Jonah Goldberg: Our Political Leaders Believe in Two Different Americas
[Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.]
John Edwards, when he wasn’t fixing his hair or cheating on his wife, liked to talk about “two Americas.” In one America, things were pretty bad, somewhere between The Grapes of Wrath and Thunderdome. In the other America, where Edwards himself lived in a McMansion, things were going swimmingly.
Edwards was hardly the only one to use this two-Americas formulation. It’s been a popular talking point for years. Socialist intellectual Michael Harrington helped to inspire the Great Society with his book The Other America....
The notion that health care is a right is an old one with deep roots in socialist and progressive thought. It achieved its highest expression in FDR’s 1944 address to Congress. The president insisted that the old Bill of Rights had run its course and the new industrial age required new rights. These rights included a guaranteed good job, a good home, and, naturally, good medical care....
Roosevelt said that opposition to this sweeping transformation of America made you a fascist. If “history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920’s, then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.”...
What we have here is a fundamental conflict of visions, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell. One side believes that people are born into their station in life and that it is the government’s job to make their miserable lives a little better. Indeed, it is the natural order of things for the government to provide jobs, health care, and homes to the people. If you object to this concept of government, it must be because you want to “punish” the downtrodden and discriminated. You must be animated by racism, sexism, greed — “fascism!”...
he other side says that our rights come from God, not from government. That while the government has an obligation to promote the general welfare, it doesn’t have a holy writ to design the nation as it sees fit....
But the leaders of one America don’t see it that way, and probably never will. Which is why, whatever happens in Congress in the coming days and weeks, it will be “two Americas” for a very long time.
Read entire article at National Review Online
John Edwards, when he wasn’t fixing his hair or cheating on his wife, liked to talk about “two Americas.” In one America, things were pretty bad, somewhere between The Grapes of Wrath and Thunderdome. In the other America, where Edwards himself lived in a McMansion, things were going swimmingly.
Edwards was hardly the only one to use this two-Americas formulation. It’s been a popular talking point for years. Socialist intellectual Michael Harrington helped to inspire the Great Society with his book The Other America....
The notion that health care is a right is an old one with deep roots in socialist and progressive thought. It achieved its highest expression in FDR’s 1944 address to Congress. The president insisted that the old Bill of Rights had run its course and the new industrial age required new rights. These rights included a guaranteed good job, a good home, and, naturally, good medical care....
Roosevelt said that opposition to this sweeping transformation of America made you a fascist. If “history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920’s, then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.”...
What we have here is a fundamental conflict of visions, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell. One side believes that people are born into their station in life and that it is the government’s job to make their miserable lives a little better. Indeed, it is the natural order of things for the government to provide jobs, health care, and homes to the people. If you object to this concept of government, it must be because you want to “punish” the downtrodden and discriminated. You must be animated by racism, sexism, greed — “fascism!”...
he other side says that our rights come from God, not from government. That while the government has an obligation to promote the general welfare, it doesn’t have a holy writ to design the nation as it sees fit....
But the leaders of one America don’t see it that way, and probably never will. Which is why, whatever happens in Congress in the coming days and weeks, it will be “two Americas” for a very long time.