WARREN’S STUDENT LOAN DEBT PLAN CREATES THE IRRESPONSIBLE SOCIETY:

I guess it boils down to what kind of society do you want? It’s not just student loan forgiveness, or “free” college tuition paid for by those who pay taxes. Government radically altering the nature of American society makes a powerful underlying statement: you’re a chump if you play by the rules. You’re a knucklehead if you live your life responsibly. You’re a dolt if you’re self-reliant.

It’s not Lyndon Johnson’s “The Great Society,” it’s “The Irresponsible Society.”

That’s not the kind of country I want to live in.

As Fred Siegel wrote in his 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses, “The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. ‘Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class,’ Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, ‘and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected.’ Alienated from middle-class American life, liberalism drew on an idealized image of ‘organic’ pre-modern folkways and rhapsodized about a future harmony that would reestablish the proper hierarchy of virtue in a post-bourgeois, post-democratic world.”