By Warren Moore

One of the arguments a liberal friend of mine likes to use is that large percentage x of The People want government-sponsored healthcare/Head Start/cowboy poetry/snail treadmills, and that folks on my side of the aisle are therefore obstructing some sort of Rousseauian General Will. My response has typically been that of Anatole France: “If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”

I think the “What’s the matter with Kansas?” argument is related to this, along these lines:

P: Kansans, like the rest of the population, want the goodies the Democratic Party offers.

p: However, they have voted against the Democratic politicians who would bring them these goodies.

C: Therefore, Kansans have been manipulated by the GOP into voting against their best interests.

As a consequence of this reasoning, the liberals/progressives tend to chalk up their failures either as failures to adequately communicate their message (remember “framing“?) or as the unfortunate consequence of a general cynicism about politics. But as Walter Russell Mead and the Ace of Spades both note, there’s more to it than that, and it’s a function of the Democrats’ neglect of half the bargain they offer. While the Dems talk about the benefits they would offer, they tend to gloss over the cost, both financial and personal.

Ace points out that there are lots of things we might like, if we believed we could afford them:

Consider this analogy: Ask me if I’d like a very top-line sportscar. I’d say yes. Ask me if I’d like to do 0 to 60 in under 4 seconds. Yes again. Ask me if I’d like road-gripping $3,000 racing tires. Yes, I do. Ask me if I’d like that turbo charged. Yup.

Okay, I said yes to all of those things. So, if I want all of those things, why do I not own a Ferarri, or a Corvette?

Answer: Because you didn’t ask me if I’d be willing to pay $150,000 or at least $70,000 for them. You didn’t ask me about all elements of the bargain at once — including price.

Because no car dealer is actually offering me these things for free. He’s offering me a car in exchange for $70,000 or $150,000, and I may wish to keep that money for other purposes. (In fact, I might not even have that money at all.)

So to just ask this laundry list of “Do you want…?” is as absurd as the conclusion that every man in the country must own a Corvette or Mustang or refurbished Jaguar Mk. II simply because he agreed, in the abstract, that the things you were talking about sounded nice.

They did sound nice. I genuinely want those things. But I don’t have the money, and if I did, I’d spend that money on other things which I want more.

Now, the Left has tried to duck this particular obstacle by assuring us that “the rich” can buy all the nifty stuff for us, if only they’d pay their “fair share.” This is where class envy enters the picture, and that’s a discussion for another time. But that argument doesn’t address what I think is the larger problem — the personal/spiritual cost of their vision’s implementation. We turn to Mead:

The progressive state has never seen its job as simply to check the excesses of the rich.  It has also sought to correct the vices of the poor and to uplift the masses.  From the Prohibition and eugenics movements of the early twentieth century to various improvement and uplift projects in our own day, well educated people have seen it as their simple duty to use the powers of government to make the people do what is right: to express the correct racial ideas, to eschew bad child rearing technique like corporal punishment, to eat nutritionally appropriate foods, to quit smoking, to use the right light bulbs and so on and so on.

[…]

The deep crisis of the progressive ideal today is that it is no longer clear that the American clerisy is wanted or needed in that role.

At bottom, that is what the populist revolt against establishments of all kinds is about.  A growing section of the American population wants to think and act for itself, without the guidance of the graduates of ivy league colleges and blue chip graduate programs.

The fight for limited government that animates so many Americans today isn’t a reaction against the abuses and failures of government.  It is a fight to break the power of a credentialed elite that believe themselves entitled by talent and hard work to a greater say in the nation’s affairs than people who scored lower on standardized tests and studied business administration in cheap colleges rather than political science in expensive ones.

Ace, meanwhile, puts it in characteristically more pungent terms:

You can ask your average person: Do you wish people would exercise more? Take more of an interest in their health? Stop eating too much? Stop smoking? Stop drinking so much? Stop gambling away their kids’ college funds?

Of course the answer is “yes” to all of these (for most respondents).

But again that’s just the sales pitch, not the actual offer.

Give them the actual offer and most will say No. Because the actual offer is:

Do you wish to empower a cadre of busybody bureaucrats, who frankly are largely mediocrities at best, but believe themselves to be chosen for greatness, to boss you around your whole life, in order to make sure some other people aren’t eating french fries and having a cigarette?

The real answer is “NO!,” because the real answer is, “Look, sure I want other people to live better lives, but frankly, I don’t care very much about that and I’m sure not paying for my own personal censor to scold me for making “bad” choices.“

In short, Americans have come to believe that the Left is offering us a bargain we don’t particularly want, at least at the price that comes with it — and there is always a price.

Warren Moore is a regular contributor to The American Culture, and Associate Professor of English at Newberry College, in Newberry, SC. He also writes at his home blog, Professor Mondo.