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17 Jul 2008 01:35 pm

Annoyed, Intrigued, Impressed, Curious, Taken Aback, And Baffled

Drum has mixed emotions about GNP:

Their agenda is fundamentally natalist: they want to protect the traditional family and they want that traditional family to have plenty of kids. To accomplish that, they propose a variety of initiatives to reduce out-of-wedlock births, make divorce harder, use the tax code to subsidize childbearing, and so forth. The problem here— and it’s one they seem to understand—is that there’s something fundamentally hypocritical about this: it involves an extensive program of social engineering being put in place by conservative elites who don’t really need (or want to be bound by) any of its rules themselves.

They’re only doing it because— well, because the lower classes need it. It’s for their own good. In one sense, this arguably isn’t as bad as it sounds. Hypocrisy is vastly overrated as a sin, after all. But even with plenty of lipstick on this pig, it’s still not very pretty. And not likely to gain much support, either. Liberals, who are at least open to the idea of social engineering, aren’t going to support this particular version of it, and conservatives, who might  very well cotton to its goals, are allergic to social engineering. This is very big government indeed, and how many conservatives are likely to support that?

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