the family it really is “from each according to his ability, to
each according to his need.”
What Hayek argues is that it’s the microcosm that gener-
ates the values—the respect for human rights, the respect
for human dignity, the respect for the Golden Rule—all of
these sorts of yeasty cultural ideas that make the macrocosm
of the extended order of liberty work. The extended order of
liberty is the world of contracts, of consumers, of rule of law.
It lowers the threshold to dealing with strangers. Because in
the state of nature, the way you deal with a stranger is you hit
them over the head with a rock, while in the modern world
the way we deal with strangers is we try to sell them rocks.
So part of my argument is that every kind of totalitarian
regime or authoritarian regime is trying to take the values of
the microcosm and apply them to the macrocosm. Nazism is
tribalism for one race; fascism is tribalism for one country;
communism is tribalism for one class. It’s trying to take those
notions of social solidarity and intimacy from the microcosm
and apply them to the macrocosm, and when you do that, you
destroy liberty and the rule of law.
However, when you take the logic of the macrocosm and
you apply it to the microcosm, you destroy the engines of
value generation that make society work. If you tried to turn
a family into a business, it would ruin the family. And if you
tried to make a country of 310 million people operate as if the
president were our father or our mother, it would ruin every-
thing that Reason stands for.
To when do you date the beginning of the decline?
Because this is a slow-motion suicide.
Ronald Reagan said, “Every generation, we’re only one gener-
ation away from tyranny,” because we don’t have an inherent
love for liberty in our blood. We have to be taught it. So we’ve
had these struggles many times in our past.
One of the things I focus on—and it’s most acute in higher
education, but watch virtually any frickin’ award show from
out of Hollywood and you find it there too, and you find it in
mainstream journalism—is this desire to define all of Ameri-
can history by its sins. And I absolutely want to teach that
stuff. About slavery, about the bad things that came with
Christopher Columbus, about what we did to the Indians.
You’re not saying we have to teach that Christopher
Columbus was the greatest guy in the world.
No. Absolutely not. But a thing that drives me absolutely
crazy is our tendency to compare events in the past against
an ideal in the future. The American Founding has all sorts
of problems with it, but it was better than anything that came
before it. Yet we want to hold up the gold standard of, not even
today, but an ideal sometime in the Utopian future against
what they were talking about in 1776.
Let’s remember that the ideas that emerged from the
miracle worked. This bourgeois, mercantile, merchant-class
ideology made poor people richer. It also made rich people
richer, but if you’re of a progressive mindset that says the
thing you should be concerned about is the status of poor
people, this is the only economic system that has actually
made poor people richer. We should recognize that.
But one of the great and glorious things about the Ameri-
can Revolution and the Constitutional Convention is that
they wrote this shit down and locked us into it. And because
of the cultural stock of the population at the American
Founding and throughout much of the 19th century, it got
instantiated and strengthened in our institutions.
I would say that this starts to unravel not in the 1960s,
not in the 1950s, but really with the rise of the Progressive
Era, where you get all of these major intellectuals who were
taught from the historicist school in Germany that come to
the United States, and they think everything is relative. They
completely reject the views of the Austrian school and all
that stuff.
Those sorts of ideas percolate along and start taking over
the universities, and then the materialist [critique] comes in
after World War II, when we get really rich really fast.
I like getting rich really fast, and I want to make the world
get richer really fast. But the violence that does to estab-
lished institutions and customs and norms sets a lot of peo-
ple adrift, and you get a mass affluent class of people, or what
Schumpeter calls the “new class,” who are incentivized to
pee on America from a great height and to pee on capitalism
from a great height. They’re the priests who want to use the
only weapons they have, which are words and concepts, to
undermine the system and argue for something that empow-
ers them. So you get robber barons who have lawyers for
kids, and the lawyers have spoken-word poets for kids.In a way, the suicide of the West is a luxury good, right?
We don’t have to worry about food. We don’t have to
worry about next week’s budget. We’re fat and happy,
and we start taking for granted the institutions that got
us here.
What we’re witnessing because of this level of mass affluence
is the ruling classes of the world uniting. Literally, that’s what
cosmopolitanism means. You get these people, the globalist
class, who have more sense of social connection with some-
body across the Atlantic who shares their status than they do
with the person who cleans their yard.REASON 53