So glad Nunberg took the term "entitlement" apart--the dueling definitions have been on my mind a lot lately.
But it's only when critics get to the role of government that the two
meanings of "entitlement" start to seep into each other. On the one
hand, the psychological sense of the word colors its governmental
meaning. When people fulminate about the cost of government entitlements
these days, there's often the implicit modifier "unearned" lurking in
the background. And that in turn makes it easier to think of those
programs as the cause of a wider social malaise — that they create what
critics call a "culture of dependency" or a class of "takers," which are
basically ways of referring to what the Victorians called the
undeserving poor.
That isn't a new argument. The early opponents of Social Security charged that it would discourage individual thrift and reduce Americans to the level of Europeans. But now the language itself helps make the argument, by using the same word for the political cause and the cultural effects. You can deplore "the entitlement society" without actually having to say whether you mean the social or political sense of the word, or even acknowledging that there's any difference. It's a strategic rewriting of linguistic history, as if we call the programs entitlements simply because people feel entitled to them.
But to make that linguistic fusion work, you have to bend the meanings of the words to fit. When people rail about the cost of government entitlements, they're thinking of social benefit programs like Medicare, not the price supports or the tax breaks that some economists call hidden entitlements. And what people call the culture of entitlement is elastic enough to include both the high school senior who's been told he has a right to get into Harvard and the out-of-work plumber who isn't bothering to look for a job because he knows his unemployment check is in the mail. But it rarely stretches to include the hedge-fund manager who makes a life model of Ayn Rand's Howard Roark, who is the most conspicuous monster of entitlement in all of modern American literature.
That isn't a new argument. The early opponents of Social Security charged that it would discourage individual thrift and reduce Americans to the level of Europeans. But now the language itself helps make the argument, by using the same word for the political cause and the cultural effects. You can deplore "the entitlement society" without actually having to say whether you mean the social or political sense of the word, or even acknowledging that there's any difference. It's a strategic rewriting of linguistic history, as if we call the programs entitlements simply because people feel entitled to them.
But to make that linguistic fusion work, you have to bend the meanings of the words to fit. When people rail about the cost of government entitlements, they're thinking of social benefit programs like Medicare, not the price supports or the tax breaks that some economists call hidden entitlements. And what people call the culture of entitlement is elastic enough to include both the high school senior who's been told he has a right to get into Harvard and the out-of-work plumber who isn't bothering to look for a job because he knows his unemployment check is in the mail. But it rarely stretches to include the hedge-fund manager who makes a life model of Ayn Rand's Howard Roark, who is the most conspicuous monster of entitlement in all of modern American literature.
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