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The Pyrrhic Liberal Victory

Ross Douthat’s excellent column yesterday discussed the fraying of the social fabric in American civil society, and its relation to our changing politics. He noted the GOP’s tin ear to the economic aspects of that rolling disaster, but said that the recently victorious Democrats have nothing to gloat about. Excerpt: But if conservatives don’t acknowledge […]

Ross Douthat’s excellent column yesterday discussed the fraying of the social fabric in American civil society, and its relation to our changing politics. He noted the GOP’s tin ear to the economic aspects of that rolling disaster, but said that the recently victorious Democrats have nothing to gloat about. Excerpt:

But if conservatives don’t acknowledge the crisis’s economic component, liberalism often seems indifferent to its deeper social roots. The progressive bias toward the capital-F Future, the old left-wing suspicion of faith and domesticity, the fact that Democrats have benefited politically from these trends — all of this makes it easy for liberals to just celebrate the emerging America, to minimize the costs of disrupted families and hollowed-out communities, and to treat the places where Americans have traditionally found solidarity outside the state (like the churches threatened by the Obama White House’s contraceptive mandate) as irritants or threats.

This is a great flaw in the liberal vision, because whatever role government plays in prosperity, transfer payments are not a sufficient foundation for middle-class success. It’s not a coincidence that the economic era that many liberals pine for — the great, egalitarian post-World War II boom — was an era that social conservatives remember fondly as well: a time of leaping church attendance, rising marriage rates and birthrates, and widespread civic renewal and engagement.

The point of all this is identify the cloud behind the silver lining of the victorious new Democratic coalition. Douthat:

Liberals look at the Obama majority and see a coalition bound together by enlightened values — reason rather than superstition, tolerance rather than bigotry, equality rather than hierarchy. But it’s just as easy to see a coalition created by social disintegration and unified by economic fear.

How terrible it is that Christopher Lasch died so (relatively) young. This is his moment.

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