Theodore Dalrymple (pen name), has produced some of the most compelling work I’ve read about the welfare state and how it creates and sustains the underclass. If you are still staring out across the crumbling wreckage of the fruited plain, wondering how we got here and where we may be headed, Dalrymple has some very relevant observations. A doctor with the British Health Service (Blimey Obamacare), he has and continues to write at great length about the victims of government largess, and the sorry state of his country as a result of it.
In a recent article in City Journal, he wrote…”The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form.”
A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice.
We are the 99% anyone?
The #Occupy movement is not the underclass, not entirely at least. It is more likely the lefts astro-turfed version of the real British underclass responsible for England’s riots. It is what the left wants, longs for even; what their policies inevitably create, as they have in Britain, but which have not yet come to full fruition in the U.S. despite the Democrat parties best efforts to get us there. But make no mistake. A few more years of Obama and we will have completed our journey to the dark side in a fraction of the time it evolved in England. And Riots?
Left unchecked the Democrats and well funded socialist/Union/labor groups, will not need to organize protests with a goal of inciting class warfare riots to market the unfairness of capitalism to everyone else in America who owns a television. Forget that it is socialist-welfare state theory in practice which actually creates the conditions needed to blame Capitalism; the people trapped on the cusp of total misery, welfare state slaves on the Obama plantation, will be ready and willing to attack whichever scapegoat the stewards of the dependency culture blame if they can be convinced it will make them feel better about their lot in life.
But we’re not there yet, and #OWS proves it. Disgruntled college graduates supported by limousine liberals with union back up? Not yet. But Dalrymple must be heeded. The same way Daniel Hannan warns us that our hold on freedom in America is tenuous, Dalrymple shows us how government creates a class warfare army (intentionally or not) that helps it secure its power. The underclass in Britain was created by the institutional left, the same left that has been running America into the ground. It will be no different here unless we slow it, then stop it, and then reverse it.
But you need to truley understand it. To that end I highly recommend you pick up or download a copy of ‘Life a the Bottom.’ The parallels will astonish you. It might even remind you why we don’t just need a new President but a new attitude about government assistance and entitlement, and why Obamacare, the kind of socialized medicine Dalrymple covers in all of his earlier works, must be stopped at all cost.
