The New Road to Serfdom Read Online Free PDF Page A

how lucky they are.
    It is human nature to take familiar things for granted. So let me, in this chapter, set out some of the things that strike an outside observer about the U.S. political system.
    The first observation is that, for all the grumbles and the scornful jokes, most people have faith in the system. This might seem a strange thing to say: Elected representatives are the target of as many cynical remarks in the United States as elsewhere, and first-time candidates often make a big deal out of not being politicians. One of my little girls has a book called
Vote for Duck,
given to her by a kind American friend: Its conceit is that a farmyard duck rises, first to run the farm, then to become a governor, and finally to win the presidencyby repeatedly running under the slogan “Vote for a duck, not a politician!”
    Behind the sarcasm, though, there is an underlying confidence. Think of the television series
The West Wing.
Its premise is that most politicians, including the ones you disagree with, are patriots who are doing their best. While it makes criticisms of Washington, its essential tone is laudatory. Even the right-wing Republicans who are presented least sympathetically, such as the John Goodman character who, in a bizarre twist, moves from being speaker of the House of Representatives to temporarily occupying the White House under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, are shown, when the chips are down, placing their country before their personal ambitions.
    Believe me when I tell you that such a program is unimaginable—literally unimaginable—on my side of the Atlantic. British political dramas are invariably predicated on the idea that all elected representatives are petty, jobbing cowards. The most enjoyable such program was the late 1970s and early 1980s BBC production
Yes, Minister,
starring Nigel Hawthorne and Paul Eddington, which centered on a battle between a wily civil servant and the vote-grabbing politician who was notionally in charge of his department.
    While the minister was shown as shallow and ambitious, there was a dash of warmth in the portrayal. Not so in later series. In
The New Statesman,
Rik Mayall played a selfish, greedy, perverted crook who roseswiftly through the ranks. In
House of Cards
Ian Richardson was a chief whip prepared to commit murder in order to become prime minister. In the current series
The Thick of It,
power is shown to have shifted definitively to the spin doctors, leaving the ministers as small-minded drones obsessed with their careers.
    Things are even worse in Continental Europe. Canvassing in France and Spain, I have been left shaken by the way voters talk of their elected ministers. It is as though they are discussing agents of an occupying power. Latin America has been even more violently convulsed by an anti-politics mood: tinpot
caudillos
have taken power across the region, not because people expect them to do any good, but because they embody and articulate the rage that electorates felt against the old parties.
    I’m not saying that U.S. politicians don’t also come in for their share of mockery. But there is a difference between teasing people in authority—cutting them down to size—and fundamentally denying their legitimacy. Satirical shows in the United States strike most European viewers as so mild as to be deferential. The same is true of political interviews. While U.S. presenters can be searching and aggressive, you rarely catch them contorting their features into the knowing sneer that is the default expression of a European journalist interviewing a politician.
    One might argue, of course, that this is merely a symptom of a wider cultural difference. The Americanmedia in general, with their editorial high-mindedness and determination to avoid bad language, are primmer than their British or European counterparts. Nonetheless, television can be a telling cultural marker, and fiction has always been a useful way to assess the temper of a civilization, to