Socialism's rise?

Yglesias with a thoroughly depressing thought:

Be that as it may, this is why the era of big government being over is over. It would be a serious mistake to confuse Bush's brand of big conservatism with liberalism, or with any kind of real concession to liberalism, but it suggests that the underlying political dynamics have shifted a great deal. If you did have a progressive president, there's no longer a particularly large amount of popular resistance to expanding the activist state. Even most Republicans don't especially care about small government.

John Derbyshire said something similar this week:

All the windsocks are now pointing in the direction of more socialism. As the population ages, Americans will want more leisure, drugs, health care, nursing homes, security. As the Jihadist threat continues to metastasize (from the MidEast to Indonesia, Thailand, Africa, the Caucasus, Europe), we shall want the state to have more police powers, more scrutiny of us and our lives. The trend of the last 40 years away from the old Anglo-Saxon rights and liberties -- private property rights (google "tobacco settlement," "Kelo," etc.), freedom of speech, contract and assembly ("speech codes," anti-discrimination laws, etc.), limited government (is Washington DC shrinking? looking poorer and shabbier? not that I've noticed) -- will accelerate. And everybody will be fine with all this, because that's what everybody wants, except for a few freakish intellectuals like ourselves.

As Derbyshire notes, outside of the politically aware elite, there’s very little support for limiting state power. And why should there be? It’s not as if the problems of a massive government are blindingly obvious to the vast majority of Americans. Sure, high taxes are annoying, and that’s why Bush’s cuts have been so successful, but outside of large business interests and intellectuals, how many people are really going to spend the time necessary to conclude that government services, entitlements and the socialist agenda are bad? A kind, helpful government that works to better its citizens certainly sounds like a good idea at first – who doesn’t want the government to help people? – and few have any incentive to move beyond their initial impression that government services aid those in need.

The socialist agenda is based on an awkward (but ingenius) blend of selfishness and misplaced altruistic sentiment. The masses love it because they can claim to support the public good while supporting policies that allow them to mooch off the state. The elites, on the opposite end of the financial spectrum, get to promote public welfare and put up a selfless front without having to sacrifice their own cushy lifestyles.

The challenge for small government conservatives is to combat these notions not just with intellectual ferocity in the usual outlets (that’s being done daily), but with populist messaging that promotes the easy to grasp ideas on the surface of small-government ideals: lower taxes, unrestricted speech, personal freedom, big government as villain. The left’s biggest success has been in co-opting culture, and subsequently, their ideas of guaranteed equality and corporate villainy have permeated the skin of mass entertainment to the point that they’re accepted without thought even by Americans who consider themselves conservative. The fiscal, libertarian right has had lots of success in the intellectual sphere, but less so with mass culture.

What I’m really saying, I think, is that we need more movies like Serenity.