![]() However true any of that may be of Paul Ryan, it describes Barack Obama far better. I am not competent to evaluate numbers, but no budgetary expertise is required to see that his moral and political concepts are crude and sometimes weird. His intellectual universe is a conformist, like-minded universe he gives no indication of familiarity with, or curiosity about, thoughts and traditions that differ from his own. That line of criticism, however, is like swinging an ax around at a cocktail party full of Wieseltier’s own friends. Wieseltier finds the roots of Ryan’s cruelty in his lack of intellectualism. Wieseltier sees evidence of cruelty in that critique, but it’s hardly a novel point, and his own magazine has made it many times over the decades. As Ryan notes, such programs create more dependency than they salve. Wieseltier finds it reprehensible that Ryan uses scare quotes around “safety net.” But the reason Ryan uses scare quotes there is not that he scoffs at the idea of a social safety net - any more than he scoffs at “compassion.” Rather, Ryan quite rightly rejects the idea that today’s vast redistributive entitlement programs should be characterized as a “safety net” or “compassion” in the first place. The process suffocates individual initiative and transforms self-reliance into a vice and government dependency into a virtue. ![]() By this means, government increasingly dictates how Americans live their lives they are not only wards of the state, but also its subjects, increasingly directed in their behavior by the government’s “compassion.” But dependency drains individual character, which in turn weakens American society. More ruinous in the long run is the extent to which the “safety net” has come to enmesh more and more Americans - reaching into middle incomes and higher - so that growing numbers have come to rely on government, not themselves, for growing shares of their income and assets. Need proof? Here’s Ryan’s comment on “safety net” entitlements in his 2010 budget plan: The point of the piece is to demonstrate that Ryan is a heartless radical individualist with a taste for cruelty towards the downtrodden. As a hit piece, it could win a prize in the category of collateral damage. But the bombs land all over the place: on his own magazine, on President Obama, on Walter Lippmann, on Daniel Patrick Moynihan - on people and positions he had no intention of criticizing. Writing in The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier recently unleashed an attempted decapitation strike on Representative Paul Ryan. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2022
Categories |