The Modern Liberal Statist

The modern liberal statist is a product of the ordered urban jungle.  He has never touched a cow, much less milked one or helped it give birth.  He has never had to kill something in order to eat it, nor has he suffered real hunger if he can’t or won’t find something to kill and eat.  He has never grown his own food.  He has never prayed for rain.  He has never called on his neighbors and friends at church to help him out of a bind.  He believes his world is ordered, and he sees no reason to pray or to believe in God.

The modern liberal statist instead lives in a very different world: a world where one cannot escape the reaches of the state.  All manner of infrastructure and services make life possible for the modern liberal statist and his brothers and sisters (hipsters, anarchists, barristas, leathermen, etc.).  These goods and services are provided by the state, and weave a complex web of specialization, co-dependence, and anonymity.  He believes that food originates somehow on white Styrofoam, covered in cling-film, and believes the government ensures that it is safe to eat.  He believes that poor people deserve “social justice”, and looks to a crazy-quilt of bureaucracies to define and deliver it.  He is comfortable turning over their lives to a thousand government agencies because he cannot imagine any life where that is not necessary.  He believes that life should be safe, and if it isn’t, the state should make it so.  He doesn’t like war, and sometimes believes it is avoidable.  He doesn’t know anyone who is serving in our volunteer military, and he cannot imagine the motivation for volunteering, or for believing in something so much he would die for it. 

The modern liberal statist rejects the notion of God outright, and then, having killed God, in the next breath, re-incarnates god as state.  “The state is my shepherd.  I shall not want.”  Rather than repent and give his life over to the Almighty, he pronounces those around him weak and in need of state-based salvation, and turns over their rights to his god, the state.  He gladly trades liberty for security, and believes with all his heart that the state is truly benevolent.  He believes the state is omnipotent, too.  It can prevent war if it wants (“Give peace a chance”).  It can prevent gun crime by regulating or confiscating guns.  It can stop drug dependency and drug crime, too. 
Sometimes the state lets bad things happen to good people, but the modern liberal statist knows that can usually be overcome by giving the state more authority, power, and money.  He is completely dependent on the state for his survival.  He literally has given over his life to the state, having granted it control of his healthcare provisions.  He loves the state, but his suckling and coddling at the breast of the state has made him deaf and blind, and forgetful.

The modern liberal statist is quick to judge and condemn those that don’t live or think his way.  He believes that people who do not live in metropolises are hicks.  He calls those regions “fly-over states,” perhaps not even realizing how insulting that is.  Despite not being able to shoot a gun, plow a straight furrow, bale hay, build a house, wire an outlet, fix an old Chevy, make moonshine, or accomplish any of a thousand other useful tasks, he describes those that do as illiterate and stupid.  The modern statist reads the “New York Review of Books” on Sunday, which makes him better than someone who goes to church and visits veterans at the V.A. hospital instead. 

Through a confluence of rivers of modernization, the modern liberal statist is swimming in people just like him.  He looks around and sees only those like him.  He hears an echo when he thinks, constantly repeating the mantra of more services, more programs, more control.  A majority of American people live in large urban and suburban super-cities now, and are increasingly insulated from the rural, essential things that used to bind us together, and are ignorant of their life-giving benefits.  The modern liberal statist lives there, has adapted to become comfortable as a simple, anonymous cog in the state’s collection of gears and wheels.  He doesn’t know those on whom he depends for his very existence, or even really what they do, and so he has no feelings, no love for them. 

And so he lives and dies, a helpless ward of the state his entire lonely life.
Well, my God doesn’t need my rights and my money.  He needs my devotion and my heart.  He wants me to love my neighbor, which means getting to know him, and to feel his pain and help him live his life.  He wants me to tend to the poor and the injured.  And He wants me to make my own decisions.  He wants me to depend on myself, on my community, and ultimately on Him.  I will not bow down to the modern liberal statist’s state.