TWO SOLITUDES
If it were just Good King Barack and Henrietta Hughes, rulers and subjects, all would be well. But America still has a citizenry: the productive class—the ones whose labors have to fund both the swollen state bureaucracy and its dependents. It’s tough if you happen to fall into this third category. Most of the time, such as at that town hall meeting in Fort Myers, you’re not even part of the national conversation: you live in the Flownover Country. In 1945, Hugh MacLennan wrote a novel set in Montreal whose title came to sum up the relationship between the English and the French in Canada:
In the United States, especially in the present election, we get glimpses of two political solitudes that have been created not by any plausible socio-economic division within society, nor by any deep division between different ethnic tribes, but tautologically by the notion of “two solitudes” itself. The nation is divided, roughly half-and-half, between people who instinctively resent the Nanny State, and those who instinctively long for its ministrations.52
John Edwards, yesterday’s coming man, had an oft retailed stump speech about “the two Americas,” a Disraelian portrait of Dickensian gloom conjured in the mawkish drool of a Depression-era sob-sister: one America was a wasteland of shuttered mills and shivering “coatless girls,” while in the other America Dick Cheney and his Halliburton fat cats were sitting ’round the pool swigging crude straight from the well and toasting their war profits all day long.53 Edwards was right about the “two Americas,” but not about the division: in one America, those who subscribe to the ruling ideology can access a world of tenured security lubricated by government and without creating a dime of wealth for the overall economy; in the other America, millions of people go to work every day to try to support their families and build up businesses and improve themselves, and the harder they work the more they’re penalized to support the government class in its privileges. Traditionally, he who paid the piper called the tune. But not anymore. Flownover Country pays the piper, very generously, in salaries, benefits, pensions, and perks. But Conformicrat America calls the tune, the same unending single-note dirge. David Warren regards these as “two basically irreconcilable views of reality”: “Only in America are they so equally balanced. Elsewhere in the west, the true believers in the Nanny State have long since prevailed.”54
Increasingly, America’s divide is about the nature of the state itself—about the American idea. And in that case why go on sharing the same real estate? As someone once said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
The Flownover Country’s champion ought, in theory, to be the Republican Party. But, even in less fractious times, this is a loveless marriage. Much of the GOP establishment is either seduced by the Conformicrats or terrified by them, to the point where they insist on allowing the liberals to set the parameters of the debate—on health care, immigration, education, Social Security—and then wonder why elections are always fought on the Democrats’ terms. If you let the left make the rules, the right winds up being represented by the likes of Bob Dole and John McCain, decent old sticks who know how to give dignified concession speeches. If you want to get rave reviews for losing gracefully, that’s the way to go. If you want to prevent Big Government driving America off a cliff, it’s insufficient.
The Conformicrats need Flownover Country to fund them. It’s less clear why Flownover Country needs the Conformicrats—and a house divided against itself cannot stand without the guy who keeps up the mortgage payments.
According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009, 47 percent of U.S. households paid no federal income tax.55 Obviously, many of them paid other kinds of taxes—state tax, property tax, cigarette tax. But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it, whether it’s national defense, or interest payments on the debt, or vital stimulus funding to pump monkeys in North Carolina full of cocaine (true, seriously, but don’t ask me why).56 Furthermore, if you pay local tax but no federal income tax, you’re more easily seduced by the most malign of Big Government’s distortions: its insistence that more and more aspects of life have to be regulated by a centralized regime in Washington rather than by varieties of state, county, and municipal bodies. As a general principle, if you pay nothing for government, why would you want less of it? More specifically, if you pay nothing for federal government, why would the relentless centralization of American statism bother you?
In 2009, Ken Rogulski of WJR Detroit reported on a federal aid “giveaway” at the city’s Cobo Center:
WJR: Why are you here?
WOMAN #1: To get some money.
WJR: What kind of money?
WOMAN #1: Obama money.
WJR: Where’s it coming from?
WOMAN #1: Obama.
WJR: And where did Obama get it?
WOMAN #1: I don’t know. His stash. I don’t know. [She laughs.] I don’t know where he got it from, but he’s giving it to us, to help us.
WOMAN #2: And we love him.
WOMAN #1: We love him. That’s why we voted for him!
WOMEN (chanting): Obama! Obama! Obama! [They laugh.]
WJR: …and where did Obama get the funds?
WOMAN #2: Ummm, I have no idea, to tell you the truth. He’s the President.57
Well, he got it from me, and from you. Every dollar in Obama’s “stash” comes from me, you, or the Chinese Politburo. And redistributing it on the grounds above only inflates these ladies’ blithe assumptions. But so what?
If the object is to increase government, and expand the power of those in government, then the “Obama’s stash” route works just fine.
By contrast, if you fall into the taxation category and you’re stuck with the tab for Obama’s stash, you’re not only paying for groups that get a better hearing in Washington, but ensuring that the socioeconomic conditions of the republic will trend, mercilessly, against you. The small business class—men and women in unglamorous lines of work that keep the Flownover Country going—are disfavored by the Conformicrats. They are occasionally acknowledged by our rulers with rhetorical flourishes—“tax cuts for working families”—but, on closer inspection, these “tax cuts” invariably mean not reductions in the rate of income seizure but a “tax credit” reimbursed from the seizure in return for living your life the way the government wants you to, and expanding the size of the dependent class.
United States income tax is becoming the twenty-first-century equivalent of the “jizya”—the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens. In return for funding the Caliphate, the infidels were permitted to carry on practicing their faith. Under the American jizya, in return for funding Big Government, the non-believers are permitted to carry on practicing their faith in capitalism, small business, economic activity, and the other primitive belief systems to which they cling so touchingly.
In the Islamic world, the infidel tax base eventually wised up. You can see it literally in the landscape in rural parts of the Balkans: Christian trades-men got fed up paying the jizya and moved out of the towns up into remote hills far from the shakedown crowd. In less mountainous terrain where it’s harder to lie low, non-Muslims found it easier to convert. That’s partly what drove Muslim expansion. Once Araby had been secured for Islam, it was necessary to move on to the Levant, and to Persia, and to Central Asia and North Africa and India and Europe—in search of new infidels to mug. I’m not so invested in my analogy that I’m suggesting America’s Big Government shakedown racket will be forced to invade Canada and Scandinavia.
For one thing, everywhere else got with the Big Government program well ahead of America and those on
