After America полностью

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: