Apr. 15 - This was supposed to be a Friday Alamanac, but Friday was busy. Then Saturday was busy and then instead of going to bed when herself and I got home from a party, I was mesmerized by the breaking news that a fleet of drones and missiles were on their way from Iran to Israel. I obviously had to stay awake long enough to see how that one ended—and then was awakened much too early Sunday by a family emergency you needn’t concern yourself with.
The Friday almanac stuff is down the bottom, so if you’re still wondering whose birthdays you missed, and what holidays, you can get all caught up down there.
On Saturday Herself and I attended the landsmøde of Liberal Alliance, the Danish political party that’s rapidly becoming the main opposition party to the current Frankenstein government.
Liberal Alliance is on the upswing. It has more members than ever before and is polling better than ever before. A lot of this new popularity is attributed to the party’s charismatic young leader, Alex Vanopslagh (I’m pretty sure I have t-shirts older than him). That’s surely a factor—he’s kind of a rock star among the Danish youth—but if you map LA’s gowth on a timeline alongside other events, it’s hard not to notice a correlation to the government’s draconian restrictions on individual rights during the covid pandemic.
Nothing boosts public support for small government, individual empowerment, free speech, and private autonomy quite as vigorously as the example of a government stomping on those things—especially when the head of that government blithely tramples the law whenever it gets in her own political way.
We’ve reached the point where Vanopslagh is being touted as a possible prime minister if the right-of-center block wins a majority in the next election, something that current polling suggests is possible and maybe even likely.
I’d never attended a Danish landsmøde before—I suppose in English we’d call it a convention, but I don’t want to use that word because American political party conventions are such over-the-top affairs that I think it’d give the wrong idea.
There were about 850 party members gathered at the event, held at Tivoli Congress Center. During the course of the day, the party’s finances were reviewed, elections for leadership posts were held, individual members had the opportunity to speak their minds, and of course there were some speeches from the party’s leading lights, most notably Vanopslagh and the party’s candidate for European Parliament, Henrik Dahl.
There was, to my American eyes, a surprising dearth of silly hats and provocative t-shirts, and there were no protesters inside or outside the convention. I mean, the landsmøde.
But then it’s hard to protest a party whose foundational message is leave us alone.
It was a pleasant and novel experience for me to be among kindred spirits. That’s the charm of these things, I suppose: the appeal of being surrounded by people who share your same general outlook. I’ve spent most of my life in professions and geographies where my own ideas were way outside the mainstream. Not just beyond the pale, but in an entirely different time zone.
You might have noticed the words on the big blue drapes behind Vanopslagh in the photo above: in English, they are Freedom, Responsibility, and Optimism, and those are the lodestars of the party’s messaging.
Vanopslagh’s speech clung to those themes, and it was lovely to hear them presented so lucidly but I’m not going to bore you with all that. He did however make one point I haven’t heard made before.
He talked about the difficulty involved in trying to promote any sort of individualist message to a population that considers any criticism of the welfare state a threat to their own quality of life. This is a universal political truism—it’s why, for example, entitlement programs are considered one of the third rails of American politics.
“I love freedom! I love independence! And we’ve got to something about that deficit! But goddammit, if you so much as glance at my entitlements I will cut you off at the knees!”
Vanopslagh made the simple observation that there is a difference between a welfare state and welfare culture.
So simple. So true. So rarely said.
You can be a welfare culture without a welfare state, and you can have a welfare state without a welfare culture. The well-being of a citizenry isn’t conditional on the machinery of its state, any more than an all-powerful state guarantees the well-being of its citizenry. These things are obvious but very rarely said. They need to be said more.
More specifically, they need to be said clearly and directly. Here’s how it sounds when they’re said poorly (from George H.W. Bush’s inaugural address in 1989):
To the innocent and unbiased ear, his point is simple enough: the government should get out of the way of the community organizations that are doing good. Should learn from them. Should empower and encourage them.
But to many Americans that whole “thousand points of light” business was too abstract. It was some kind of weird code. He was laying the groundwork for a globalist new world order! Freemasons! Knights Templar! Stonecutters!
Neither conservatives nor libertarians oppose a welfare culture. Quite the contrary: it’s their actual reason for being: to promote ideas and policies that create the conditions necessary for a welfare culture. What they oppose is a welfare state.
Leftists like to argue as though “welfare”—the well-being of the citizenry, the common weal, whatever you want to call it—is a zero sum game: either the government provides it or it can’t be had. There is no distinction for them between a welfare state and a welfare culture: you can only have one to the extent you have the other.
Too often they’re allowed to get away with that. Too often we on the right get lost in digressions about the unseen hand of the market, or the powerful force of enlightened self-interest, or the importance of harnessing the innovative power of competition, or, I don’t know, the importance of Sydney Sweeney’s rack.
Wait, where was I?
Oh! Right. Language like the elder Bush’s makes leftists shut down. Their defenses go up and their minds close. They don’t want to hear words like duty, sacrifice, and commitment—not as applied to individuals, in any case. They want the rich to sacrifice. They want the government’s commitment. It’s the government’s duty to give them stuff.
So Vanopslagh’s distinction is important and useful. The right needs to get better at communicating its desire for a welfare culture rather than a welfare state. We share the left’s desire for a culture where no one’s left behind, a culture that empowers everyone to be the very best version of themselves they can be, a culture that’s about ensuring opportunities and obliterating obstacles to individual aspiration. Our problem with the welfare state is that it’s actually welfare for the state: it’s about growing and inflating the already oversized machinery of government instead of serving the people.
Nietzsche made the same point:
State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.” That is a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life. . . It is annihilators who set traps for the many and call them “state”: they too hang a sword and a hundred appetites over them. . . All-too-many are born: for the superfluous the state was invented.
But Zarathustra ain’t for everyone.
But it’s the same idea: what we need in Denmark—in America—across the western world—is not more government, but more community. Pegging our “welfare” to the state just makes us vassals of the state. Who wants that?
I know, I know: some people. A lot of people, even. But not most people, and that’s why this strikes me as such a powerful means of reaching those with the ears to hear it.
So I thought I should mention it.
Almanacky Weekend Leftovers
On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in outer space, which is just an anthropocentric way of saying he was the first invader of outer space. Dedicate a moment of your time to bow your head in shame for humanity’s first colonialist settler of outer space.
On April 12, 1606, the Union Flag became the national flag of Great Britain. It was not the Union Jack. That came later. Here is a helpful guide.
On April 13, 1598, the Edict of Nantes was “promulgated” by Henry IV of France in Brittany. This allowed important religious liberties—mainly that of not being killed for their religion—to his Huguenot subjects.
On April 14, 1865, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth while attending a performance of Our American Cousin. Despite the obvious theatrical venue of the assassination, historians continue to insist Lincoln was shot in the temple.
April 12 was the birthday of Claire Danes (1979), Andy Garcia (1956), David Cassidy (1950), David Letterman (1947), Charles Ludlam (1943), Alan Ayckbourn (1939), and King Christian IV of Denmark (1577).
April 13 was the birthday of Christopher Hitchens (1949), Don Adams (1923), Samuel Beckett (1906), Butch Cassidy (1866), Thomas Jefferson (1743), Guy Fawkes (1570), and Catherine de Medici (1519).
April 14 was the birthday of Pete Rose (1941), Julie Christie (1940), Loretta Lynn (1932), John Gielgud (1904), and Arnold Toynbee (1889).
Eid al Fitr was celebrated across the Muslim world over the weekend.
April 13 was Cambodian New Year in Cambodia (of all places), Nepali New Year in Nepal, and Lao New Year in Laos. It was also Songkran in Thailand, but that’s just fancy talk for Thai New Year.
April 14 was Americas’ Day in Honduras and Bohag Bihu in parts of India.
Hope you enjoyed the weekend!
© 2024 The Moron’s Almanac