The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town

I was writing a piece on Bush's "ownership society". You do remember, of course "the Great Society", the "New Deal" and other such constructs. Now President Bush talks of implementing his vision (do you also remember Bush the elder's "the vision thing") of an ownership society, to justify his inversion of the income redistribution pyramid. He wants to make everybody "own" something, a home, a 401K, a retirement account. Sounds good, doesn't it? But that vision implies that everybody will also own the risks of living in a capitalist society. The State, in our present iteration, seeks to spread the risks widely through mechanisms that ensure that the many support the few and come to the aid of the weak in need. The State remains objective and impersonal, "bureaucratic" while collecting the resources and distributing the help. Surowiecki in The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town tells it better than I ever could.

In The Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich ("Nickel and Dimed" is her much discussed book) tells how the faith based initiatives are subverting this form of income redistribution, much as Hamas is doing among Palestinians on the West Bank. She tells us "...right-leaning Christian churches represent a coldly Calvinist tradition in which, even speaking in tongues, if it occurs at all, has been routinized and restricted to the pastor. What these churches have to offer, in addition to intangibles like eternal salvation, is concrete, material assistance. They have become an alternative welfare state, whose support rests not only on "faith" but also on the loyalty of the grateful recipients."

"Drive out from Washington to the Virginia suburbs, for example, and you will find the McLean Bible Church [...] still hopping on a weekday night. Dozens of families and teenagers enjoy a low-priced dinner in the cafeteria; a hundred unemployed people meet for prayer and job tips at the "Career Ministry"; divorced and abused women gather in support groups. Among its many services, MBC distributes free clothing to 10,000 poor people a year, helped start an inner-city ministry for at-risk youth and operates a "special needs" ministry for disabled children."

And later:"...What makes the typical evangelicals' social welfare efforts sinister is their implicit -and sometimes not so implicit- linkage to a program for the destruction of public and secular services. This year the connecting words were "abortion" and "gay marriage": to vote for the candidate who opposed these supposed moral atrocities, as the Christian Coalition and so many churches strongly advised, was to vote against public housing subsidies, childcare and expanded public forms of health insurance [...] The evangelical church-based welfare system is being fed by the deliberate destruction of the secular welfare state."

Such is the front on the culture wars.