Yahoo for making the right look stupid, but do something too

Charles Murray's Coming Apart, like The Bell Curve, which he also co-wrote, has become another opportunity to examine why America's poor have no one to blame but themselves. Oh, and liberals too. And the sixties and our culture of moral relativism. Declining wages, growing poverty, evaporating hope, failing schools, none of this has anything to do with the plight of the poor. According to Murray, the problem is a cultural failure, permitted and accelerated by liberal elites. We no longer ask the poor to take responsibility for their lives, or their families, or their behavior. As Murray puts it, the problem is "American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn't." Reread that. Because, if you are a liberal like me, Murray doesn't mean what you think he means. The problem isn't, as is true, in Cleveland and Detroit and Youngstown and Flint, that jobs that once helped a breadwinner provide for his family are gone, the problem, according to Murray, is that doing menial work to try to provide for your family is no longer a source of status in contemporary America. The sixties, according to Murray, destroyed our value system. Somehow, all these years later, we still crave the highs that recreational drugs promise, and casual sex, and easy going good times. Screw work, man!

Murray is right that you can deposit blame for America's decline at the feet of liberals, but not for the reasons he proposes ("that liberal elites, while themselves living lives of probity, have refused to proselytize for the bourgeois virtues to which they subscribe, thus leaving their less discerning fellow-citizens to flounder in the anti-bourgeois legacy of the counter-cultural 1960s"), but because we have become too timid in our defense of the role of government in resisting the persistent assault of corporate capitalism, which aims at pauperizing workers, stripping them of all defenses, limiting their ability to organize, and eliminating their voice in any conversation about social and economic policy. We haven't failed because we let the unemployed smoke pot and live lives filled with unrestrained sexual abandon. We have failed because we have allowed corporations and bankers to dismantle government, defund our schools, and disenfranchise the poor.

Don't misunderstand me, the bad guys are greedy corporate predators, like Bain-era Mitt Romney, and the multinationals that dismantled cities across the rust-belt, eliminating jobs and shifting work overseas, and the Republican party that elevated this ideology of greed and exploitation to the center of their party platform. But I think Democrats have become absorbed, since Clinton, with winning the rhetorical war and have lost sight of what they should do: use government to help the vulnerable. Andrew Sullivan's new Newsweek piece says: "Obama’s greatest skill is in getting his opponents to overreach and self-destruct." Clinton era triangulation was an effort, similarly, to out-position his opponents on the right. As Haley Barbour claimed at the time, Clinton developed "the amazing ability to turn 180 degrees in a wink".

Where is the commitment to champion compassionate, liberal, pro-government politics? Democratic presidents can't only be measured by their ability to make the right look stupid. They have to get things done too. In winning these skirmishes, liberals have lost site of the war, and the right has rolled across the country taking territory.

In a federal system, a commitment to effective government begins in Washington, but requires a similar commitment at the state and local level. While Democrats have been busy deploying defensive tactics in D.C., Republicans have succeeded in dismantling local government,starving counties of tax revenue, and, in the process, destroying public education.Privatizing services that once were public, surrending to for-profit contractors the fees and assessments that residents once paid municipalities. And, of course, distracting voters with a whole array of bogeymen, like gay marriage. In my home state of Ohio in 2004, for example, when voters should have been worried about the continuing economic slide of the state, Republicans got Ohioans agitated about same sex matrimony. This happens time and time again, from place to place, and the response by Democrats has been, on the whole, to move to the right, running candidates that could be "acceptable" to the supposedly right-leaning electorate. The result is, all across America, local politicians, whether Democratic or Republican, who have no deep commitment to the idea that government is good, especially when it is devoted to the work of assisting the most vulnerable. It's sad and profoundly discouraging. And this, not Murray's fantasy about the persistence and destructiveness of sixties-era values, is the source of poor America's plight.