Phillips sees expenses scandal resulting in “possible terminal wipe-out” of Labor Party

(Note: comments in this entry begin here. Also, can a modern liberal society maintain an ideal of public service? With further thoughts on that question here.)

Jeff in England writes: “I don’t know if you grasp that this MP expenses scandal has burgeoned into a much bigger issue than the financial crisis. People seem almost on the verge of a revolution over this. If only they could get as excited about immigration.”

I haven’t started to grasp the scale of this scandal. Jeff sent an article by Melanie Phillips that starts with this: “As is becoming more obvious by the day, the scale of public fury aroused by the parliamentary expenses scandal exceeds anything in living memory.” The piece is worth reading (though Phillips bizarrely criticizes the political establishment for ignoring the immigration issue, which she herself has resolutely ignored for years).

Each of her Mail columns links several of her recent columns. Here is her article on the scandal from May 12, in which she details some of the incredible things the MPs did with their expense accounts. You have to read it to believe it, and this is just barely touching what’s there.

The details and scale of what they were up to are beyond belief.

‘Flipping’ the designation of their main and second homes to manipulate the expenses system to their advantage and to avoid paying various taxes. [LA replies: this is most amazing. As I understand it, they were given expenses to live in London away from their homes while attending Parliament. Flipping the designation means that the money that was supposed to go for helping them reside in London, went instead for home improvements in their main home away from London.

Claiming help with mortgage payments for houses that were already paid for.

[Luton South MP Margaret Moran claimed £22,500 of taxpayers’ money for treating dry rot in a house in Southampton, many miles from her constituency or Westminster]

Getting the taxpayer to reimburse them for eyeliner, plastic bags, nappies, mock Tudor beams, Maltesers, nail polish, plasma TVs, Christmas tree decorations, horse manure, bath plugs; and on and surreally on.

Phillips of course hates the BNP and doesn’t want them to do well. But she makes some remarkable recommendations and predictions:

Parliament has thus shown it is simply incapable of policing itself. Therefore, reforming the rules won’t address the real problem. Even the ‘independent auditing body’ being suggested will still be set up by Parliament.

It is Parliament that has to be held to account for its malfeasance—and the only way to do that is by calling an immediate General Election so the people can throw out all these wretches.

An election is also essential because, as former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey has observed, the moral authority of the House of Commons is shot to pieces.

A belief in the basic integrity of Parliament is essential if the laws that it passes are to secure popular consent. But how can any such laws command public respect when the institution passing them has not only been revealed to be institutionally corrupt, but refuses to acknowledge this fact?

How are people to be expected not to fiddle the system or avoid paying their taxes when the Chancellor of the Exchequer stands accused of ‘flipping’ the status of his residences back and forth to milk the expenses system—including getting his stamp duty paid by the taxpayer?

The proposal which has surfaced to get rid of the expenses system and instead raise MPs’ salaries merely shows yet further how out of touch politicians are with reality.

It’s as if an employee caught with his hand in the till were to ask the boss he was robbing for a raise, on the grounds that he had only tried to steal from him because he was so poor.

It’s not poverty that caused MPs to behave in this way. It is the breakdown of morality, ethics and the very concept of public service among MPs and those in Parliament whom they appoint to police their behaviour.

Even a General Election would fail to get to the heart of the problem. What was noticeable over the weekend was the almost total silence from the Conservative party, which is doubtless quaking in its boots for fear that further revelations will show Tory MPs were also playing the system in this way.

The real problem is that the entire political class is deeply damaged, thus confirming the already widespread public belief that politicians are ‘all as bad as each other’.

The question now is what will be the consequences of all this. For with such an unprecedented breakdown of Parliamentary integrity and loss of public trust, we are surely in uncharted territory.

One obvious possibility is that, come the election, people will refuse to vote at all or vote for fringe parties. But our electoral system makes it unlikely that any of these small parties will get very far.

What is more plausible is that Labour faces not just electoral defeat, but a possibly terminal wipe-out.

When socialism collapsed with the Berlin Wall in 1989, all that was left of Labour’s historic mission—which has hung in the air like the Cheshire Cat’s grin—was its sense of its own moral virtue.

This sustained it through the illusion politics of the Blairite ‘Third Way’. But now that Blairism and the claim to moral virtue have been blown to shreds, the demise of Labour that has been so long predicted may finally come to pass.

The result of that could even be a realignment of British politics more generally, with a split across the political spectrum between social conservatives, who want to defend Judeo-Christian values against the onslaught being mounted upon them, and libertarians, who support that attack.

But in the meantime, the more immediate danger is that Parliamentary democracy is in danger of going down the plughole with the Home Secretary’s dirty bathwater.

[End Phillips article.]

I said a few months ago that Britain needs nothing less than a revolution, throwing out the entire present ruling class and its ideology. What’s happening now doesn’t go that far, but it sure seems like a step in the right direction.

Also, isn’t is remarkable that Phillips identifies the bad guys not as the politically correct, multicultural left, which is her usual bete noire, but as “libertarians”? Perhaps she is understanding that the real enemy—or, rather, the bad principle that all the enemies have in common, whatever their particular name and ideology—is the elevation of rights and privileges of individuals—of all individuals, in Britain and the world—over the primary existence of the British nation itself. The libertarians would thus include what we in America call liberals, as well as libertarians, economic conservatives, neoconservatives, multiculturalists, globalists, Randians. What all these factions and ideologies have in common is contempt for or indifference to the nation as a concrete cultural entity and support for policies that will dissolve it.

Here are selections from an article on the expenses scandal from the May 13 Christian Science Monitor:

British Parliament finds steep cost in ‘expense’ scandal: credibility

The public is paying for everything from cleaning moats to changing light bulbs. Amid the fury, support for Gordon Brown’s party is at its lowest in 65 years.

By Ben Quinn

[…] The details on expense claims lodged by members of Parliament (MPs) have been published by the Daily Telegraph newspaper in recent days. The stories are making a mockery of many MPs’ attempts to convince voters that they are sharing some of the pain of the recession.

Those tainted by the scandal include a Conservative MP, Douglas Hogg, who lodged expenses claims of £2,000 ($3,025) for the cost of cleaning of a moat around his country estate—not exactly the type of thing that helps his party in its ongoing efforts to jettison an image of being a bastion of the upper classes.

The light bulb gag was inspired by another Conservative MP, David Willets, who billed the taxpayers more than £115 ($174) for workmen to replace 25 light bulbs at his second home in London. The MP, who is nicknamed “two brains” because of his intellect, and who acts as his party’s spokesman on innovation and skills, charged another £80 ($121) to “change lights in bathroom,” as part of a £2,191.38 ($3,318) invoice for odd tasks that included cleaning a shower head.

From the governing Labour Party, Kitty Ussher, currently a minister overseeing reform of housing benefits for the public, carried out a £20,000 pound ($30,000) makeover of her London home soon after she was first elected, despite already having lived there for five years.

Others lodged claims for gardening and various other costs that were supposedly sustained as a result of their duties as MPs. However, the most damaging revelations relate to MPs who used their parliamentary perks to carry out major refurbishments to properties that were then sold on at a profit….

Mark Garnett from Lancaster University, who specializes in the study of British political culture, says the expenses controversy is unprecedented.

“Obviously we’ve had major scandals in the past, such as the selling of peerages to the House of Lords in the early part of the last century by the then-prime minister, Lloyd George. But this is unique, for three reasons. First, hardly anyone in the House of Commons is untainted. Even those who haven’t tried to make a profit from the system have claimed for items which were not strictly necessary for the conduct of their duties.”

The second reason this scandal is unique is rooted in a “far more intrusive and disrespectful” news media, Professor Garnett says. “For more than a decade, it has taken delight in pulling down individual politicians, and the chance to put the whole lot of them in the pillory is a dream come true.

“Third, this scandal comes after a series of developments which have eroded public confidence in politicians. Not least of these is the rise and fall of ‘New’ Labour, which promised to clean up politics and has presided over a series of unsavory incidents. But the climate of economic gloom makes the idea of greedy MPs even more intolerable to most voters.”

The affair is also the latest hammer blow to the already under siege premiership of Gordon Brown, who as prime minister has staggered from one travail to another following a high point earlier this year when he hosted the Group of 20 summit….

Brown, who is in serious trouble ahead of a general election due by June 2010, now faces the prospect of a leadership coup by his despairing followers. His predicament was underlined in a poll published over the weekend in the Mail on Sunday newspaper, which put support for the Labour Party at just 23 percent, the lowest rating the party has recorded since such surveys were first carried out in 1943. A separate poll for the tabloid News of the World on Sunday showed that 68 percent of Britons thought the expenses scandal had directly hurt the prime minister.

A boon for the far right?

…

On wider scale, analysts warn that one of the biggest winners could the Far Right British National Party (BNP). It currently has no MPs at the Westminster Parliament, and is ostracized from the political mainstream because of its racist message—only whites, for instance, are allowed to be members—but is now poised to make a breakthrough at elections next month for the European Parliament, which sits in Brussels and includes representatives from across the European Union.

Toby Helm, a veteran British political journalist who works for the Observer, a national newspaper, says that one of the most striking things about the expenses scandal “is that there seemed to have been a collective agreement between MPs in order to keep this secret for so long.”

“Public anger cannot be underestimated, and with the European elections just weeks away, it could have major implications in terms of potentially increasing the votes of smaller parties—such as the BNP. They are in a position to make the type of breakthrough that the far right has never made before in British politics.”…

[end of CSM article]

- end of initial entry -

Paul Nachman writes:

Your entry about the British MPs, quoting extensively from Melanie Phillips, brings up something that may be too obvious for comment: the systematic atrocious behavior of the MPs is like that of so many other legislators in so many other legislatures. California comes to mind, especially, but isn’t the New York legislature hellbound, too (as Joel Le Fevre would say)? The Illinois political class may, to my surprise, be even worse now than when I was growing up there. Many in Congress, itself, also seem to have lost the core idea of public service.

LA replies:

But modern liberalism is just as incompatible with public service as it is with, say, patriotism.

Modern liberalism says that the larger realities to which we belong and which form us, such as sexual distinctions, family, religion, ethnicity, race, nation, are either unreal or suspect, and that the self is the highest reality. It says that there is no transcendent truth, because something is not true unless it’s a direct object of experience. What happens then to the ideal of public service? An ideal is something transcendent. So ideals are out the window.

A society that believes in the complete liberation of the individual and his desires will not be able to maintain the ideal of public service.

Jeff in England writes:

Great entry by you in VFR on Expensegate here in the UK.

It has taken me a while to get used to the enormity of this issue. I had just said “oh it’s more of the same, some corrupt MP’s caught, no big deal, happens all the time,” etc. But it proved to be an issue “greater than itself” (that’s a Dylan reference from the song “High Water” on “Love and Theft” when one character says to Dylan’s narrator, “Great as you are man, you’ll never be greater than yourself”).

I think the “freaking out” by the British public on this issue against all three major parties is at least in part a letting out of the anger built up from various previous issues and the deceptions involved within those issues:

1) The financial crisis, in particular the continued awarding of bonuses to various banking executives of failed banks, insurance executives of bankrupt insurance companies, executives of failed stock investment firms etc , while many ordinary people lost their life’s savings.

2) The Iraq war issue, in particular Tony Blair’s Labour government’s lies about Saddam’s nuclear capabilities which deceived the public into thinking a war against Iraq was necessary followed by the subsequent attempts by Blair and the cabinet to blame their decision to go to war on wrong information.

3) The immigration issue: In particular the Labour government’s deception about the scale of Eastern European immigration as well as the government generally ignoring the implications of mass immigration on the UK.

So when this Parliamentary expenses scandal was revealed (thanks to The Daily Telegraph investigation), the volcano of emotions that was simmering reached the point of eruption.

But I do not think there will be riots in the streets. In a way they are very passe.

Rather, people are rising up in a far more positive manner.

They are literally forcing the politicians (of all parties) to cleanse parliament by threatening to remove them at election time. The media is at one with the people on this.

This scenario reflects (in part) a New Paradigm: the death of a controlled collectivism by various mainstream political parties and the birth of a new democratic individualism. In the age of the internet, democracy will now move forward with people no longer loyal to any particular party. Perhaps the long rumoured electronic voting in every home will be part of that change. Blogging is certainly part of this new paradigm. Ditto interactive TV. People power based on the informed individual may become a reality.

The people are speaking (about some things).

The Speaker of the Commons has been toppled.

Several MP’s and executives of the mainstream parties have already had to resign.

There are already serious calls for a new British Constitution to be forged!

I wish this anger and people power was focused on the immigration issue.

No such luck.

There is still not the will for that by the British public.

The “people” are more than willing to rise up against an invasion of the integrity of the own sacred political institutions. Psychologically speaking it is further bringing down of the “father” so to speak. Or in this case, the cleansing of the father. But for various reasons previously analysed by you and others, they seem unable to summon the will to fight a foreign immigrant invasion, even after atrocious terrorist acts were committed.

As I have said, the best chance for that will to be summoned will be either after a near complete economic collapse or a massive terrorist attack (nuclear, biological etc.) beyond anything we have seen (I repeat that I do not advocate this).

If at least one of those scenarios do not happen, the public will focus on cleansing its own institutions but not on repelling immigrant invasions.

“Snouck Hurgronje” writes from the Netherlands:

You wrote: “I said a few months ago that Britain needs nothing less than a revolution, throwing out the entire present ruling class and its ideology. What’s happening now doesn’t go that far, but it sure seems like a step in the right direction.”

This could also be a step in the direction of more authority for the European Parliament in British politics.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

So many of the people who are now throwing bricks through MP’s windows and boiling over with fury at the corruption and basic disregard for moral integrity among the people that they have elected, will also be the first to exclaim that a man’s personal moral conduct “has nothing to do with” the business of governing. They elect people without any regard to their basic trustworthiness, or the seriousness with which they treat sacred oaths such as marriage, then pat themselves on the back for being so hip, so wise, so sophisticated, so modern. Then they are shocked and outraged—not pretending, mind you, but genuinely shocked and outraged—when those same politicians turn out to be entirely corrupt and treat their public trust with total contempt.

In this country, if you are attempting to get a security clearance for anything really serious, you will find it very difficult to do so should it come to your adjudicator’s attention that you are an incorrigible adulterer, or if you have very bad credit, or if you are a serial liar, or a known cheat of some kind. This is obviously a good policy, because it keeps people of shady ethical character away from jobs that will give them access to secure information, or even a large overseas expense account. Yet public officialdom in the West—men like Rudy Giuliani—are repeatedly voted into office even when it has become known that the people closest to them simply cannot trust them. It is considered moralizing, scolding, even “puritanical,” to suggest that Bill Clinton’s personal behavior might have any tenuous connection with the likelihood that he might violate the public trust.

The British are angry, but they are not really angry because their pols have behaved unethically, which happens constantly. They are angry because this scandal involves their money, and they can claim to be the aggrieved party. They are in a paroxysm of rage because this time it is their own personal ox being gored, good and hard. But having abandoned any sense of a binding public morality, they’ll just get more of the same later on, and because they are largely liberals, they’ll be just as shocked the next time around.

LA writes:

Some first rate comments here.

Larry G. writes:

What strikes me about this scandal is how ordinary the expenses are. If this was an American scandal we’d be reading about junkets to Las Vegas on government jets with $4,000/hour prostitutes and bowls full of cocaine. I first heard about this in a video on Hot Air of an MP confronting a BBC interviewer. The MP said his salary was about £62,000 (about $98,000), while the interviewer admitted her salary was around £92,000. The MP makes about 1/2 of a US congressional salary. They could have avoided all this if they had simply given themselves a pay raise.

Why didn’t they? I get the impression of Britain as an impoverished country, both financially and spiritually. This was once the seat of a worldwide empire! What have they done to themselves? They’ve destroyed their industries, imported poverty stricken enemy aliens, and demoralized their people. What do they have now to offer the world? And what will become of us, as we drive full-throttle down the same road?

LA replies:

So, the MPs’ position in their own defense is simply that they are not paid enough, and that everyone knows this, so these expenses are allowed to them under the tacit understanding that they need this extra money to make up the shortfall. And therefore from their point of view they didn’t do anything so wrong. This was not large scale peculation, but a modest supplement on their income for ordinary living expenses.

At first hearing, it sounds sort of reasonable. But if this was the case, then, as you say, why didn’t they simply raise their salaries?

Kevin V. writes:

You wrote:

“But modern liberalism is just as incompatible with public service as it is with, say, patriotism.

“Modern liberalism says that the larger realities to which we belong and which form us, such as sexual distinctions, family, religion, ethnicity, race, nation, are either unreal or suspect, and that the self is the highest reality. It says that there is no transcendent truth, because something is not true unless it’s a direct object of experience. What happens then to the ideal of public service? An ideal is something transcendent. So ideals are out the window.

“A society that believes in the complete liberation of the individual and his desires will not be able to maintain the ideal of public service.”

This comment of yours is just about the best thing I’ve ever read from you. Well done. This points needs to be hammered home by true conservatives. If there was any opposition group at all in this country right now they could be making the case that the corruption from Springfield to Sacramento to Washington to London is inherent in the political culture and cannot be challenged until we challenge the underlying ideology.

LA replies:

Yes to your point, and thank you, though I don’t feel my point was made very well.

Almost no one in our culture makes these connections, or they do so in a limited, partial way. At an immigration reform conference in the early ’90s, I said, “People who go around wearing T-shirts are not people who will have the self-discipline and will to control our borders.” A young woman at the meeting thought that was just off the wall. Of course, the culture has gone a long way beyond T-shirts since then. So I’ll update my statement: People who have gone through their college years and twenties behaving like the characters in Tom Wolfe’s novel, I am Charlotte Simmons, and have not repented of it, will not have self-discipline, force of will, and devotion to country to control our borders. But it remains the case that no conservatives make the connection between our pervasive “liberated-self” culture on one hand and all kinds of social and political deterioration on the other, including the massive irresponsibility and frequently the corruption of public officials. It doesn’t occur to anyone to criticize the former any more than it would occur to them to criticize non-discriminatory legal immigration or racial equality. But the simple fact is that people who are loose with themselves with be loose with their society. Why don’t people see this? Because then they would have to oppose that looseness, which in their minds would be the same as saying, “Let’s undo our entire society as it has evolved since 1960 and become fascists.” They can no longer imagine a state of ordered freedom, of restrained individualism—a fine phrase of Sam Francis’s which to me captures the essence of what America is about, or used to be about.

Let’s take an obvious example of this idea. How many people reading the Mail—decent, concerned people who are horrified by Britain’s uncontrolled immigration, horrified by the collapse of law and order, horrified by the spread of Clockwork Orange-type savagery in their country, horrified by the vicious narcissism and irresponsibility of their public officials—make any connection between those problems and the Mail’s Femail section, with its nonstop immersion in the sex lives of celebrities and its normalization of the shameless, liberated self? Don’t they realize that their political leaders, both in their public duties and their private lives, are behaving just like those celebrities?

I’ve often said that a conservatism that doesn’t recognize racial realities and oppose liberal racial ideology is not a serious conservatism. By the same token, a conservatism that does not recognize our culture’s commitment to personal looseness in dress, speech, popular entertainments, and sexual behavior, and doesn’t oppose it, is not a serious conservatism. This is fundamental. Yet no mainstream conservatives that I’m aware of make this point. They might criticize one or another, easy-to-identify-and-criticize aspect of the moral disorder—pornography, abortion—but not the “normalized” culture of libertinism of which those things are expressions.

The connection between the moral nihilism from within and the immigration invasion from without was the central theme of my 2003 booklet/essay, Erasing America: The Politics of the Borderless Nation, which is still available.

May 23

Jeff in England writes:

I think it is exaggerating the point to say “no conservatives” (other than yourself) make the case between our pervasive ‘liberated-self’ culture and all kinds of social and political (Note: it seems you could have added the words moral and ethical here) deterioration on the other including the massive irresponsibility and frequently the corruption of public officials.”

Unless I am misunderstanding your point, there are definitely some of what I am calling moral anti-libertarian conservatives around. Roger Scruton, the Christian philosopher, comes to mind here. [LA replies: Scruton has been well known as an atheist for his whole career, and just announced in the last couple of months that he has become a Christian; that doesn’t make him a Christian philosopher.] Mitt Romney, a dedicated Mormon, may fit the bill in the U.S. Ditto many other Christian conservatives. Michael Medved is an anti-libertarian conservative as far as I know. Even some Muslim conservatives may fit the bill.

In addition, there are some moral anti-libertarian liberals (and even leftists) who emphasize that they oppose the ‘liberated-self culture’ way of life. Various Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist and yes even Muslim liberals would be considered moral and anti-libertarian.

Shmuely Boteach, (Chasidic Jewish writer and talk show host) is one specific person that springs to mind. He is a liberal who is very committed to a conservative social view. Good ole Jimmy Carter might be another though I will have to recheck his credentials. I have Buddhist friends who might fit the bill.

‘The Culture of Narcissism’ by Christopher Lasch (have you read it) was an important and defining book which dealt with the causes and effects of that ‘liberated-self culture’. Lasch was a critic of varied libertarian segments of leftism, liberalism and conservatism and was ‘attacked’ by such people from all three groups. His Wikipedia entry is worth googling.

“So why don’t people see this” you ask. Well some people do. You seem to paint yourself as the only one who sees the light on this point and I think that is not the case. I know you didn’t mean to make this point(s) in a holier than thou way but it can come across like that.

As you can see, I am not commenting on your race related points for now.

LA replies:

First, please don’t make this be about me. I’m trying to make a certain observations about society, which are either correct or not; I’m not trying to say that I am the only person making these observations. And you should read Erasing America, which is short and you could read it in an hour or two.

Second, as I indicated in my comment, of course various social conservatives attack moral decay and moral libertarianism. But my point was that they attack fairly obvious aspects of it such as illegitimacy and pornography, not the pervasive (and therefore unseen and normalized) liberatory, vulgar aspects of our culture, as reflected in dress, manners, speech, TV shows, TV advertisements, sports events; and making the connection between our normalized looseness and our inability to defend our society from internal threats such as statism and socialism and external threats such as immigration and globalism.

And even on the obvious issue of illegitimacy, the single most morally destructive thing in our society, mainstream conservatives have largely dropped the ball. As I’ve pointed out many times, that used to be a central concern for them, but after the election of G.W. Bush, with his praise of single mothers, they moved away from it.

Scruton has probably gone after some of these things and probably comes the closest to the kind of thing I’m talking about, but I’d have to see quotations. I doubt Romney has. He likes to be liked and is not exactly someone to challenge the manners and morals of the whole society. As for Michael Medved, the last time I saw him he was giving a talk to some Republican group saying that that Sarah Palin is a great conservative because she and her husband are hot. He became almost orgasmic about it. It was unspeakably vulgar. There is someone who is a part of the cultural decay I’m talking about, not a critic of it. As I’ve shown before, Medved attacks things that are openly nihilistic, anti-Christian etc., but if these same trends are presented in a “nice” guise, he praises them. Thus he was completely suckered in by a pro-homosexual propaganda movie years ago because it had a “sweet” aspect. As long as nihilism doesn’t come across as overtly nasty, he likes it. In this respect, Medved is like Norman Podhoretz, who only opposes leftist things that clearly hostile and disruptive, while he celebrated, as a victory for conservatism, the movement for homoseuxal “marriage,” because it was not disruptive and was affirming marriage. A movement to destroy marriage, he praised as an affirmation of marriage! And obviously Medved would not critically connect cultural vulgarity and sexual liberation with our inability to defend our country’s existence and sovereignty, because what he opposes, far more than liberalism, is conservatives who are against illegal immigration and a North American Union.

I read Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism many years ago, but his anaysis of the narcissist was rather abstract. I don’t remember that he discussed the kinds of issues being discussed here, but he may have.

You mention other people in a vague way but I would need to see quotations.

Finally, I think it’s completely inappropriate to bring up Muslim “conservatives” and “liberals” as people defending our culture. Muslims exist in a framework outside our culture and always will. Their ethical basis is the Islamic religion, which commands the elimination of our society, and would do even if we had the morality of 1950 or 1850 or 1250. Your continuing efforts to normalize Muslims and make them seem part of our society is infinitely more unrealistic than my argument, which you constantly attack as unrealistic, that Muslims don’t belong in our society and must be made to leave.

Jeff replies:

Yes I know it wasn’t meant to be about you, it just might seem that way to someone.

I take your point about Medved.

I just mentioned Romney off the top of my head.

Whether Muslims should be part of our civilisation is not the point here. I was referring to a very specific point you made about liberated-self amoral culture etc. Theoretically, Muslims are among those who are against it. That they have other characteristics which makes you and I oppose their presence in the West is a somewhat separate point.

The same goes for the Shmuely Boteach sort of liberal. Boteach is in agreement with your moral views on liberated self and basic morality/ethics. That he is a liberal on other issues (immigration, race etc.) is neither here nor there regarding this specific point. You made a specific point and it is my view that people from all sorts of groups could theoretically agree with you. Of course common sense says conservatives would be more prone to agree with you than leftists or liberals. And common sense says that most mainstream religious people would be more likely to agree with you than either atheists or pagans. But even here, theoretically there can be exceptions.

As for Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism), both of us need to reread him and see what exactly he does say. I just remember that he covered the topic in general. Ditto for VFR readers.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 22, 2009 01:51 AM | Send