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elfsEzra Klein interviewed George Will (George Will Makes the Conservative Case Against Democracy) last week and something he said really stuck out at me, because it triggered the same reaction that David Frum's Dead Right did.
George Will is a straight white man born of privilege who has never served in the military. His parents were white, upper-middle class, his father a highly respected academic. He went to a public but still highly privileged high school, got degrees from Trinity and Oxford, worked for politicians and ended up teaching at Harvard.
In the essay with Klein, Will says the following:
David Frum is also a straight white man born of privilege who has never served in the military. He went to Harvard and Yale, then rode the right-ving welfare rails straight up to The Wall Street Journal and a regular gig on NPR. In 1994, David Frum wrote about the exact same conservative impulse:
These are the same position. To quote yet another great scion of conservatism, Winston Churchill, "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." (Source) Neither George Will nor David Frum has ever been in the line of fire1. Neither has ever faced homelessness, gone a day without knowing where their next meal is coming from. Their notions of going without out sleep are memories of being young men committing themselves to getting other conservatives elected. They may, on the rare occasion, have felt a bit of a chill. They know the police are on their side. They know the burglar alarms in their house work.
The most "exhilarating" thing either man has done is invest in the stock market. Either that or choose a wife.
Frum and Will look at the great unwashed masses and have spent their entire life trying to tell them that they're wrong about how they feel. The immanent threat of homelessness is either "exhilirating" or "a necessary discipline."
I can't tell which man is the bigger monster, but I'm gonna say it's George Will. Frum's position doesn't take into account the wider world and the way the market he loves has empowered a network of corporations, from the property management firms that own our apartments to the surveillance companies that advertise to us to the people who employ us, to control our lives and make callous decisions about our "utility" and discard us when they're done with us. Will's position is pure gaslighting: you don't appreciate just how exciting it is, that threat to "sleep rough" and without sanitation for days, weeks, and months on end.
1 For that matter, I've never been in the line of fire, either. The people who have are usually rather quiet about it.
George Will is a straight white man born of privilege who has never served in the military. His parents were white, upper-middle class, his father a highly respected academic. He went to a public but still highly privileged high school, got degrees from Trinity and Oxford, worked for politicians and ended up teaching at Harvard.
In the essay with Klein, Will says the following:
The conservative sensibility finds the lack of design and lack of control of a spontaneous-order, free market society to be exhilarating. ... American conservatism celebrates and wants to reconcile people to the hazards and frictions granted, and the creative destruction, the exhilaration of a free society.
David Frum is also a straight white man born of privilege who has never served in the military. He went to Harvard and Yale, then rode the right-ving welfare rails straight up to The Wall Street Journal and a regular gig on NPR. In 1994, David Frum wrote about the exact same conservative impulse:
The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk. Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor, or of the crash of his investment portfolio. Risk makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches them self-control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top. Social security, student loans, and other government programs make it far less catastrophic than it used to be for middle-class people to dissolve their families. Without welfare and food stamps, poor people would cling harder to working-class respectability than they do not.
These are the same position. To quote yet another great scion of conservatism, Winston Churchill, "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." (Source) Neither George Will nor David Frum has ever been in the line of fire1. Neither has ever faced homelessness, gone a day without knowing where their next meal is coming from. Their notions of going without out sleep are memories of being young men committing themselves to getting other conservatives elected. They may, on the rare occasion, have felt a bit of a chill. They know the police are on their side. They know the burglar alarms in their house work.
The most "exhilarating" thing either man has done is invest in the stock market. Either that or choose a wife.
Frum and Will look at the great unwashed masses and have spent their entire life trying to tell them that they're wrong about how they feel. The immanent threat of homelessness is either "exhilirating" or "a necessary discipline."
I can't tell which man is the bigger monster, but I'm gonna say it's George Will. Frum's position doesn't take into account the wider world and the way the market he loves has empowered a network of corporations, from the property management firms that own our apartments to the surveillance companies that advertise to us to the people who employ us, to control our lives and make callous decisions about our "utility" and discard us when they're done with us. Will's position is pure gaslighting: you don't appreciate just how exciting it is, that threat to "sleep rough" and without sanitation for days, weeks, and months on end.
1 For that matter, I've never been in the line of fire, either. The people who have are usually rather quiet about it.
