Killjoy Was Here: What Conservatives And Progressives And Washington Don't Get
What don’t the reigning politicos and policy wonks of our day get?
Spoiler Alert: They don’t get the pursuit of Happiness.
America was founded on a very simple proposition: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
So begins the declaratory part of the Declaration of Independence. You could look it up.
The Right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness is the essence of what it means to be an American.
I am unabashedly pro-Life and pro-Liberty, values well represented (and, also, very capably opposed) in the public square. The orphan value?
The pursuit of Happiness.
Both conservatives and libertarians, who, admirably, are on the barricades for Life and/or Liberty, are remarkably tone deaf about the pursuit of Happiness. This is a great pity, since we, rather than progressives, have the right stuff for that pursuit. Why be diffident about it?
One is reminded of the definition by the divine H.L. Mencken, in Sententiæ: The Citizen and the State:
Celebratory headlines across America announced the 21st Amendment's repeal, after 14 long, dry years, of the 18th Amendment’s Prohibition of alcohol. Let it not pass notice that by Puritans Mencken was addressing the progressives of his day. As he wrote in the Little Book in C Major:
Let me note in passing, as is sure to be pointed out by a few irate readers, that this is deeply unfair to the actual Puritans, who really did know how to have a good time. That said, as Wikipedia notes, “Puritans sought both individual and corporate conformity to the teaching of the Bible, with moral purity pursued down to the smallest detail, as well as ecclesiastical purity to the highest level.”
One can see how such intense devotion to “moral purity down to the smallest detail” could have shaded the Puritans' reputation for fun. However, the purpose of this column is neither to indict nor to rehabilitate the reputation of the Puritans.
My purpose is to indict the killjoyism besetting politics today.
Elsewhere I have proposed that the Republicans, who at least pay lip service to prosperity -- a legitimate aspect of the pursuit of Happiness -- embrace a declaration merrily (if apocryphally) attributed to the late wild child Tallulah Bankhead: “I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich. Rich is better.” (Its real originator was Bea Kaufman. Tallulah, however, the spicy daughter of a Democratic Speaker of the House, was a lot wilder, thus more fun.) Call it Tallulahnomics.
Instead, professional Republicans have dogmatized free markets. Balderdash. Free markets are a law of nature, like gravity. Not a doctrine. There is a simple litmus test which seems to escape most.
When markets are free to flourish, people flourish economically. If we -- the general populace (one hesitates to use the word “collectively,” thank you, Ayn) -- are not flourishing, that's a sure sign that the Free Market is being invoked rhetorically, probably to justify some oligarchic privilege, rather than employed.
Human flourishing is the simple litmus test for policy. Where are the public intellectuals who are making human flourishing the standard by which to judge policy? William Walton, a friend, of Common Ground comes to mind. Few others, of either the right or the left, do. Pity.
Free market prosperity is part of the recipe for human flourishing. This is not exactly a new insight. As Old Longears wrote in the Tao Te Ching (chapter 58) thousands of years ago:
Economic security is important. However, a half century of academic happiness research (yes, such exists) has proven that happiness derives primarily from good family and social connection.
As I previously wrote:
"For men over sixty-five, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate of all causes in Roseto, in fact, was 30 to 35 percent lower than expected. … ‘There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn’t have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That’s it.’
"This was discovered, upon close investigation, to be due not to diet, healthy lifestyle, or genetics. It was solely due to a close-knit village social structure.
"This is not merely anecdotal. As reported in Berkeley’s GreaterGood,
'The upshot of 50 years of happiness research is that the quantity and quality of a person's social connections—friendships, relationships with family members, closeness to neighbors, etc.—is so closely related to well-being and personal happiness the two can practically be equated.'"
So much research supporting this proposition has been conducted as to make this observation irrefutable. Its implications are too little politically discussed.
… The sociologists Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas spent several months in a small Iowa town and found that children who appeared likely to succeed were from an early age groomed for departure by their parents and teachers. Other kids, marked as stayers, were often ignored in school. Everyone realized that encouraging the ambitious kids to leave was killing the town, but the ambition of the children was valued more than the life of the community. The kids most likely to make it big weren’t just permitted to leave—they were pushed.
In Orange City…[p]eople didn’t seem to care about careers as much as they did in other places. “Even now, my friends there, I’m not sure what many of them do, and I don’t think they know what I do,” Dan Vermeer says. “That’s just not what you talk about.” You could be proud of a child doing something impressive in another part of the country, but having grown children and grandkids around you was equally a sign of success. Go to Northwestern, Orange City parents would say. And, when you get your degree, why not settle down here? There are plenty of jobs, and it’ll take you five minutes to drive to work. When you have children, we’ll help you take care of them. People here share your values, it’s a good Christian place. And they care about you: if anything happens, they’ll have your back.
It is the true source of Happiness.
My previous column on this theme concluded:
"The quantity and quality of a person's social connections is so closely related to well-being and personal happiness the two can practically be equated?"
Using the pursuit of Happiness as a political trump card may sound vaguely unfair. It’s not.
The pursuit of Happiness -- declared in our founding charter, the Declaration of Independence, as an unalienable right with which we are endowed by our Creator -- is where our elected officials and aspirants to public office should passionately focus.
They've lost the thread. Let us bring them back to first principles.
As Jefferson wrote in the Declaration, “... to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men….”
If politicians will but focus on securing the right to the pursuit of Happiness -- in proven common sense ways, not by clever, novel, and unproven propositions -- they will find this a potent vote-getter. Electoral landslides await!
The pursuit of Happiness is what conservatives, progressives, and Washington are missing. There's a lot of discussion -- even a consensus building -- that our political leaders are out of touch.
ET, Phone home! If you do, not only will an enthusiastic electorate vote for the proponents of the pursuit of Happiness in droves, you will embark on a project of which you can be proud: restoring the American Dream.
Life.
Liberty.
And the pursuit of Happiness.
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Ralph Benko is an advisor to nonprofit and advocacy organizations, is a member of the Conservative Action Project, a contributor to the contributor to the ARRA News Service. Founder of The Prosperity Caucus, he was a member of the Jack Kemp supply-side team, served in an unrelated area as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House. The article which first appeared in Forbes.
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