Romancing the state.(The Week)

FURTHER on in these pages I've offered a modest meditation on Albert Jay Nock. In the course of my research, I looked up Nock's obituary in the New York Times. He died on Aug. 19, 1945, and the Timesran its remembrance of him the next day (which suggests that it was prepared ahead of time). After a brief squib from the Associated Press announcing his death, the article begins under the subheading "His Dislikes Were Many":

 
   Mr. Nock, an essayist and historian, wrote 
   pithily and often cynically on many 
   subjects. His last book, "Memoirs 
   of a Superfluous Man," an autobiographical 
   study published in 
   1943, revealed his list of hates to 
   be much longer than his loves, 
   and to include almost everything 
   except classical literature, beer, wine, 
   Chinese food, and one or two other 
   items. 

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I found this nasty summation of Nock oddly reassuring. Things have not changed much.

One of the least remarked but most constant assumptions of the progressive mind is that dislike for the overweening state marks you as a "hater."

To be sure, there is something to Emerson's observation that "there is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact." But Emerson was making an observation about an argument, not about the people who made it. Slowly but surely, the dominant liberal culture has made opposition to the expansion of the state the hallmark of a stingy and uncharitable character. Recall Joe Biden's explaining that supporting higher taxes is both a religious obligation and a hallmark of charity. Barack Obama said that paying ...