart from naming more public buildings after himself than your average Latin American caudillo would, what else did Byrd accomplish in his “public service”? What do Michiganders have to show for the Dingell dynasty’s four-fifths of a century in office? Opponents should simply put up graphs showing the debt when Inouye and the rest were elected, and what it is now.

Charlie Rangel has been there since 1970. Even his car has been there a long time. Apparently in Congress you’re not meant to keep a vehicle in the House parking garage for more than six weeks without moving it. Rangel parked his Mercedes in one of the most “highly coveted” spaces in 2003, put a tarp on it, and left it there for six years.⁷⁰ If only we could have done that with him and the rest of the legislative class. The chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means committee, Rangel was the man who wrote the nation’s tax laws yet did not consider himself bound by them. So, for example, he had a rental property in the Dominican Republic but did not declare the income he received from it. Good for him. Would you like to have a rental property in a foreign jurisdiction and keep all the dough to yourself? Too bad. If you were to do it, there wouldn’t be enough money to maintain our rulers in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. Rangel isn’t rich by congressional standards, but he is in the happy position of so many people one encounters in “public service” who rarely if ever have cause to write a personal check. After the congressman’s grotesque selfpitying ululations on the House floor for the injustice of being “censured” for his conduct, Kerry Picket of the Washington Times invited him to imagine what punishment the “average American citizen” would have received had he done what Rangel did. “Please,” the congressman told her. “I don’t deal in average American citizens.”⁷¹

If only. Pete Stark has been in the House of Representatives since 1973. For all those decades, he has sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States. What’s in there? Let Pete explain it. In 2010, running for his nineteenth term in Congress, Stark was asked about the constitutionality of ObamaCare. He replied: “I think there are very few constitutional limits that would prevent the federal government from rules that could affect your private life.”⁷²

His lady questioner wanted to be sure she’d understood: “Is your answer that they can do anything?”

Stark responded: “The federal government, yes, can do most anything in this country.”

He’s right. If the Commerce Clause can be stretched to require you to make arrangements for your health care that meet the approval of the national government, then the republic is dead.

What’s the very least that we’re entitled to expect of our legislators? That they know what they’re legislating. John Conyers has been in the House of Representatives since 1965. Like most representatives, he didn’t bother reading the 3,000-page health-care bill he voted for, because, as he said with disarming honesty, he wouldn’t understand it even if he did: “I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’” sighed Congressman Conyers. “What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”⁷³

Okay, so it would be unreasonable to expect a legislator to know what it is he’s actually legislating into law. He’s got wall-to-wall aides to do that for him. When you’re rejiggering more than one-sixth of the economy and incurring massive future debt, that’s the sort of minor task you can outsource to a flunkey. It would be churlish to direct readers to the video posted on the Internet of Representative Conyers finding time to peruse a copy of Playboy while on a commuter flight to Detroit.⁷⁴ Perhaps if the ObamaCare bill had had a centerfold of Kathleen Sebelius on page 1,872, or maybe a “Girls of the Health & Human Services Death Panel” pictorial ...

Two-thousand-page bills, unread and indeed unwritten at the time of passage, are the death of representative government. They also provide a clue as to why, in a country this large, national government should be minimal and constrained. Even if you doubled or trebled the size of the legislature, the Conyers plea would still hold: no individual can read these bills and understand what he’s voting on. That’s why the bulk of these responsibilities should be left to states and subsidiary jurisdictions, which can legislate on such matters at readable length and in comprehensible language.

But there’s a more basic objection: Conyers is correct. He doesn’t need to read the bill because he is no longer a maker of law. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is two thousand pages, there’s no equality: instead, there’s a hierarchy of privilege. One state is treated differently from another, out of raw political necessity. For ObamaCare, Nebraska got a “Cornhusker Kickback,” but there was no “Granite State Graft” for New Hampshire, because there was no political need for one. Some citizens (i.e., members of powerful unions and approved identity groups) are treated differently from other citizens (i.e., you). It’s not a law so much as a Forbes 500 List, a hit parade of who’s most plugged in to who matters in Washington, with Nebraska senators and UAW honchos at the top, and a loser like you way down at the bottom. And even then, as happened almost as soon as ObamaCare had passed, the un-level playing field had to be re-landscaped with additional hillocks and valleys containing opt-outs for McDonald’s, the United Federation of Teachers, and anyone else powerful enough to get past the Obama switchboard operator.⁷⁵ So Conyers has to worry only that his client groups have been taken care of: he doesn’t deal in average American citizens, as Charlie Rangel would say. Joe Average and all the rest can be left to the agency of this, the board of that, the commission of the other, manned by millions of bureaucrats whose role is to determine, arbitrarily but authoritatively, which of the multiple categories of Unequal-Before-the-Law Second-Class (or Third-Class, or Fourth-Class) Citizenship you happen to fall into.

The lifetime professional legislative class boasts of its “experience.” Experience of what? Of spending beyond not their means but ours. The Emirs of Incumbistan have presided over an explosion of government, an avalanche of debt, and the looting of America’s future. Robert C. Byrd named buildings after himself; Eddie Bernice Johnson handed out a third of Congressional Black Caucus college scholarships to her own grandchildren and the family of her senior aide;⁷⁶ Charlie Rangel fiddled his expenses while Rome burned through our money. Focused on their petty privileges, they were happy to sub-contract law-making to others. The Emirs corrupted not just themselves but the very idea of responsible government. And far from the ballot box, alternative sources of power arose.

Behind our left-wing legislators are lefter judges. In a country where every other institution has lost legitimacy, only our robed rulers still command widespread deference. So these days the left advances its causes more effectively through the courts than through elections, for the fairly obvious reason that very few people are dumb enough to vote for this stuff. The judiciary legislates fundamental issues—abortion, gay marriage, illegal immigration, health care—and thereby supplies electoral cover for Democrats. As Nancy Pelosi explained, “It is a decision of the Supreme Court. So this is almost as if God has spoken.”⁷⁷ So that’s that. Love to help you, says Nancy, take your point, but there’s nothing I can do.

That’s not how Abraham Lincoln saw it: “If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court... the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”⁷⁸

Which they have.

America is unique in this regard. In Europe, if the establishment wants to invent a new “right”—that is, yet another intrusion by government—it goes ahead and does so. If it happens to conflict with this year’s constitution, they rewrite it. But the United States is the only western nation in which the rulers invoke the Constitution for the purpose of overriding it.

What Judge Bolton in the Arizona immigration case and Judge Walker in the California marriage case share with Mayor Bloomberg’s observations on popular opposition to the Ground Zero mosque is a contempt for the people. Popular sovereignty may be fine in theory but not when the citizenry are so obviously in need of “re-education” by their betters. The alliance of political statists and judicial statists is moving us into a land beyond law—a land of apostasy trials. The Conformicrats have made a bet that the populace will willingly submit to subtle but pervasive forms of re-education camp. Over in England, London’s transportation department has a bureaucrat whose very title sums up our rulers’ general disposition toward us: Head of Behavior Change.

In 2008, when the Canadian Islamic Congress attempted to criminalize my writing north of the border by taking me to the “Human Rights” Commission, a number of outraged American readers wrote to me saying, “You need to start kicking up a fuss about this, Steyn, and then maybe Canadians will get mad and elect a conservative government that will end this nonsense.”

Made perfect sense. Except that Canada already had a Conservative government under a Conservative prime minister, and the very head of the “human rights” commission investigating me was herself the Conservative appointee of a Conservative minister of justice. Makes no difference. Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever expanding number of government jobs will be statists—sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, sometimes patrician noblesse oblige statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war western democracies is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: the people can elect “conservatives,” as from time to time the Germans and British have done, and the left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who for tuppenceha’penny would agree to go and take the chill off the toilet seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects were ready to stroll in and assume their rightful place. Republicans have gotten good at keeping the seat warm.

Thus, America in the twenty-first century—a supposedly “center-right” nation governed by a left-of-center political class, a lefter-of-center judiciary, a leftest-of-center bureaucracy, all of whom have been educated by a lefterooniest-of-all academy.

Liberalism, as the political scientist Theodore Lowi put it, “is hostile to law,” and has a preference for “policy without law.”⁷⁹ The law itself doesn’t really matter so much as the process it sets in motion—or, as Nancy Pelosi famously told the American people regarding health care, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.”⁸⁰ When Lowi was writing in the Seventies, he noted that both the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) were set up by a Congress that didn’t identify a single policy goal for these agencies and “provided no standards whatsoever” for their conduct. So they made it up as they went along.

Where do you go to vote out the CPSC or OSHA?

Or any of the rest of the unaccountable acronyms drowning America in alphabet soup. For more and more Americans, law has been supplanted by “regulation”—a governing set of rules not legislated by representatives accountable to the people, but invented by an activist bureaucracy, much of which is well to the left of either political party. As the newspapers blandly reported in 2010, the bureaucrats weren’t terribly bothered about whether Congress would pass a cap-and-trade mega-bill into law because, if fainthearted Dems lose their nerve, the EPA will just “raise” “standards” all by itself.⁸¹

Where do you go to vote out the EPA?

Congress stripped provisions for end-of-life counseling (the so-called “death panels”) out of the ObamaCare bill, but Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, put ’em back on her say so.⁸² And why shouldn’t she? As Philip Klein pointed out in the American Spectator, the new law contained 700 references to the Secretary “shall,” another 200 to the Secretary “may,” and 139 to the Secretary “determines.” So the Secretary may and shall determine pretty much anything she wants. Plucked at random:

Where do you go to vote out “the Secretary”?

And so “We the people” degenerates into “We the regulators, we the bureaucrats, we the permit-issuers, we the czars.” Dancing with the czars is unrepublican. “Ignorantia juris non excusat” is one of the oldest concepts of civilized society: ignorance of the law is no excuse. But today we’re all ignorant of the law, from John Conyers and the guys who make it down to li’l ol’ you on the receiving end. How can you not be? Under the hyper-regulatory state, any one of us is in breach of dozens of laws at any one time without being aware of it. In a New York deli, a bagel with cream cheese is subject to food-preparation tax, but a plain bagel with no filling is not.⁸⁴ Except that, if the clerk slices the plain bagel for you, the food-preparation tax applies. Just for that one knife cut. As a progressive caring society, New York has advanced from tax cuts to taxed cuts. Oh, and, if he doesn’t slice the plain bagel, but you opt to eat it in the deli, the food preparation tax also applies, even though no preparation was required for the food.

Got that? If you’ve got a deli, you better have, because New York is so broke they need their nine cents per sliced bagel and their bagel inspectors are cracking down. How does the song go? “If I can make it there/I’ll make it anywhere!” If you can make it there, you’re some kind of genius. To open a restaurant in NYC requires dealing with the conflicting demands of at least eleven municipal agencies, plus submitting to twenty-three city inspections, and applying for thirty different permits and certificates. Not including the state liquor license.⁸⁵ The city conceded that this could all get very complicated. So what did it do to help would-be restaurateurs? It set up a new bureaucratic body to help you negotiate your way through all the other bureaucratic bodies. Great! An Agency of Bureaucratic Expeditiousness! And, if that doesn’t work, they’ll set up an Agency of Bureaucratic Expeditiousness Regulation to keep it up to snuff.

In such a world, there is no “law”—in the sense of (a) you the citizen being found by (b) a jury of your peers to be in breach of (c) a statute passed by (d) your elected representatives. Instead, unknown, unnamed, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats determine transgressions, prosecute infractions, and levy fines for behavioral rules they themselves craft and which, thanks to the ever more tangled spaghetti of preferences, subsidies, entitlements, and incentives, apply to different citizens unequally. But tyranny is always whimsical. You may be lucky: you may not catch their eye—for a while. But perhaps your neighbor does, or the guy down the street. No trial, no jury, just a dogsbody in some office who pronounces that you’re guilty of an offense a colleague of his invented.

One morning, I strolled into my office in New Hampshire and noticed a letter on my assistant’s desk from the State of New York’s Bureau of Compliance informing us that we were in non-compliance with the Bureau of Compliance.

This was news to me. I don’t live in New York, I don’t own a business in New York, I don’t make anything in New York, I don’t sell anything in New York, I rarely visit New York except to fly in once in a while and catch a Broadway show (which I’ll now be doing on its out-of-town tryout in New Haven). Nevertheless, the State of New York had notified me that I was in non-compliance with the Bureau of Compliance, and apparently the fine for that is $14,000.

“Fourteen grand?” I roared to my lawyer. “On principle, I’d rather go to jail and be gang-raped by whichever bunch of convicted Albany legislators I have the misfortune to be sharing a cell with.”

“I take it then you don’t want to settle?”

No, sir. I’m proud to be in non-compliance with the Bureau of Compliance. I’ve put it on my business card. Still, I was interested to read this a few days later in the New York Times:

Why wouldn’t they be? Government accounting is a joke. In one year (2009), Medicare handed out $98 billion in improper or erroneous payments. ⁸⁷ A tenth of a trillion? Ha! Rounding error. Look for it in the lineitems under “Miscellaneous.” For an accounting fraud of $567 million, Enron’s executives went to jail, and its head guy died there.⁸⁸ For an accounting fraud ten times that size, the two Democrat hacks who headed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, walked away with a combined taxpayer-funded payout of $116.4 million. Fannie and Freddie are two of the largest businesses in America, but they’re exempt from SEC disclosure rules and Sarbanes-Oxley “corporate governance” burdens, and so in 2008, unlike Enron, WorldCom, or any of the other reviled private-sector bogeymen, they came close to taking down the entire global economy. What then is the point of the SEC?

By 2005, the costs of federal regulatory compliance alone (that is, not including state or local red tape) were up to $1.13 trillion—or approaching 10 percent of GDP.⁸⁹ In much of America, it takes far more paperwork to start a business than to go on welfare. In the words of a headline in the organic free-range hippie-dippy magazine Acres, “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.”⁹⁰

The most vital element in a dynamic society is the space the citizen has to live life to his fullest potential. Big Government encroaches on this space unceasingly. Under the acronyms uncountable, we have devolved from republican self-government to a micro-regulated nursery. The book What’s the Matter with Kansas? gives the game away in its very title. What’s the matter with Kansas is that it declines to vote as the statists would like. It surely cannot be that there is something the matter with the statists, so there must be something the matter with their subjects: they’re too ill-educated, or manipulated by advertisers, or deceived by talk radio, or just plain lazy to understand their own best interests. Therefore, it is our duty, as enlightened progressives, to correct their misunderstanding of themselves and decide on their behalf. In a famous interaction at an early tea party, CNN’s Susan Roesgen interviewed a guy in the crowd and asked why he was here: “Because,” said the Tea Partier, “I hear a president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln’s primary thing was he believed that people had the right to liberty, and had the right ...”⁹¹

But Miss Roesgen had heard enough: “What does this have to do with your taxes? Do you realize that you’re eligible for a $400 credit?”

Had the Tea Party animal been as angry as Angry White Men are supposed to be, he’d have said, “Oh, push off, you condescending tick. Taxes are a liberty issue. I don’t want a $400 ‘credit’ for agreeing to live my life in governmentapproved ways.” Had he been of a more literary bent, he might have adapted Sir Thomas More’s line from A Man for All Seasons: “Why, Susan, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for a $400 tax credit?”

But Miss Roesgen wasn’t done with her “You may already have won!” commercial: “Did you know,” she sneered, “that the state of Lincoln gets $50 billion out of this stimulus? That’s $50 billion for this state, sir.”

Golly! Who knew it was that easy? $50 billion! Where did it come from? Did one of those Somali pirate ships find it just off the coast in a half-submerged treasure chest, all in convertible pieces of eight or Zanzibari doubloons? Or is it perhaps the case that that $50 billion has to be raised from the same limited pool of 300 million Americans and their as yet unborn descendants? And, if so, is giving it to the (bankrupt) “state of Lincoln” likely to be of much benefit to the citizens? Government money is not about the money, it’s about the government. It’s about social engineering—a $400 tax credit for falling into line with Barack Obama, Susan Roesgen, and the “Head of Behavior Change.” That’s why these protests are called Tea Parties—because the heart of the matter is the same question posed two-and-a-third centuries ago: Are Americans subjects or citizens? If you’re a citizen, then a benign sovereign should not be determining “your interests” and then announcing that he’s giving you a “tax credit” as your pocket money.

In Political Economy (1816), Thomas Jefferson wrote that “to take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association—‘the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.’” To do so on the scale modern western societies do leads to two obvious problems: First, you can’t erect a system of socioeconomic redistribution as extravagant as Susan Roesgen favors without losing a lot of the money en route. How much money do you have to take from Smith to give a $400 tax credit to Jones? Government isn’t an efficient delivery system; it’s a leach-field pipe with Smith at one end and Jones at the other and holes every couple of inches with thousands of bureaucrats sluicing all the way along. That’s why we’ve wound up with a situation worse than that foreseen by Jefferson. America is not a society comprising two groups—one that has “acquired too much” and one that has “not exercised equal industry and skill”—but a society dominated by a third group, a government bureaucracy that has “acquired too much” and, to add insult to financial injury, is not required to “exercise equal industry.”

And, when the state is that large, it takes not only the fruits but the fruit pies of your labors.

On the first Friday of Lent 2009, a state inspector from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture raided the fish fry at St. Cecilia’s Catholic Church in Rochester. He had been there for his annual inspection of the church’s kitchen, but, while going about his work, he espied an elderly parishioner unwrapping some pies.

He swooped. Would these by any chance be homemade pies? Sergeant Joe Pieday wasn’t taking no for an answer. The perps fessed up:

Josie Reed had made her pumpkin pie.

Louise Humbert had made her raisin pie.

Mary Pratte had made her coconut cream pie.

And Marge Murtha had made her farm apple pie.

And, by selling their prohibited substances for a dollar a slice, these ladies and their accomplices were committing a criminal act. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, it is illegal for 88-year-old Mary Pratte to bake a pie in her kitchen for sale at a church fundraiser. The inspector declared that the baked goods could not be sold.⁹²

St. Cecilia’s holds a fish fry every Friday during Lent, and regular church suppers during the rest of the year. That’s a lot of pie to forego. What solutions might there be? The inspector informed the ladies they could continue baking pies at home if each paid a $35 fee for him to come ’round to her home and certify her kitchen as state-compliant. “Well, that’s just ridiculous,” Louise Humbert, seventy-three, told the Wall Street Journal.

Alternatively, they could bake their pies in the state-inspected kitchen at the church. As anyone who bakes pies, as opposed to regulating them, could tell the inspector, if you attempt to replicate your family recipe in a strange oven, it doesn’t always turn out like it should.

A local bakery stepped in and donated some pies. But that’s not really the same, is it? Perhaps a more inventive solution is required. In simpler times, Sweeney Todd, purveyor of fine foodstuffs to Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop in Fleet Street, would have been proposing we drop the coconut cream and replace it with state-inspector pie, perhaps with a lattice crust, symbolizing the prison bars he ought to be behind. Problem solved. Easy as pie, as we used to say.

Instead, bye bye, Miss American Pie.

No matter how you slice it, this is tyranny. When I first came to my corner of New Hampshire, one of the small pleasures I took in my new state were the frequent bake sales—the Ladies’ Aid, the nursery school, the church rummage sale. Most of the muffins and cookies were good; some were exceptional; a few went down to sit in the stomach like overloaded barges at the bottom of the Suez Canal. But even then you admired if not the cooking then certainly the civic engagement. In a small but tangible way, a person who submits to a state pie regime is a subject, not a citizen—because participation is the essence of citizenship, and thus barriers to participation crowd out citizenship. A couple of kids with a lemonade stand are learning the rudiments not just of economic self-reliance but of civic identity. So naturally an ever multiplying number of jurisdictions have determined to put an end to such a quintessentially American institution. Seven-year-old Julie Murphy was selling lemonade in Portland, Oregon, when two officers demanded to see her “temporary restaurant license.” Which would have cost her $120. When she failed to produce it, they threatened her with a $500 fine, and also made her cry.⁹³ Perhaps like the officers of Saudi Arabia’s mutaween (the “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices”) the cheerless scolds of Permitstan could be issued with whips and scourges to flay the sinners in the street. When life hands you lemons, make lemonade—and then watch the state enforcers turn it back into sour fruit.

It is part of a sustained and all but explicit assault on civic participation, intended to leave government with a monopoly not just of power but of social legitimacy. So, while thanking that local bakery in Pennsylvania for their generosity in stepping up to the plate, we should note that, just as gun control is not about guns but control, so pie control is likewise not about pies, but about ever more total control.

Indeed, we do an injustice to ye medieval tyrants of yore. As Tocqueville wrote: “There was a time in Europe in which the law, as well as the consent of the people, clothed kings with a power almost without limits. But almost never did it happen that they made use of it.”

True. His Majesty was an absolute tyrant—in theory. But in practice he was in his palace hundreds of miles away. A pantalooned emissary might come prancing into your dooryard once every half-decade and give you a hard time, but for the most part you got on with your life relatively undisturbed. In Tocqueville’s words: “Although the entire government of the empire was concentrated in the hands of the emperor alone, and although he remained, in time of need, the arbiter of all things, the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.”

Just so. You were the mean and worthless subject of a cruel and mercurial despot but, even if he wanted to, he lacked the means to micro-regulate your life in every aspect. Yet what would happen, Tocqueville wondered, if administrative capability were to evolve to make it possible “to subject all of his subjects to the details of a uniform set of regulations”?

That moment has now arrived. Thanks to computer technology, it’s easier than ever to subject the state’s subjects to “a uniform set of regulations.”

Back in the 1990s, Bill Clinton famously said, “The era of Big Government is over.”⁹⁴ What we have instead is the era of lots and lots of itsy-bitsy, teensy-weensy morsels of small government that cumulatively add up to something bigger than the Biggest Government of all—a web of micro-tyrannies which, in their overbearing pettiness, ensnare you at every turn.

Marge Murtha can make an apple pie. What can a regime that criminalizes such a pie make? That’s easy: Big Government makes small citizens.

Like to mull that thought over a cup o’ joe? Sorry, I’d love to offer you one, but it’s illegal. With its uncanny ability to prioritize, California, land of Golden Statism for unionized bureaucrats, is cracking down on complimentary coffee. From the Ventura County Star:

Even inside? Gee, that’s big of you. “Those establishments have permits”? In California, what doesn’t? Commissar Huff added that there are a range of permits of varying costs. No doubt a plain instant coffee permit would be relatively simple, but if you wished to offer a decaf caramel macchiato with complimentary biscotti additional licenses may be required.

“We’re certainly working with the health department,” said Mr. Collins. “We want to be in compliance with the law.”

Why?

When the law says that it’s illegal for a storekeeper to offer his customer a cup of coffee, you should be proud to be in non-compliance. Otherwise, what the hell did you guys bother holding a revolution for? Say what you like about George III, but he didn’t prosecute the Boston Tea Party for unlicensed handling of beverage ingredients in a public place.

This is the reality of small business in America today. You don’t make the rules, you don’t get to vote for people who make the rules. But you have to work harder, pay more taxes, buy more permits, fill in more paperwork, contribute to the growth of an ever less favorable business environment, and prostrate yourself before the Commissar of Community Services—all for the privilege of taking home less and less money.

The prohibition of non-state-licensed coffee is a small but palpable loss to civic life—a genuine community service, as opposed to those “Community Services” of which Elizabeth Huff is the state-designated “Manager.” Randy Collins and the other taxpayers of Ventura County pay Commissar Huff’s salary. I would wager that, like most small business owners, the Collins family work hard. They take fewer vacations and receive fewer benefits than Commissar Huff. They will retire later and on a smaller pension. Yet they pay for her. Big Government requires enough of a doughnut to pay for the hole: you take as much dough as you can get away with and toss it into the big gaping nullity of microregulation. And it’s never enough. And eventually you wake up and find your state is all hole and no doughnut.

What do we have to show for the political class’ disruption of every field of endeavor? From education to energy, health care to homeowning, the Conformicrats bungled everything they touched. You can see the impact of the regulatory state in the structural transformation of the American economy. From 1947 to the start of the downturn in 2008, manufacturing declined from 25.6 percent of the economy to 11 percent, while finance, insurance, real estate, and “professional services” grew from 13.9 percent to 33.5 percent.⁹⁶ Much of that last category is about the paperwork necessary to keep whatever it is you do in compliance with the Bureau of Compliance. Of the remainder, the financial sector ballooned in support of the Age of Credit, and real estate was the one thing you could always rely on—“safe as houses,” right?

So how are those growth “industries” doing today? A headline from the New York Times:

Not anymore. Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, calculates that it will take two decades to recoup the $6 trillion of housing wealth lost between 2005 and 2010.⁹⁸ Which means that in real terms it might never be recouped. In the early Seventies, the United States had about 35 million homes with three or more bedrooms, and about 25 million two-parent families with children. By 2005, the number of two-parent households with children was exactly the same, but the number of three-or-more-bedroom homes had doubled to 72 million. As the Baby Boomers began to retire, America had perhaps as much as a 40 percent over-supply of family-sized houses.⁹⁹ As Mr. Baker puts it, “People shouldn’t look at a home as a way to make money because it won’t.”¹⁰⁰

Oh. So what does that leave?

The “financial sector”? In the Atlantic Monthly, Simon Johnson pointed out that, from 1973 to 1985, it was responsible for about 16 percent of U.S. corporate profits. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, it was up to 41 percent.¹⁰¹ That’s higher than healthy, but the “financial sector” would never have got anywhere near that size if government didn’t annex so much of your wealth—through everything from income tax to small-business regulation—that it’s become increasingly difficult to improve your lot in life through effort—by working hard, making stuff, selling it. Instead, in order to fund a more comfortable retirement and much else, large numbers of people became “investors”— albeit not as the term was traditionally understood. Like homeowning, it was all very painless: you work for some company, and it puts some money on your behalf in some sort of account that somebody on the 12th floor pools together with all the others and gives to somebody else in New York to disperse among various parties hither and yon. You’ve no idea what you’re “investing” in, but it keeps going up, so why do you care? That’s not like a nineteenth-century chappie saying he’s starting a rubber plantation in Malaya and, with the faster shipping routes out of Singapore, it may be worth your while owning 25 percent of it. Or a guy in 1929 barking “Buy this!” and “Sell that!” at his broker every morning. Instead, in both property prices and retirement plans, an exaggerated return on mediocre assets became accepted as a permanent feature of life.

It’s not, and it never can be. In Sebastian Faulks’ novel A Week in December, set during the great unraveling of 2008, the wife of a hedgefundy type muses:

We’re in a worse state than Jonathan Swift’s banker—we cannot reliably say who has our bonds and therefore our souls. Thanks to the packaging, repackaging, subcontracting, and outsourcing of even routine mortgages, millions of home “owners” have no idea who really holds their property or the terms by which they can be expelled from it. And nor do the banks. According to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, by 2010 the U.S. financial system “owned” more than 230 trillion dollars’ worth of derivatives—or about four times the entire planet’s GDP.¹⁰²

It was Polonius who advised, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” and America at the dawn of the Obama era was approaching that blessed state. A man who borrows $400,000 for a house he cannot afford isn’t really a “borrower,” is he? After all, by 2008 every politician agreed that the priority was to keep people in “their” homes, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus was soon calling for a “moratorium on foreclosures,” which is a polysyllabic way of saying there’s no need to make your monthly payments. In what sense then is such a man “borrowing”?

And the banker who loaned the 400 grand isn’t a “lender” of anything terribly real, is he? Not in an era of banking as performance art. “We refused to touch credit default swaps,” the author and investment adviser Nassim Taleb said. “It would be like buying insurance on the Titanic from someone on the Titanic.”¹⁰³ But a lot of people did just that. The Canadian commentator Jay Currie, waxing lyrical, put it this way: “If two people make a bet on the fall of a raindrop and each puts up, say, their shoes, the bet is a real bet. If they put up cash it is very close to a real bet. IOUs are not much of a bet. Someone else’s IOUs? Still less of a bet. A good deal of imaginary money is going to money heaven, which is sort of like saying that your stuffed animal is dead.”¹⁰⁴

Except that many people made real-world decisions with their dead imaginary money. You thought the house you bought for a hundred grand was now worth a quarter-mil and so you took out a home-equity loan to buy a camper or to send your kid to private school. Your stuffed animal has died, but you’ve still got a real vet’s bill to pay.

And then, just to pile on, the government steps in to replace all that dead imaginary money with real (or realish) money. Having, in effect, colluded in the destruction of meaningful risk-evaluation, Washington decided it was obliged to act—not to prevent a Thirties-style “credit crunch” but to prop up an unsustainable form of mock credit that had led to the crisis in the first place. The state’s response to the downturn was to insist that we needed to re-inflate the credit bubble. If someone punctures your balloon, you can huff and puff into it all you want, but you’re never going to get it up in the air again. The Obama administration blew a trillion dollars of “stimulus” into the punctured credit balloon, and it flew out the gaping hole in the back, dropped into the Potomac, and floated out to sea.

“Borrowing,” continues Polonius, “dulls the edge of husbandry”—and that goes double for government, whose husbandry is dulled in the best of times. The state spends too much. So the individual spends too much. The state hires too many people on whom it lavishes too many benefits. So those foolish enough to remain in the private sector have to pay for the benefits of the public sector, and fund both their basics (housing) and their baubles (plasma TVs) through debt. At the start of the Reagan administration, America was the world’s largest creditor nation and its citizens had a 10 percent savings rate.¹⁰⁵ Not today: By 2007, the average U.S. household had debts equivalent to 130 percent of income.¹⁰⁶ Keynes’ view of the economy derived from the premise that a government treasury was not a family purse, and so the state, unlike the household, could borrow to “invest.” Now, the family purse has caught up: Governments and individuals alike borrow extravagantly—and to “consume” in the most transient sense rather than invest in anything meaningful.

The intellectual cover for America’s structural deformation was provided by “globalization.” Some of us have always been in favor of the “global economy.” If I want to buy a CD or a sofa, I don’t think it’s any business of the government whether it comes from Cleveland or Milan or Ougadougou. As Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill will tell you, free trade has been indispensable to economic vitality from the Netherlands to Bengal. But you no longer hear much about “free trade.” That humdrum, prosaic supply-anddemand concept yielded to a glittering new coinage: “globalization,” less a commercial mechanism than an ideology.

But what does this mysterious metaphysical force called “globalization” actually boil down to? At the end of 2008, a few weeks after Barack Obama’s historic election, the media reported on America’s Christmas shopping spree. “Retail Sales Plummet,” read the headline in the Wall Street Journal. “Sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer spending.”¹⁰⁷

That’s great news, isn’t it? After all, everyone knows Americans consume too much. What was it that then Senator Obama had said on the subject only a few months before? “We can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world’s resources with just four percent of the world’s population, and expect the rest of the world to say, ‘You just go ahead, we’ll be fine.’”¹⁰⁸

And by jiminy, we took the great man’s words to heart. SUV sales nosedived, and 72 is no longer your home’s thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand the president’s logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume 4 percent of the world’s resources. And in his first year in office we made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans were driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, the Obama administration wasn’t terribly happy about the Obamafication of the U.S. economy. The Democrats immediately passed a bazillion dollar “stimulus” package to “stimulate” us back into our bad old ways, and, when that didn’t work, Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve printed another gazillion dollars in “quantitative easing” to lure us back into the malls.

And how did the rest of the world, of whose tender sensibilities Senator Obama was so mindful, feel about the collapse of American consumer excess? They were aghast, and terrified—as you would be if you suddenly found yourself strapped into a nightmare ride on a one-way express elevator into the abyss.

They didn’t put it that way, of course. Economics correspondents instead penned erudite thumbsuckers about how the global economy needed to restore aggregate demand. Which is a fancy term for you—yes, you, Joe Lardbutt, the bloated, disgusting embodiment of American excess, driving around in your Chevy Behemoth, getting two blocks to the gallon as you shear the roof off the drive-thru lane to pick up your $7.93 decaf gingersnap-mocha-pepperoni-zebra mussel frappuccino, which makes for a wonderful thirst-quencher after you’ve been working up a sweat watching the 78” TV in your rec room with the thermostat set to 87. The message from the European political class couldn’t be more straightforward: if you crass, vulgar Americans don’t ramp up the demand, we’re kaput. Unless you get back to previous levels of planet-devastating consumption, the planet is screwed.

“Much of the load will fall on the U.S.,” wrote Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, “largely because the Europeans, Japanese and even the Chinese are too inert, too complacent, or too weak.”¹⁰⁹ The European Union has 500 million people, compared with America’s 300 million.¹¹⁰ Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain are advanced economies whose combined population adds up to that of the United States. Many EU members have enjoyed for decades the enlightened progressive policies that Americans didn’t find themselves on the receiving end of until the Obama-Pelosi-Reid era. Why then are these advanced societies so “inert” that their economic fortunes depend on the despised, moronic Yanks?

Well, that’s globalization. All the stuff that used to be made in America is now made somewhere else. But the people who buy it are still Americans. That part hasn’t changed.

So, if Americans don’t make any of this stuff, where do they get the money to buy it?

By borrowing it. Once you’re paying what citizens of free societies do in taxes, what’s left barely covers room and board. So life’s little luxuries—or cheap plastic Chinese-made luxuries—have to be paid for through debt. So Americans buy toys that so enrich the Chinese they can afford to lend huge amounts of money to America to help our government grow even bigger so that Americans will have to borrow even more money for the next generation of cheap Chinese toys.

Hey, it’s globalization. What could go wrong?

Entire countries—not just the Third World assembly plants, but G7 members such as Canada—have economies overwhelmingly dependent on access to the U.S. market. “Globalization,” translated out of globaloney, means the American shopping mall is all but singlehandedly propping up living standards from Ontario to Indonesia. In 2010 U.S. consumer debt (that means us: not the spendaholic rulers but the spendaholic subjects) was about $2.5 trillion, or the combined GDP of Canada and India.¹¹¹ That seems like a lot of money to borrow in order to buy electronic amusements for a lifestyle we can’t afford.

But the Chinese are smart guys. They must know that, right?

Undoubtedly. But the dollar is the global currency and so, unlike Zimbabwe or even Iceland, America gets to borrow money in its own bills, which it has the exclusive right to print as much of as it wants. So, even if there’s a decline in value, for foreigners there is perceived to be a limit to the risk: buying U.S. debt is not like buying Zimbabwe’s debt.

Yes, but why is the dollar still the global currency if America’s the biggest debtor nation?

That’s about image, too: America is seen as the guarantor of global order.

But, as noted earlier, when money drains, so does power—and very quickly, as the British learned after World War II. Today, money is draining across the Pacific. China Minmetals is a Fortune 500 company owned and controlled by the People’s Republic.¹¹² By the way, read that sentence again and imagine what an H. G. Wells time traveler from the early Sixties, from the time of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, would make of it. Yet in the Fortune Top Ten there are three Chinese companies against two from the United States.¹¹³ And China Minmetals is serious business: they own the Northern Peru Copper Company in Canada,¹¹⁴ and the Golden Grove copper, lead, zinc, silver, and gold mines in Western Australia,¹¹⁵ and the mining rights to a huge percentage of Jamaican bauxite.¹¹⁶ China’s Sinopec bought up Calgary’s Addax petroleum¹¹⁷ and 9 percent of the Alberta oil sands business Syncrude,¹¹⁸ and have massively expanded oil production and development in Sudan and Ethiopia. China’s Sinochem took over Britain’s Emerald Energy.¹¹⁹ You remember all the “No Blood for Oil” chants back in 2003? Relax, it’s our blood, their oil. The biggest foreign investor in post-war Iraq is the developer of the Ahdab oil field, the China National Petroleum Corporation.¹²⁰

Think of it as the first settlers did vis á vis the Indians: the ChiComs sell us trinkets in exchange for our resources. Lenin boasted that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” His fellow Communists in Beijing inverted the strategy to lethal effect: they sell us the rope, and sit back to watch us hang ourselves.

And, where money flows, power follows. Having turned resource nations in Africa into de facto protectorates, China has moved on to the developed world, and bailed out Portugal for $100 billion in exchange for significant stakes in their national utility companies.¹²¹ Beijing is also the biggest foreign investor in post-bailout General Motors: they bought 18 percent of the Obama administration’s IPO in 2010.¹²² If the Obamaapproved Chevy Volt isn’t environmentally friendly enough for you, wait for the new Chevy Rickshaw. Can you still, as Dinah Shore sang, see the USA in your Chevrolet? The Chinese can.

Like America, China has structural defects. It’s a dictatorship whose authoritarian policies have crippled its human capital. It has too many oldsters and not enough youth, and among its youth it has millions of surplus boys and no girls for them to marry. If China were the inevitable successor to America as global hegemon, that would be one thing. But the fact that it is incapable of playing that role is likely to make things even messier, more unpredictable, and far more destabilizing.

They have our souls who have our bonds. In their decadence, much of the western elite now think the answer to our worsening problems is not merely Chinese money but Chinese-style dictatorial government. If you support Bush’s “Patriot Act,” you’re endangering civil rights. But if you support eco-totalitarianism, it’s totally groovy.

In 2008, David Suzuki, Canada’s most famous environmentalist, suggested that “denialist” politicians should be thrown in jail.¹²³ Mayer Hillman, senior fellow at the Policy Studies Institute in London, thinks democratic dissent from conformocrat-enviro-hysteria needs to be suppressed: “When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it. This has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not.”¹²⁴ If the people are too foolish to vote as their betters instruct, then it will have to be “imposed.” The earth is your führer. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute, agrees on the inadequacy of America’s “democracy” (his scare quotes) and argues that (to quote the article he wrote for the South China Morning Post) “Chinese Leadership Needed to Save Humanity.”¹²⁵

The New York Times’ Great Thinker Thomas Friedman regularly channels his inner Walter Duranty: “What if we could just be China for a day?” he fantasized. “Where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions. . . .”¹²⁶ Ah, yes. “Authorize” the “right” solutions without all that messy multi-party democracy getting in the way: why, in Beijing, where they don’t suffer the disadvantages of free elections, they banned the environmentally destructive plastic bag! In one day! Just like that! “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,” wrote Friedman. “But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”¹²⁷

Ooooo-kay. But, pardon my asking, forward to where?

When the New York Times’ most prominent writer comes out in favor of dictatorship, and no one else in the smart set calls him on it, you get a glimpse at the very least of the scale of elite contempt for popular sovereignty and the republic’s animating principles. In breaking faith with the American idea, the political class got everything wrong: they exported millions of low-skilled jobs but imported millions of low-skilled workers; they fund both sides of the war on terror out of a wanton hostility to domestic energy production that leaves us dependent on noxious oil dictatorships that use their profits to wage civilizational warfare. And, having gotten us into this mess, the way to get us out is “China for a day.” This is the logical endpoint of a cocooned conformocracy: Big Government having “imposed” the problems in the first place, only Even Bigger Government can “impose” the solutions.

Never underestimate the totalitarian temptations of the smart set. We’ll hear a lot more of that in the years ahead.