Lords, peasants, and skeptics

Victor Davis Hanson notes that today our

notions of wealth and poverty are frozen in amber around 1965, as if the technological revolution never took place and the federal welfare state hadn’t been erected — as if today’s poor were the emaciated Joads, rather than struggling with inordinate rates of obesity and diabetes, in air-conditioned apartments replete with big-screen TVs, and owning cell phones with more computing power than was available to the wealthy as recently as the 1980s. Flash-mobbing sneaker stores is more common than storming Costcos for bags of rice and flour.

Hanson also notes that the progressives now in charge of our country are actually medieval in their world view.

By medieval I mean that they adhere to accepted doctrine — in this case, the progressive doctrine of always finding solutions in larger government and more taxes — despite all the evidence to the contrary. The irony is that they project just such ideological blinkers onto their conservative opponents.

For example, their views on education:

For now, ensuring that the transgendered can use either public-school restroom is about all that he can offer to raise test scores and create a safe high-school campus.

The medieval-minded progressive clings to all sorts of calcified bromides for educational chaos — higher taxes, more mandates and regulation, more entitlements, and always more money. Charter schools, deunionization, a back-to-basics curriculum, or restored standards of discipline and behavior just rub the medieval liberal the wrong way.

Al Gore is the medieval liberal par excellence, whose own life is not lived in accordance with his ideology, and who is more interested in becoming wealthier than in leading a modest but principled life. Like the worst of medieval clerics, Gore is an elitist who spouts pieties to save his soul, as compensation for selling it to the highest bidder for fossil-fuel-generated dollars.

The medieval liberal could not imagine himself the materialist and reactionary that he most certainly is, wedded to Detroit and Chicago nostrums of big government, high taxes, increased entitlements, tyrannical unions, racial condescension, and apartheid — and in pursuance of the metrosexual good life.

Of lords, peasants, and skeptics:

The medieval world of two classes, lord and peasant, continued for centuries. What was hated, then and now, was the newcomer, the upstart, the man without contractual obligations, neither rich nor poor, neither dependent nor surrounded by dependents, the skeptic who Tocqueville thought would keep America from becoming what it is becoming.

We need a cultural Reformation, a Renaissance in classical thinking, a return to true diversity and real intellectual tolerance that rejects the medieval reactionary’s mind, exposes his hypocrisy, and recreates three classes from his two.