Vanity of Vanities

Jane Austen’s last complete novel, Persuasion, is about vanity. Principally, it turns around the vanity of the novel heroine’s father, Sir Walter Elliott. This empty vessel (Latin: vanus: empty) is remarkably proud of his title, his lineage, his good looks, and his splendid mansion, Kellynch. He provides a suitable contrast to the heroine, Anne. “[N]one so proper, none so capable, as Anne,” as the hero Captain Wentworth, puts it.

The spectacle of Sen. Barack Obama (D-NY) expatiating on his embarrassment that few Americans speak French, or his proposal that American kids should be forced to do community service remind us about the unseriousness, the emptiness, the vanity of the modern liberal.

Decades ago our liberal friends set upon a serious program, to bring material benefits to the other half. They would provide a safety net to people that had none, and they would lift up the forgotten man to a decent standard of life.

Today it is easy to criticize their program.We can say that their safety net was no safety net, but an an umbilical cord to the welfare state and permanent dependency. We can look at free education today and ask what happened. We can look a Social Security and say: if only we had put Fidelity and Vanguard in charge of this. We can look at the ruins of the working class, now the underclass, and shake our heads at the follies of the liberals.

But fifty, sixty years ago, only a couple of prophets, men like F.A. Hayek, were saying that the welfare state was a Road to Serfdom. No serious person thought that.

But today’s liberals are no longer serious. They want to fiddle with health care. But Americans have basic health care, the kind that saves the lives of mothers and babies. They want women to be able to abort their babies. No serious person could ever do that. They want to carve out benefits for gays and lesbians, who being childless, are not really the most important item on the docket. They are more eager to battle Americans that don’t agree with them than Islamists who want to take over the world.

Anyone can now see that liberals, in the late summer of their power, have become empty, vain, unserious.

We have not experienced, directly, the un-seriousness of liberals in full political power for nearly a generation, not since the un-serious presidency of President Carter. Maybe it’s time for a refresher course.