George F. Will’s column in the Washington Post of February 1st -- entitled “Freedom vs. Equality” -- is unusually insightful. He responds to the carping conservatives these days who are criticizing President Bush for “big-government” spending.
He points out that some conservatives believe “government strength” is “inimical to conservative aspirations.” But this wrongly assumes that government is “merely coercive.” Instead, government can act “strongly” to make itself “less controlling and intrusive” by “enacting laws that offer opportunities and incentives for individuals to become more self-sufficient.”
Liberals favor expanded government controls to promote equality -- through the encouragement of “equal dependence” on government provisions. DEPENDENCY is the key idea.
Bush Republicans, however, favor a “strong-government conservatism [that] contracts the dependency culture and expands the sphere of choices, thereby enhancing the individual's competence and responsibility. This…serves the right's traditional preference for freedom over legislated equality.” The GOP can carry this out by reforming education, health care, and pensions -- and this will “drive Democrats into reactionary liberalism: defense of the dependency culture and its increasing constriction of individuals' choices.”
This reminds me of a prophetic book that came out just before the 2000 election entitled The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism by Robert William Fogel.
The following will interest and surprise you depressed conservatives….
Fogel is an economist and a moderate liberal (who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in economics). He said that there have been four “Great Awakenings” in American history -- spiritual/political eras of reform -- than defined American history.
The first Great Awakening of 1730 founded the ideology for the American Revolution; the second started in 1800 and helped introduce reforms such as the abolition of slavery; the third from 1890 to 1930 attacked social injustice and created the welfare state. The fourth is occurring now: it began in the late 1950’s and will continue for a few more decades.
Fogel believes egalitarianism is the defining philosophy of all these Awakenings (he is, after all, a liberal). But he sees the last Awakening as a shift from the push for egalitarianism of material needs during the 3rd Awakening to a yearning for egalitarianism of spiritual needs (also called “immaterial” needs or “knowledge capital”).
He says that the new equity issues of the 4th Awakening -- unlike the 3rd Awakening -- “do not arise from the shock of rapid urbanization, the destruction of small businesses by competition from industrial giants, the massive destitution created by the prolonged unemployment of up to one-quarter of prime-age workers, the disappearance of the frontier as a safety valve for urban unemployment and poverty.”
Rather, people now want to “have an understanding of life’s opportunities, a sense of which opportunities are most attractive to him or her at each stage of life, and the requisite educational, material, and spiritual resources to pursue these opportunities.”
Here’s what Fogel means by “spiritual” needs:
“Spiritual resources are not limited to those found in the sacred realm but include the whole range of immaterial commodities that are needed to cope with emotional trauma and that, more often than not, are transferred between individuals privately, rather than through the market. Such resources include a sense of purpose, a sense of opportunity, a sense of community, a strong family ethic, a strong work ethic, and high self-esteem.” [Emphasis added]
Surprisingly: “Like it or not, the reform agenda spelled out by the religious Right, with its focus on the restoration of the traditional family and its emphasis on equality of opportunity, more fully addresses the new issues of egalitarianism than does the agenda of the Third Great Awakening.”
Fogel goes on to say that Republicans and conservatives will probably benefit the most from this 4th Awakening -- such that Republicans will predominate over the next decade or two.
This means that Janet Jackson’s stunts and John Kerry's tiredness -- the whole panoply of anti-authoritarian purposeless rebellions that promote sloppiness, shallowness, and cynicism in daily life; and the Democratic harping on class warfare, racial division, and the need for the encouragement of dependency needs -- are going against the grain of the new Awakening.
People really WANT purposeful and self-reliant lives. It’s a winning platform!
Something for conservatives to feel hopeful about.