Unintended consequences?

Soothscribe Thomas Sowell once again skewers sanctimonious "progressive" hypocrisy in NRO:

At one time, housing prices in San Francisco were much like housing prices elsewhere in the country. But the building restrictions - and outright bans - resulting from the political crusades of environmentalist zealots sent housing prices skyrocketing in San Francisco, San Jose, and most of the communities in between. Housing prices in these communities soared to about three times the national average.

The black population in three adjacent counties on the San Francisco peninsula is just under 3 percent of the total population in the 39 communities in those counties. It so happens that these are counties where voters and the officials they elect are virtually all liberal Democrats. You might be hard pressed to find similarly one-sided conservative Republican communities where blacks are such small percentages of the population.

Certainly that would be hard to find in states with a substantial total population of blacks. In California, a substantial black population has simply been forced by economics to vacate many communities near the coast and move farther inland, where the environmental zealots are not yet as strong politically, and where housing prices are therefore not yet as unaffordable.

I will cut some initial slack to the authors of do-gooding legislation that turns out to be a nightmare for whatever group supposedly favoured by it. In particular (hate-filled garbage like Aneurin Bevan aside), that dispensation covers most of the New Jerusalemites of the post-World War II Labour administration in Britain.

But when you persist in programmes that have manifestly not only failed to achieve the betterment originally conceived, but have also created additional problems, then you are quite simply evil. That is what has happened to the "progressives", who are now the most viciously reactionary segment of society, united by a fanatical determination to prevent any change that might threaten their interests, heavily vested in all those once high-sounding redistributive programmes.

Of them all, the mutation of environmentalism from a commitment to clean air, clean water and proper husbandry of resources to a covert determination to keep the poor down, domestically and internationally, has been the most rapid and the most nauseating.

But then the common denominator of all the "progressive" crusades of our times has been that they originate and are sustained by the lower middle class (petit bourgeosie), historically the most retrograde section of society and as such excoriated by, most notably, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

What's the point?

Today Christopher Booker, backed up by Richard North, has written about the EU-made shambles that is rubbish collection as exacerbated in Britain by its maniacally elaborate enforcement. The words "cost effective" are kryptonite to bureaucrats everywhere; but the British sub-species seems to be particularly aggressive in seeking ways to impose niggling, unnecessary burdens on the rest of the population.

It may seem OTT to ascribe a philosophical underpinning to the squalid scramble to feed at the public trough, but it is essential to seek an explanation, not so much for the behaviour of people living at public expense, but for why that public has put up with their exponentially rising exactions, increasingly flagrant corruption and chronic incompetence for so long.

Part of it stems from envy. The ideal of equality or "fairness" in Britain comes down to the squalid sentiment that if I can't have it, nobody should. Envy is the enemy of aspiration, and it works at all social levels - particularly among the young. There is no difference between ghetto youths attacking the "oreos" who want to make something of themselves and public schoolboys victimising the studious as "swots".

From this, possibly, comes the apathy and cowardice among the general population that has been the main enabler of a relentless drive for the lowest common denominator in all aspects of social engineering. The adventurous and the ambitious have been fleeing Britain's deadening consensus for centuries, and the genetic pool left behind must have been diminished by the diaspora.

Unfortunately, although in the past immigration by Huguenots, Jews, Eastern Europeans and others fleeing oppression injected new dynamism, more recently it has mainly added ethnic sub-groups nurturing historic grievances and demanding special entitlements with the active encouragement of the British bureaucracy.

But something else must be at work for those more blessed by nature to subscribe to the general malaise. Although most of them will never have heard of it, I believe it lies in the perversion of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative:

Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. 

It is the sentiment that underlies a sense of duty and of social obligation; but the sting in the tail is the last bit, the "will that it should become a universal law". From "will" to "enact" may seem barely a step, yet there is a gulf between the two into which, without exception, all social engineering legislation falls, however well-meaning. That gulf is the moral disempowerment of the population the legislation is supposed to benefit.

From which, after many decades of relentless social engineering, we have a de-moralized as well as demoralized society, governed either by cynics who use the slogans of a more idealistic past as a smokescreen for looting the public purse, or by arrogantly ignorant theorists like our current prime minister and deputy prime minister. Ignorant because what they fondly believe are new ideas are old and failed expedients; arrogant because they believe that their will can overcome profound institutional inertia and widespread societal indifference.

They all end up in the same place. Those who enter politics with an eye to filling their pockets do so. The idealists take another course: they come to despise the people who do not respond to their exhortations and, most notoriously in the case of Blair (on whom the charisma-lite David Cameron seeks, without success, to model himself), persuade themselves that their public service deserves generous private reward.

I do not see any way that the Gadarene rush to the final extinction of everything that was once distinctive and admirable in Britain can be halted or even re-directed. As Yeats put it in "The Second Coming":  

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Bear in mind he wrote that in 1919, in my opinion the moment when British society changed irrevocably for the worse. If Britain had been governed by decent people instead of the profiteering scum and opportunists* who backed Lloyd George (who himself stole money donated by Carnegie to help the war wounded), the enormous sacrifice of the Great War and the social solidarity of the trenches might have transcribed into a more just society.

Instead there was a betrayal of hope so egregious that I believe it broke the spirit of the British people. The welfare state that might have been created in 1919, when Britain was still a wealthy nation, was built instead in bankruptcy after World War II. The will for a better life dashed in 1919 came back in 1945 as the grimly determined sense of entitlement that has been the curse of Britain ever since.

Barring defeat in war and occupation, I know of no society that has ever broken out of a spiral of decline. Social revolutions are generally conservative phenomena sparked by economic changes that threaten the lower middle class, which supplies the principal clientele for socialist parties.

That class, roughly defined as shitting downwards and snarling upwards, holds absolute sway in Britain. It is unmoved by facts or logic, and knows no reasons other than its precarious social and economic status, and the desperate fear of change it generates. Everything else follows from that. 

* Including the devouringly ambitious Winston Churchill, desperate to recover from his humiliation over the Dardanelles fiasco.

Remember when they called it the "Torygraph"?

There is no "right wing" in this country. Indeed, if one can take the struggling dead tree media as a guide, there is no "right" at all. A vignette: reporting on yesterday's Prime Minster's question time in the Commons, the Telegraph commented on Miliband's so far faltering attempts to pin down Cameron:

[Cameron] then hit the ball very hard back at Miliband, asking him whether it was fair for their constituents to work hard “to give benefits so people can live in homes” costing £30,000, £40,000, £50,000 a year, of which those constituents “couldn’t even dream”. 

Never mind, for the moment, that Mr Cameron also has homes of which the constituents could not even dream.

WTF has that got to do with it? Were Cameron's homes paid for out of taxation? It is not the stridency of the envious lefties that has made this country such a hopeless place, it is the snivelling cowardice of the rest.

"Underclass"

Arguably the most pernicious of all the Americanisms that lefty me-tooist Brits have swallowed in the manner of Monica Lewinsky is the concept of an "underclass". The term made little sense in its country of origin, which generally rejects social class as an alien concept, but for class hustling low-mid Brit lefties it came as a welcome alternative to Marx's "sub-proletariat", all-too similar to "sub-human".

The term embodies a pronounced difference in expectations among classes, whereby pathological behavior is held to define the "underclass" rather than being a possible consequence of being held to a lower standard of behaviour. Lip service to the "poor and uneducated" aside, nobody stops to ask why after over a century of universal free education there can still be uneducated people, or why all the wars and programs to eradicate poverty have simply moved the cash boundaries, and feed the pathologies they were supposed to cure.

The New York Times is the preeminent journal of European-style US social democrats, who choose to call themselves liberals. There is nothing remotely Liberal, in the historic sense, about them, but that is part and parcel of the American penchant for meaning-blurring euphemism. The NYT's class snobbery is relentlessly expressed in terms of intelligence or the lack thereof. Thus they pursue the illusion of wealth and dress gaudily to put on airs; we are not so stupid. We mortgage ourselves to the limit and buy expensive "eco-friendly" cars to . . . um . . .  reflect our status.

Despite my distaste for the Brit obsession with class, within that discourse it is reasonably clear that the great American middle in fact embodies the values and vices of the lower middle class, desperately anxious to make the boundary with the lower class as impermeable as possible. Not for nothing is the cornerstone of US welfare provisions called Social Security. The concept of an "underclass" serves that function very well.

Nor should we forget that much of the lower middle class depends on the state for employment and "status", not least the army of "social workers" and their departmental bureaucracies, which have no objective self-interest whatsoever in reducing the size or improving the behaviour of their client base. 

Amusingly, I even have a quotation from Marx and Engels to support my thesis. In The German Ideology they wrote that each emerging social class "represents its interests as the common interests of all members of society" and its ideas as "the only rational, universally valid ones".

The implications of this across the whole range of subjects I blog about is manifest. Within the discourse of class, much that I find odious in Britain and in the States finds a partial explanation in the frantic attempt of the lower middle class to create an environment in which it feels secure, and where mediocrity - its defining characteristic - is accepted as the highest aspiration of mankind.

Sandwell: epitome of lowmid tyranny

Big Brother Watch has been documenting for some time how the overwhelmingly Labour-dominated Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council (website here) in the West Midlands "persistently demonstrates the worst of Britain's big brother state".

Reviewing the incidents collated by BBW, one has to wonder if the Council is not in the grip of some kind of lower middle class collective psychosis about littering; and one has to wonder even more about the voters of Sandwell, who actually increased the Labour majority in the Council at the last election.