America’s “Tough Love” moment By Dale A. Fitzgibbons for American Thinker
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …”
So begins that great epic novel, A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. It is set in the late eighteenth century, during the volcanic social and political turbulence leading to, and culminates with the French Revolution and ensuing Reign of Terror.
Though our current age comes some twenty-four decades after that epoch, it’s not hard to identify striking parallels. Sociopolitical turbulence has been a hallmark of the human experience throughout history.
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The main source of tension then was the contrast between the nobility and the peasantry, each group viewing the other with distrust and contempt. Today, it’s the American plutocracy—the ruling class haughty elite—infatuated as they are with prestige, power, wealth, and privilege, and openly disdainful of our mainstream citizenry, those “deplorables” who “bitterly cling” to their faith, constitutional rights, and traditional values.
Through the entirety of his narrative, author Dickens weaves a tapestry of contrasts between the opulence and vanity of the privileged class and the desperation of the commoners. He continues,
“It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, …”
Monarchic Europe had its cultural treasures and its behavioral quirks. Members of an educated nobility would use their schooling and status for purposes both noble and depraved, while unlettered commoners would acquire sufficient horse-sense acumen to work a trade or to rob a nobleman.
In today’s dichotomy—leftists versus patriots—each side dismisses the other’s “wisdom” as “foolishness” and, seemingly, vaunts its own “foolishness” as “wisdom.” Which side’s worldview is “correct”? Simply put, it’s which version of public policy works well and what doesn’t, to produce lasting, wholesome, beneficial results. Keep reading.
Given that mid-nineteenth-century England, the time Dickens published his masterpiece, suffered many of the same social and economic ills that plagued France decades earlier, it can be argued that he wrote this as a grim warning to the British aristocracy. Though our conflicts don’t exactly match theirs, it can likewise be argued that this nation is also overdue for its own grim warning.
American citizens are constitutionally free from Europe’s class hierarchy. But citizen complacency, political ambition, and the seductive promise of largesse from a nanny-state government fuel the ever-growing bureaucratic plutocracy cited above.
