Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (28 page)

There are more, many of them targeted at the usual suspects: gun owners, Walmart, Tea Partiers, Republicans. This is the poor crone’s road back to relevance, and who can blame her? She’s too old to do
Dancing with the Stars
. Twitter is where old cranks go to live and to die; and it’s exactly how they would want to die—with an audience cheering on their every last crackpot thought. (Note to my relatives: The moment I hit sixty, kill my Twitter account. I fear I may end up tweeting about my Pat Sajak fantasies—and I prefer to keep all that stuff for my memoirs.)

The bedrock of cool politics is simple: Help everyone into the warm, fuzzy arms of government. It’s not exactly a horrible thing to believe, if you close your eyes to the unintended (or perhaps intended) consequences. In order for this cool idea to survive
unscathed, you have to ignore history and detach the incompetence from the price paid by taxpayers. As a kid, I had no idea where things came from. I didn’t realize we paid for the stuff we got. Dad made 25K a year, but he could have been a millionaire. When the milk arrived, I saw the milk (and the milkman, because I’m that old) but never the bill. This is the brain of the child and the liberal. There’s a wall between candy and its cost.

So the belief that government is a good thing that you work for (as opposed to the other way around, the government being awful and it works for you) puts cool kids at an advantage. Because there is no shortage of ideas when the answer is always yes. If a solution to one troubled program is another troubled program, then you can always be Santa Claus. You can keep saying yes, as long as the connection between benefit and cost is never made. You can do this till the day you die, where you’ll be eulogized by a drum circle of IRS agents.

So when a TV host asks a conservative guest, “What can the government do about health care?,” the answer “nothing but harm” may be true, but it’s also uncool and mean. If government is a board game, the right comes off like a petulant child refusing to roll the dice. Government is the game, and we’re the pissy kid who won’t play. Asking a conservative for “government solutions to a problem” is like asking a surgeon to name his favorite cancer. Asking a libertarian to nominate their favorite government program is like asking a hemophiliac to name his favorite sharp object.

Which is why the left is always portrayed as the cool cat, offering solutions that make poor people smile, while the right-winger comes off as cold and brutal, as he shakes his head dismissively, rejecting such romantic wrongheaded notions. Never mind that the solutions offered are abstract poisons, and poisons that
kill you slowly. By not offering government-administered alternatives, we are uncool. Until libertarians offer their own form of “government program,” they will always be seen as aloof, heartless, and evil.

Here’s what I call the Stossel experiment.

Imagine John Stossel, a good-looking chap, taking a pill that would have him say, “We really need more programs to feed the poor and help the homeless.” That Stossel would be a movie star.

Now imagine Stossel saying, “We need government to stop helping the poor because the more they help, the more they hurt.” That Stossel would have a weekly show on Fox Business.

Life would be more glamorous for Stossel if he took the damn pill.

Where does a nation end up, under the thumb of the cool? You have a welfare state mired in debt with nothing to show for it. It’s a three-pronged attack on everything that made America the greatest country ever, a combination of incompetence, a degradation of society’s desire to create and grow, and an economy that simply cannot keep up.

It’s strange to me that the cool, by their very definition committed to being against “the Man,” would embrace an endless maze of bureaucracies that turns everyone into passive zombies, waiting for their allotment of bread and cheese. In the name of the public good, the cool happily hand over their power of individual freedom and the dynamic economy that it produces to a bloated blob of arbitrary administration. You have the media-academic complex saluting protesters demanding more government, so they can do—and think—less. They are marching in favor of dependency. They are marching for the right to suck.

The secret principle governing the cool is a belief that human beings have no imagination, no creativity, no ability to achieve.
Without the centralized beast to hold us together, providing us with the most mediocre of product, we would suffer. The lie, of course, is that the cool is exempt from its own assumptions. They don’t need the government to tell them what to do, whether it be stop drinking sodas or sock away money for retirement, but it must work for everyone else. And that’s the reason the cool push this nonsense—for them the consequences are divorced from cost. As millions of Americans suffer from horrible decisions they promoted (like Obamacare), they can move merrily along, to the next cause that strikes their fancy. Without ever bothering to follow up on the results of their championed causes, they continue to push even more destructive ideas on those less fortunate. A cool cat can argue vehemently for gun control, for he lives safe and secure in a benign community. It’s the bodega owner left unarmed who has to worry. The media can trumpet the notion of universal health care. Then, when it’s in place, the media isn’t present to catalog its horrors. The media screws you, then when the baby is born, it leaves town on the first bus. With your last twenty bucks. Without a backward glance or a hint of guilt.

And that’s the scariest part of the cool’s promotion of government—it’s their chosen form of relationship, and it can only be fulfilled through dependence. Perhaps in their own lives, they found their own personal relationships wanting, and see government as an ideal replacement. I’m not sure. What I do know is that when you offer the option of government as Daddy, it robs the community of actual daddies. It robs us of the initial human response, which is to solve these problems among ourselves, first. Here’s what I know in my life: If someone offers to do something for me, I let them do it. When the government now acts as proxy for community (wasn’t it the Obama 2012 campaign that said that government is what we all had in common?), what’s
the point of community? Especially when the efforts made by a community to sustain itself are so firmly blocked by a restless, carnivorous bureaucracy always looking for another way in, and larger and larger pension benefits. People telling us how much we need government—they are always the people in government!

The media has spent decades making a mockery of religion, and I get why. It’s easy. Religious people can lack irony, and they often appear humorless and credulous. If you need a piñata for a skit or a late-night joke, there’s a bag of embarrassing televangelists and disgraced holy men to choose from. But there’s another reason for the constant belittlement. The media sees religion as competition to government, and government, these days, is just media with a military. They are all the same people: the media, the government, academia. They are all populated by a cool clique that advocates expansion of their influence as a solution to our problems. Government, the
New York Times
, Harvard, it’s all from the same vat of shysters who think they’re better than you.

You can laugh at religion all you want. As a troubled agnostic, I’m not the best-equipped defender. But for years religion in a community setting grounded us and helped foster a caring collectivism (as opposed to economic collectivism) that actually worked. The church made obligations obvious; the recipients felt it immediately. They saw the cost, and they felt the results. It also got you out of the house on Sunday. Not a small thing, especially during football season.

When government intrudes, community is replaced by entitlement and everyone gets in line, not just the folks who need it most. My guess is that a lot of the forty-plus million on food stamps need it, and a lot of them don’t. But it doesn’t matter; if it’s there to be taken, why not take it? And as a member of a community, what’s required of you now? Not much. Show up, get in
line, take the handout. It used to be called Sovietization. Now it’s called progressive policy. And very, very few people ever voluntarily give it up.

Let’s face it, people, the more we rely on government, the less we rely on ourselves. We’ve seen the collapse of family life. Two-parent households are dwindling rapidly. No one sticks around. And the safety net did its job; it made it that much easier to stomach an economic collapse. Hooray. Is it a coincidence that cities implode as government expands? Is it any wonder that as government expands, illegitimacy soars? Is it any wonder that as government expands, the poor stay poor? Unchecked government is a vast, ever-expanding monster (and not nearly as sexy as Mothra).

If you explained this to the cool, that their infatuation with government is actually harmful, even deadly, would they listen? Not on your life. Because it’s uncool not to believe in government. If there’s a hole in your life, you need to fill it with stuff. The government has stuff. Make the government give more stuff. Never mind that free stuff does nothing to encourage achievement or gain any kind of moral wisdom. It does the opposite. Do a search of lottery winners. The more you give to someone, the worse it gets.

Meanwhile, the cool question, mock, and deride the things that actually work. Think about capitalism, which has done more for humanity than exercise, alcohol, and kitten videos combined. Somehow, the coolies who favor a one-size-fits-all, soulless government are the same ones who think capitalism dehumanizes people. They will say that not everyone has access to capitalism, but they all have access to government. It’s as though they skipped that integral step that makes life worth living. Something called “effort.” Capitalism works if you apply effort. And, to quote some comic I can’t remember: If you can’t make it here, you can’t
make it anywhere. America is the easiest place on the planet to make a buck. Look at me for crying out loud. I’d be a fire hydrant anywhere else. (And I’d like it.)

I’m not against welfare programs, I’m just against a welfare state. There is a difference. It’s like ice cream. It’s not a bad thing a few times a week, but try eating it every day. You are what you eat and the welfare state is the worst ice cream there is. Worse than Indian pudding.

The cool push a way of life that only they can afford. As with the rock star who can do all the drugs he wants, it’s the groupies he did the drugs with that need to find a way home the next day as the rock star hops on his jet. Society lives in the wake of cool’s destructive policies.

The American decline, which coincides with an ascendant government, is not the cool’s problem. It’s ours. And the only way to beat it is to beat them. Perhaps with a stick. Or something like a stick. I’ll leave that choice up to you. That’s what libertarians do.

So why do the cool prosper when they suck so bad? More important, how can we realign the universe so that the things that are really cool (i.e., what isn’t cool now) take precedence over the crap spawned by the coolerati?

We need to redefine cool as “what allows you to do the things you want to do with the people you love and care about.” In America’s wildly successful epoch, that’s been hard work, decent moral values, a viciously badass military, a no-bullshit analysis of the world around us, and a desire to understand the world without the assistance of style editors and root-cause experts. Our current idolization of short talk show hosts has also yielded global dividends.

So who are the truly cool? The truly cool are those who achieve greatness without giving a second thought to impressing others. It’s about doing things for the right reasons, usually unnoticed. True cool, in my book, is something that’s uniquely, and surprisingly, good. The elements that make up this murky nonspecific goodness include, but are not limited to: