Ipse Dixit

Good stuff, as usual, from Professor Victor Davis Hanson:

Like it or not, the bedrock of the American experience has always been the self-employed truck driver, the farmer, the small-businessman, the jack-of-trades entrepreneur. That is not to say that the public employee is not noble and all that, only that the American character renown for blunt speech, decisive action, free-thinking, and resolute action, even for eccentricity and stubborness was better nurtured by some professions and less by others. But bury him under high taxes, regulations, politically-correct statutes, litigiousness, intrusive government, and confusing postmodern culture, and we begin to see that profile eroding. Helping friends and hurting enemies is now slandered as Manichean. Assuming that most places abroad in South America, Africa, and Asia are illiberal and worse is ethnocentric, chauvinist, parochial.

I think we are seeing a rising tide of an antithetical profile that says. I work for government and expect protection from government, whose mission to ensure an equality of result that takes no consideration of ignorance, criminal behavior, bad personal decisions, fate, bad luck, sloth, poor health, or intrinsic unfairness, but instead by intellect, capital, and good intentions promises, if given enough power, to overcome all such factors and in infinite wisdom not mererly to level the playing field, but to ensure there are no winners, or losers, just equal particpants who start and end the same.

I deserve, I am owed, I must receive is our mantra. We must become more like the world, rather they like us. War is caused by miscommunications rather than intrinsic evil that is difficult to negotiate away. America is simply one of many nations, exceptional only to the degree that we suffer from unusual race, class, and gender transgressions. The founders and their epigones were mostly preeminent as racist and elites, not geniuses who knew far more than 99% of us today. I think all that more or less sums up the lesson from today schools and colleges, and explains why today the average American when abroad rarely defends his country from the caricatures and attacks of foreigners, or why we read daily of the errant policeman, not of the thousands of deadly miscreants he is asked to monitor, why were are told ad nauseam that health care is broken, ruined, never that hourly millions of dollars are given in emergency room care to those here illegally, or who arrive suffering from gang trauma, or those who chose not to purchase health insurance—and who were given topflight care which earns no thanks when good but often a law suit when not perfect.

Go RTWT.