Looking for "society"? Margaret Thatcher didn’t bother.

One of peevish Margaret Thatcher's better offerings was her insistence that “there is no such thing as society." Her assertion that only individuals—in co-operation or on their own—do the building and the stealing, and care for and oppress others should be accepted readily in our secular age.

Her statement, however, put conservatives on the defensive then, and, as David Frum found out last week, still does. It shouldn't. Indeed, it represents, if anything, modern conservatism’s right of passage in this enlightened age.

What would you expect a trained scientist to say?

Science hasn’t entirely turned the human mind into chemistry. However, it has long debunked the notion that individuals answer to ideologies or consider them higher and wiser than us.

Social scientists roll up data about how our minds and opinions evolve over time, and venture to guess what "society" thought just yesterday, and which societies are reasonably happy and which ones are sick. However, statistical aggregations have no life of their own.

Science has left us responsible. There’s no higher conscience assigned to check our conscience; no public interest we didn’t invent ourselves.

Hillary Clinton didn’t demonstrate that she was a left-winger or a socialist when she urged us to “Stop thinking about the individual and start thinking about what is best for society.” She was just being a Clinton: emphatic and imprecise at the same time. Margaret Thatcher only refused to pretend that individuals owe anything to a generality, literally to a blank check.

Orators, cardinals in the Vatican, and torturers get in our way by claiming that “society” has overriding interests. Further, they tell us to behave by implying that it has values of its own that are better than ours.

Theocrats and so-called “organic” conservatives can claim that society and its instrument-—the powerful modern state—are, somehow, their god’s or history's handmaid, and not merely what a lawful majority of free men and women determine to favor at the moment. However, there is no way a prudent, democratic conservative or a liberal dare accept such mumble-jumble.

Calling on Texans to be Better Texans, New Yorkers to be better Americans, and Romans to be better Romans sounds fine. However, insisting that there is a Greater Good loses its charm when the proponent is wearing a pistol, or a mask, or calls himself a prophet.

Margaret Thatcher governed in harsh times harshly. We are free to not mourn her passing. However, it’s not acceptable to have one honest statement marginalized as extreme or libertarian.

Pointing out that “society” is only a word was neither anti-social nor hardhearted. There’s no hidden agenda buried in her curt sentence. Thatcher asserted simply that conservatives can also respect and can champion rationality in politics.

Surely, our leaders can be humane—and persuasive—without inventing for us a conscience better than our own.

Brain Candy from the Great War

“Prolonged trench warfare, with its collective isolation, its ‘defensiveness,’ and its nervous obsession with what ‘the other side’ is up to, establishes a model of modern political, social, artistic, and psychological polarization. Prolonged trench warfare, whether enacted or remembered, fosters paranoid melodrama, which I take to be a primary mode in modern writing. Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon are examples of what I mean. The most indispensable concept underlying the energies of modern writing is that of ‘the enemy.’”

—By Paul Fussell in his classic analysis of the cultural impacts of the First World War: “The Great War and Modern Memory,” Oxford University Press, 1975.

Doesn’t it still grab headlines, raise money, inflame the social media, and make minor talents into major politicians, nearly a century later?

Rhetoric: Who’s the Real American and Who’s the Fraud?

Below are a dozen quotes from Barack Obama's Inaugural Address and yesterday’s Shared Vision speech by Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. It’s fair to accept that both were carefully thought through, knowing they’d be judged toughly. (Peggy Noonan insists that you can tell when you’re applauding an "applause line" and not a thought.)

The two speeches are reviewed separately in the media. However, looking at them together offers a striking early clue that the center in Washington is becoming a roomier place.

The audiences and the speakers’ styles are very different. Consequently, we shouldn’t have too much difficulty sorting them out. Further, I didn’t cheat by putting in the references to God, joy, and the “light of freedom” by the liberal or the conservative’s references to inner-city children, a police officer named Vicki, and the city of San Francisco.

Here they are:

“The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob.”

“We will advance proposals aimed at producing results in areas like education, health care, innovation, and job growth. Our solutions will be based on the conservative principles of self reliance, faith in the individual, trust in the family, and accountability in government. Our goal – to ensure every American has a fair shot at earning their success and achieving their dreams.”

“Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise; our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, these are constants in our character.”

“Just like parents, Washington must start showing care for the generations ahead while leaving the parenting to the parents.”

“For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it. We believe that America’s prosperity must rest upon the broad shoulders of a rising middle class.”

“One of our priorities this year will be to move heaven and earth to fix our education system for the most vulnerable. And when those children graduate from high school, we must expand their choices and college should be a viable option.”

“We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit.”

“But, explaining that rising health care costs are depressing take-home pay is little consolation to a working mom. Her grocery bills are higher, her kids’ school needs are more expensive, rent is up – and now, she’s just trying to get by. And getting by is not the American Dream.”

“Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time – but it does require us to act in our time.”

“There is an appropriate and necessary role for the federal government to ensure funding for basic medical research. Doing all we can to facilitate medical breakthroughs for people like Katie should be a priority. We can and must do better.’

“We must act, we must act knowing that our work will be imperfect. We must act, knowing that today’s victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall.”

“This is the kind of common sense legislation that should be non-controversial and moves us in the right direction to help make life work for families.”

Sure, they’re only words. But remember: the trenches in Washington today were dug with words as well.

Brain Candy on Uncomfortable Rhetoric

“I have been consoled by Arthur Schopenhauer’s delightfully morbid pessimism in  ‘The Wisdom of Life.’ It’s a mistaken prejudice of our times to think that the only way to cheer someone up is to tell them something cheerful. Exaggerated tragic pronouncements work far better.”

—In an interview in The New York Times Book Review, January 27, Alain de Botton, author of "How to Think More about Sex" promotes a book on philosophy that he’s recently read.

Tricky advice.

The rule in Western politics is as hard as the land we think we’ve tamed: if you’re selling words to a hungry politician, keep your messages positive. Keep relief within reach. Keep the rewards well worth the bother.

In desperate times, we look for a way out. Accordingly, hope wins; otherwise, we might not be here. But, in political markets of unprecedented affluence and with endless distractions, happy talk about staying the course or getting back on track is boring and, after a while, losses our attention.

On the other hand, tragic messages don’t even get to the client. Evangelical audiences are too positive and the rest of us are just too unsophisticated to settle for unrelieved disappointment and mistreatment.

Nevertheless, there’s worthy alternative.

Between Mr. Fix It and despairing rhetoric, there’s the riveting oratory of approaching danger. It’s not especially hard to write. Context, however, is critical.

The 90s were too sunny. Bill Clinton was a fabulous actor who never had any great excuse to forewarn and rally the nation. While the catastrophes of the Miserable 00s hit the entire world the very moment they hit George Bush and Barack Obama.

As the clouds keep clearing, Paul Ryan and the Neo Cons hope they can find fresh traction by warning America that its drifting just above the falls. Promising approach—if we’d take their graphs and three-decade-long projections more seriously. 

Obama’s stump speech is too easy on Romney

The lamest hypocrisy at Romney’s convention was the sad-eyed talk about America’s lost illusions about Barack Obama. Do you remember those warm dreams Republicans shared with innocent swing voters on that starry night?  

For Democratic partisans, it was exhilarating to win again, whatever was in store. Sober Republicans also slept well knowing they’d wake up free of responsibility for fixing a metastasizing national calamity.

However, we should well remember that there was nothing gleeful or boundlessly optimistic about Obama that night. For many of us, he sounded as wary in victory as his inspiration, Abraham Lincoln, was in 1860.

What made that night inspiring and what Republicans still can’t honor was what had happened that day at the polls. That victory can’t be undone by what’s happened since, or by the Tea Party, the Super-Pacs, and a vengeful Republican restoration this November.

These days, Obama’s stump speech contains its own miscalculation about how to use the past to win the future.

Over and over, he completes his rebuttal of the Republican economic alternative with a sigh: “The thing is, we tried that before and it didn’t work.” Last weekend, in Ohio, he reinforced his complaint by describing the Republican platform as “tired, old ideas” and their convention as best-watched “in black and white.”

This in itself is tiring and, more important, counterproductive. Obama isn’t going to scare any but a handful of old faithful Keynesians by describing Romney’s prescriptions as passé. Buyer remorse over George Bush has been crowded out by fear about what could happen next.

Obama won’t scare necessary voters by describing the Republican alternative as an old shoe. And that would be a huge missed opportunity. Scaring Americans elected waves of Republican radicals in 2010. Scaring Americans could re-elect a moderate president this fall.

Gentle souls: hope is packaging; fear is what caught up with America in 2008 and 2010, and fear is what is driving American politics today.

Move on, Obama. "Forward" is not your option; it’s inescapable. Your opponent isn’t gambling with the past, but with the future. Your opponent isn’t a naïf from business, with a weak memory. He’s making political commitments that would make both Bushes blush. His reckless public record as a presidential candidate deserves greater personal attention.

Romney did not lift a finger to strengthen the hand of Republican moderates during the debt crisis last year. Romney has bolstered the extreme, essentially obstructionist “no tax” pledge of Grover Norquist. In every speech, he makes it more difficult politically for the federal government to operate a more affordable national defense and reform entitlements. He seems to buy the argument that hastening a managed national bankruptcy will make things better.

When Romney had a chance to strengthen his own moderate tendencies and his party’s dying moderate wing, he picked as his running mate a tear-it-down-and-see-what-happens extremist.

If Romney has the nerve in the upcoming debates to suggest that Obama should’ve listened more respectfully to Bill Clinton and old-school Democrats, Obama should point out that Romney could have put any number of genuine moderate pragmatists on his ticket, including Gov. Jeb Bush.

Obama, of course, needn’t get glassy-eyed about the Bush years.

George Bush, along with dozens of congressional Democrats, was too optimistic about tax cuts, cost-effective foreign wars, and unstoppable economic growth. Mitt Romney, however, doesn’t have any of Bush’s excuses.  

George Bush insisted that he was a compassionate conservative and promised—and delivered—greater support for education. Romney and his platform turn compassion into a boast, an obligation that can be assigned, no strings attached, to others to express.

People who refuse to learn from experience aren’t conservatives or reactionaries; they’re adventures. Obama’s moderation shines by comparison.