DOOMSAYERS are never popular, but sometimes they're right. . . .
That maxim applies to the writings of . . .
. . . the economic historian Niall Ferguson. . . .
With a focus on the United States, [Ferguson's new book] "The Great Degeneration" warns that Western civilization has entered into a period of decline due mainly to the strangling of private initiative by the every-encroaching state. "We are living through a profound crisis of the institutions that were the keys to our previous success -- not only economic, but also political and cultural -- as a civilization," he writes.
The threatened institutions are representative government, the rule of law and civil society. . . .
"We humans live in a complex matrix of institutions . . . ," Mr. Ferguson writes. "Once . . . this matrix worked astonishingly well, with each set of institutions complementing and reinforcing the rest. That, I believe, was the key to Western success in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the institutions in our times are out of joint."
The most worrisom evidence of decline, he believes, is the "crisis of public debt," with government budgets out of control in the U.S. [read United States] and Europe. He sees the outsize debt as a symptom of the "betrayal of the future generations: a breach of Edmund Burke's social contract between the present and the future." . . .
. . . .
Mr. Ferguson worries as well about the erosion of the rule of law. Not only do politicians increasingly flout the Constitution, but they are creating a proliferation of unwise and unenforceable laws and regulations. Lawyers on congressional staffs write massive pieces of legislation for other lawyers to implement and still others to interpret for clients. Thus, lawyers rule.
. . . .
The author's arguments that civil society is undergoing decay is no less depressing. As government has grown, civil society has withered, he asserts. . . . Mr. Ferguson agrees with Tocqueville that "the state -- with its seductive promise of 'security from the cradle to the grave' -- was the real enemy of civil society."
. . . . "The Great Degeneration" won't be popular in the Obama White House or other centers of power. Jeremiah wasn't popular with the elders of Judea either. They tossed him in jail for his sedition. They had reason later to be sorry.
(George Melloan, Bookshelf: "A Jeremiad to Heed," wsj.com, June 19, 2013, reviewing The Great Degeneration (Penguin Press, 174 pages, $26.95))
Turning representative government into government by the administrative state, the rule of law into the rule of lawyers, and civil society into a state-centered society -- these are not accidental by-products of a civilization going wrong. They are the essence of the fundamental transformation of America that our woebegotten president desires and is accomplishing.
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