The Corner on National Review Online

Dean Campaigns in NH:

From The Corner, we have a glimpse at Dean's campaign in New Hampshire:

I arrived home from shopping today to find a large yellow manila envelope in my mailbox. Sealed with a giant Dean campaign sticker, the envelope contained:

*1 DVD titled "Howard Dean for America--Fulfilling the Promise of America"

*1 nicely designed trifold color brochure proclaiming that "This is a campaign to unite and empower Americans . . .to move the insiders out and let the people in!" The brochure features such positive messages as "I know what's wrong with America." My favorite excerpt: "As a medical doctor, I have been trained to diagnose an illness and prescribe the proper treatment. I have frequently applied the same techniques as a Governor."

Quite apart from whether or not this line of argument is apt to be successful, I want to remark that it is entirely mistaken. Chesterton wrote on the topic extensively; I quote here from What's Wrong with the World Today. Chesterton was especially prophetic, and what he saw wrong in his day often not only proved to be wrong indeed, but developed into greater wrongs on just the lines of which he warned.

In any event, the very first chapter of this work is entitled "The Medical Mistake":

The fallacy is one of the fifty fallacies that come from the modern madness for biological or bodily metaphors. It is convenient to speak of the Social Organism, just as it is convenient to speak of the British Lion. But Britain is no more an organism than Britain is a lion. The moment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal, we begin to think wildly.... Now we do talk first about the disease in cases of bodily breakdown; and that for an excellent reason. Because, though there may be doubt about the way in which the body broke down, there is no doubt at all about the shape in which it should be built up again. No doctor proposes to produce a new kind of man, with a new arrangement of eyes or limbs. The hospital, by necessity, may send a man home with one leg less: but it will not (in a creative rapture) send him home with one leg extra.

The proper shape of society is not, as Chesterton goes on to point out, a thing as certain as the proper shape of a man.

But exactly the whole difficulty in our public problems is that some men are aiming at cures which other men would regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate conditions as states of health which others would uncompromisingly call states of disease. Mr. Belloc once said that he would no more part with the idea of property than with his teeth; yet to Mr. Bernard Shaw property is not a tooth, but a toothache. Lord Milner has sincerely attempted to introduce German efficiency; and many of us would as soon welcome German measles. Dr. Saleeby would honestly like to have Eugenics; but I would rather have rheumatics.

Dr. Dean would have you believe that society is sick, and that he is going to cure it. It is wise to be wary of all such men. Another point for Chesterton; it's a pity that no one is keeping an honest account of the score.