Why the Right is Wrong: excess nostalgia

The New York Times' Young Turk conservative columnist (don't you love conservative pundits with beards? They're so individualistic), Ross Douthat, did a column on how Big Gummint's to blame for durn near everything, and how unenlightened right wingers and the Democrats all share the blame for this.

Here's my riposte (#32), which the NYT highlighted as an editor's choice:

Like most conservatives, Mr. Douthat reveals his ideal implicitly. But it's clear here that he longs for the life of the gentleman farmer ca. 1800: a man beholden to no one, and only threatened by foreign invasion or perhaps an Indian raid.

In such a milieu, a federal government--apart from being needed to provide military defense--is kind of a luxury...a hobby for wealthy citizens with time on their hands. Jefferson's ideal--not Hamilton's.

Mr. Douthat said none of this in so many words, of course, so one could accuse me of creating a straw man argument.

But the biggest clue is Mr. Douthat's conflation of corporatist government (the Republican reality) and regulatory government (what the Obama presidency is trying to do). To Mr. Douthat it's all the same, apparently.

Not to Democrats, fortunately.

I think what Mr. Douthat's ideals prevent him from grasping is that today we need a huge--yes, huge--federal government, because the forces arrayed against the individual are too big and too geographically spread out for even state government to protect us adequately.

Russian gangsters in direct collusion with the Russian government practice sophisticated ID theft and various forms of commercial fraud from thousands of miles away. National or multinational corporations pollute your water table and threaten to bury you in lawyers if you try to sue them by yourself. Complex world-scale money manipulations that throw the world economy into a tailspin. I can't believe I even have to give examples of what's arrayed against the individual today that the Framers couldn't have imagined.

Whatever our ideal, today's environment requires a powerful federal government and less personal privacy than ever--including, I believe, a national biometric ID database.

You don't have to love this. You just have to realize that the alternative is getting squashed like bugs. That's just how it is, and wishful thinking--especially delusions of rustic autonomy--won't change things.