Imagine a cafe in the Left Bank district of Paris so early in the morning, say 11 a.m., that only a few customers have had time to coalesce; but they are already engaged in heated discussions. There they are, in "Che" T-shirts, with black berets over greasy hair, drinking coffee as thick as mud, and smoking cigarettes held effetely between the thumb and index finger. Ordinarily, whenever America was mentioned, their lips would curl into a derisive sneer. But not today.

No, today they look amused and bemused by the affaires politiques on the left bank of the Atlantique. These are heady days for Parisian intellectuals. The hated Anglo-Saxon model has fallen flat on its face--or rather, its derriere.

For this topic we need a long-range historical context that liberates us from the mental prison of the Here and Now.


Recently I picked up an old favorite, Richard Weaver's "Ideas Have Consequences." He wrote as a Platonic idealist and Medievalist. One needn't agree with this point of view --and I don't-- to enjoy the benefits of escaping the usual Whig Interpretation of History, with all its utilitarianism and unimaginativeness.


p.6: The great pageant of history thus became reducible to the economic endeavors...
Man created in the divine image, the protagonist of a great drama in which his soul was at stake, was replaced by man the wealth-seeking and -consuming animal.

p.37: It clarifies much to see that socialism is in origin a middle-class and not a proletarian concept. The middle class owes to its social location an especial fondness for security and complacency.

Thus the final degradation of the Baconian philosophy is that knowledge becomes power in the service of appetite. The state...turns into a vast bureaucracy designed to promote economic activity.

p.40: The goal of social democracy is scientific feeding.

It is remarkable that Weaver wrote this in 1948, when a new corporate-bureaucratic America was emerging. No longer aspiring to be shopkeepers, small businessmen and farmers, Americans yearned for a white shirt and a grey-green Steelcase desk in giant bureaucracies like IBM, Dupont, or GM, which were modeled after the military bureaucracy that had been so successful during WWII. The corporation would not only provide the same sort of career ladder that the military had, but it would also provide health care, pensions, and educational subsidies. And the pay scale was certainly higher.

Today we see some of these giant corporate bureaucracies going bankrupt or into state ownership. Our French camarades back at the cafe might be shocked at how easily Americans are surrendering any pretenses to Constitutional government, free markets, and private businesses. They might even be secretly disappointed, since they won't have American cowboy-capitalism to kick around anymore. And it's happening faster and easier than the dissolution of the old Soviet Union! The French model reigns supreme now.

But why should anyone be shocked? Seen from the desk in a cubicle there is little difference between a gigantic corporate bureaucracy and a government one. Dilbert doesn't care about political ideology or metaphysics. He cares only about the secure continuation of his borrow-and-spend, paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle. It is quite natural for him to prefer working for a bureaucracy whose incompetence and corruption can be papered over by printing money and stuffing it into his bank account--if there are any banks left.