Great post, but I think DougJ is wrong. This isn't nihilism. It's mysticism.

What Douthat means is that nothing humans can do changes anything. The only person who can really solve our problems is Aslan.

Therefore, we should stop trying to work out responsible policies and focus on thinking as much about Aslan as we can.

I don't think any of this is new. Nor is it surprising. It's always been central to the conservative outlook that material goods - conceived broadly as including peace, poverty reduction, health, jobs - aren't really what counts in life. And so who really cares whether government ensures that they exist in adequate quantity. Actually it goes farther than that quite often: conservatives think it important that things not be provided, since the individual's autonomous will only finds its full expression in strife, struggle, poverty, and iniquity. A poor hungry man sharing his loaf is a thing of beauty. Paris Hilton throwing dollar bills at a mob just vaguely nauseating. ... at least that is the thinking, the kind of thinking that you get in circles completely insulated from any hardship.

I remember Lalo from TPM talking about traveling around Europe, and sensing that European souls were deadened, implicitly or explicitly due to that oh-so-tragic excess of socialism - that somehow material comfort as a universal goal is psychologically unsustainable, or at least spiritually unsustaining. And he isn't the only conservative to say something along those lines. to some extent I don't think this is just projection on their part. There is a great difference in the general atmosphere on the opposite sides of the pond. In the US there is a pungent sense of 'fear and loathing', which you might find invigorating if you're into that kind of thing. And it is something that is largely absent from Europe, even in the rougher parts of Glasgow, London, or Dortmund.

And to venerate this essentially American kind of MATERIAL anxiety - walking the tightrope without a safety net, to regard it as somehow superior to the more transparently dulling EXISTENTIAL angst you get in Europe has always struck me as odd. There just seems to be no clear explanation for it. Or for why the US and Europe decided to go down different paths over the last thirty years or so, why - that is - the US decided to abandon the fundamentally modernist project of Society providing for the basic material well-being of its citizens. It can't be put down to the Indomitable American 'Soul' or the American mythology of rugged individualism, because there was no daylight between the American and the European outlook just thirty years ago. It's something new. A form of brainwashing that has occurred over those decades, slowly nudging rightwards with a drip-feed of smaller and then greater lies, and one that can now unveil its true essence: 'we just don't give a shit about other people'. It has succeeded so well that it can present this 'governing philosophy' as not only a respectable worldview but as a virtuous one.

Conservatives remind of drunks looking for that bar they were at a few hours ago where they were really having a good time. They just can't remember where the hell it is. They keep saying it's just around the corner, but they end up here in this bar every time they go out and look for it. So they sit next to you talking about their good times there and how this bar isn't up to that bar and if they could find their way back to it they would be the most happiest person in the world. In the meantime, they start belittling this bar and its patrons in favor of that bar and start to demand changes be made to satisy their wants, needs and desires they received at that bar they can't find anymore. And when they can't get their way they begin to get agitated which causes some patrons to quietly get up and move to the door while others start to size up the insitgator to see if he's ready to fight or maybe willing to have a few more stiff drinks, get really snockered, then wanders outside looking for that bar again and walks in front of a moving truck.

SOCIALSIM ISN'T COOL

STOP THE OBAMA TRAUMA

and last but not least....

ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU, ASK WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR YOURSELF!

Douthat's statement,

No matter how many lives may be saved or lost because of health care policy, no lives will be saved forever, and every gain will be an infinitely modest hedge against the wasting power of disease and death.

is more hallucinogenic than nihilistic. I remember gatherings where someone might say: "the primary motivation for wanting more people to benefit from health care is the advantage it might give us in the titanic battle with the inevitability of Death itself."