Having It Both Ways

You’ve got to hand it to veteran Democrats like Washington’s own Rep. Norm Dicks (D-WA). After the vote in the House of Representatives a week ago in which the Democrats decided not to vote for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, he allowed as how the whole war was a mistake.
Quoted in The Seattle Times:

Dicks now says it was all a mistake — his vote, the invasion, and the way the United States is waging the war.

But Dicks isn’t calling for an immediate pullout. Nor is he even calling for a pullout in six-months, which is the modified proposal from John Murtha (D-PA). Oh no.

While he disagrees with Murtha’s conclusion that U.S. troops should be withdrawn within six months, Dicks said, "He may well be right if this insurgency goes much further."

But if Dicks voted against an immediate pullout, and he disagrees with Murtha’s six-month timetable, then he is more or less in agreement with the Bush administration policy that troops will be withdrawn as and when the Iraqi security forces are capable of taking over.

Presumably the Bush plan is that some time in January, after the Iraqi elections and after a new Iraqi prime minister is chosen, the Iraqis will formally request that the US will start withdrawing troops.

Oh good. That means we are all in agreement. Except that Democrats like Norm Dicks maintain that the whole thing was a mistake, and that knowing what he knows now he would never have voted for the war in the first place.

Another way of looking at the Iraq “mess” is from the perspective of the Iranian Amir Taheri. He reckons that the US policy, to hand Iraq back to the Iraqis, is on track. To hand back Iraq to the Iraqis has taken several steps:

The first objective, to bring down Saddam, was achieved in three weeks.

The next objective was to break the apparatus of oppression created by the Ba’ath. Despite some residual problems, this, too, has been achieved.

Another objective: Break Saddam’s war machine, which had been used against Iraq’s neighbors as well as Iraq’s Kurds and Shiites. After just three years, nothing is left of that infernal machine.

The formation of the Governing Council represented the first step toward restoring Iraqi sovereignty. Next came the transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis, in June 2004.

That was followed by the formation of an interim government, a series of municipal elections, a general election leading to the formation of Iraq’s first pluralist government, the writing of a new constitution and a referendum to get it approved.

The next item on the checklist is the general election set for Dec. 15.

And the first thing that the new Iraqi government will do in February, Taheri writes, will be to negotiate the withdrawal of coalition troops.

Presumably, Congressman Norm Dicks could agree with that. Even though he maintains that the whole Iraq adventure has been a complete mistake.

McCain without a McClue on Economic Policy

Over the years Republicans and conservatives have wondered about Senator John McCain. Who is he and where does he stand on economic policy?

That was what Stephen Moore has been wondering too. “Just who is John McCain, and what is his economic philosophy?” That’s what he wondered as he headed in for an interview with the senator.

I mean, if you are a Republican in the post-Reagan era there is a presumption that you have internalized the lesson of Reaganomics, the idea that you grow the economy by lowering tax rates and encouraging across-the-board business growth. And there is a presumption that you have turned away from the Democratic recipe of targeted privilege and subsidy.

But John McCain has always seemed to act against the Republican grain. First, he was involved in the S&L scandal, the only Republican in the Keating Five that carred water for Charles Keating, the corrupt S&L official. That raised a huge question mark, not just about McCain’s probity but about his common sense. What Republican would want to carry water for an official in a notoriously government-favored (and Democrat sponsored) industry and that was known to be in trouble since the late 1970s?

Then he’s been a thorn in the side of President Bush and was the co-author of the monstrous McCain Feingold bill to limit campaign speech.

So here is what Moore found out about McCain’s economic philosophy. Said McCain:

"I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated."

In case you were wondering, McCain was for years chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce,
Science, and Transportation.

Isn’t it getting a little past time for McCain to complete his economics education?

Rachel's Story

Suppose you had been brutally raped back in 2002. Suppose you had battled back and had confidently faced your attacker in court, had testified and sent him to jail.

Suppose you had written an article about your experience and now, finally, here it was, published in Marie Claire on July 7, 2005.

So here you are, riding in the London Tube on the way to work, reading your story in a women’s magazine at about 9:00 am, heading out of Kings Cross station when all of a sudden:

I felt rather than heard an explosion; it was as if I had been punched violently in both ears. The world went as black as if I had been plunged deep underwater.

Well, it’s a survival story, the story of Rachel North, rape victim and terror victim, but none the less compelling for that.

And it is a reminder that we are heading out of a curiously tranquil era in western history when nothing really happened.

But now we are going back into the real world, the world no longer of equable reason, of kindliness and due process and people dying peacefully in their beds. We are returning to the real world of life and death, of the dark chthonic forces that dwell in the ravines between the ethereal peaks of sublime exaltation, of populations on the move, of the clash of civilizations, of religious wars, of heroism and victory, of shame and defeat.

It is a world that has been there all along. Only we chose not to see it.

Keeping the Home Computers Burning

The Brits are having a spot of winter weather right now, what they call “snow chaos.” That is British understatement to describe road conditions where 1,000 cars have been temporarily stranded by five inches of snow in Cornwall.

But Vicki Woods is worrying about the home computers. What happens if the power goes out and there is no power for any of the vital home appliances. Like showers.

My husband observed that the shower wouldn’t work if the electricity went down. The shower? What was he on about? "You chose, if you remember, a power shower. What do you think ‘power’ means?"

Yes, it always comes as a shock when the power goes out. It is even more of a shock to learn that the Brits have jumped from claw-footed bathtubs to power showers in one giant leap. But then Ms. Woods starts to worry about the really important things, like how are we going to keep all the computers running when the power goes out? Time to look for a generator.

The one I liked best was a tidy little yellow object the size of a hat-box, costing £249 ($400). I liked it mostly because it promised "running time approx 10 hours", which would do me nicely if the house was plunged into darkness at three in the afternoon.

The chap down at the pub thought that was the funniest thing he’d heard all week. A little thing like that wouldn’t be able to do anything, let alone power the Woods’server farm.

"You’d be looking at - ooh, what? £500 ($900) down for a serious piece of kit that’ll do all your computers, and all you’ll need then is a gizmo that...

Yes, it’s great fun on a dark November evening to get all snuggled up next to a roaring fire and tap humorous articles about what to do when the power goes out.

But imagine the “scrum” (another classic British word) at the superstore when everyone and his brother are rushing out to buy themselves a generator! How big would it have to be to run the computers, the home theater, the microwave, the power shower, and a light or two?

Winning in Iraq

What is going on in Iraq? Are we on the cusp of helping the Iraqis establish a self-governing society complete with federal constitution and a consensual politics in which the punctuations of suicide bombers are merely gigantic sound effects? Or are we on the cusp of failure, in which the progress from election to constitutional referendum to election is a mirage of stage effect in which the reality is a menacing insurgency that is poised to plunge Iraq into civil war?

The honest answer is that we don’t know. If we knew the real situation then everything would be over, bar shouting.

But military historian Victor Davis Hanson thinks we are on the cusp of victory.

Despite acrimony at home, the politics of two national elections and a third on the horizon, and the slander of war crimes and incompetence, those on the battlefield of Iraq have almost pulled off the unthinkable — the restructuring of the politics of the Middle East in less than three years.

That is why the Democrats are not willing to go beyond their opportunistic truckling to the “Bush Lied” crowd and their ankle-biting criticism of the details of the war in Iraq. When offered a chance to vote on bringing the troops home, they respectfully declined.

They are politicians. They are creating noise—fear, uncertainty, and doubt—and preparing the ground for an “I told you so” moment, if it comes, that could help them regain control of Congress or propel a Democrat to the White House in 2008. It is a tactic that has very little downside. If the Bush strategy succeeds, well, then they can say that Bush was lucky to win, considering how he bungled the whole thing from start to finish.

Be Thankful and Hope

In the present season of conservative and Republican exhaustion it is easy to think that the great tide of conserative reform has reached its high tide and has turned into a vicious rip-tide that will swallow its supporters. Even if that is so we should be thankful, especially in this season, for all that the American conservative movement has achieved in its program of resumption, that is, the resumption of eternal truths and practices that sustain the civilized life. We use “civilized life” in the strict sense referring to the life of the city in its characteristic of bringing together those of a commercial habit to serve the consumers.

But there is also hope. In the weeks after the voters of California truckled to their public employee masters and the principled liberal voters of King County, Washington, voted to reelect Ron Sims, the county executive that presides over the third most corrupt election system in the United States, according to one observer, there are buds of renewal. According to Max Borders

Many of us are tired of trying to use political channels to bring about social change. We’re dissatisfied with the way government handles such projects, we’re fed up with the bureaucracy, and we resent having our money taxed from us every paycheck to be managed by those who only claim to know better.

And some of us are doing something about it. Borders cites a whole range of “social entrepreneurs,” many of them successful business entrepreneurs like the Google guys and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who

are starting to figure out that civil society works better than government at bringing about civic improvement, opportunity, and positive change. The altruism boom is underway. And if the government doesn’t smother it, social capitalism can amount to a revolution for tremendous good.

Fast Company has compiled a list of these new social entrepreneurs. But will they make a difference?

One thing is for sure. The present huge power structure that runs the government system of social support will not give up without a struggle.

An Old Reagan Hand Says GOP in Power Too Long

Reagan aide Lynn Nofziger is now 81. It was forty years ago that he left his job as a journalist to join the gubernatorial campaign of Ronald Reagan. Now he sees that the GOP has been in power too long, according to Ralph Z. Hollow.

"They’ve been in power too long," Mr. Nofziger says of Republicans. "Any time you put any political party in power for too long, it becomes corrupt. It loses its focus. It forgets why it came there."

Also, the Democrats have opposed the Republicans at every turn, and Republicans are just tired.

Maybe Nofziger is right. Maybe the Republicans need a turn in the political wilderness to do some thinking and to develop a new political vision. Not that the Democrats are any better.

If Republicans have got fat and lazy at the national level the Democrats are in worse shape. Their aristocratic vision of government by the enlightened and educated for the benefit of the “little people” that sounded so noble two generations ago is now a hollow joke. Today’s Democrats are an oligarchy, pure and simple, a coalition of the well connected and the privileged passing out the spoils of the tax system to their followers.

At least you can say that their followers’ needs are modest, for now. State and local government employees earn a mere 40 percent more than private sector workers and retire in their fifties.

Imagine what things will look like in twenty years. Democrats will probably have convinced themselves that they deserve to earn twice as much as evil Republican private sector workers. And they will retire on magnificent pensions in Florida and Arizona in their forties after twenty years of selfless service for the people.

Yes. Hillary Clinton for President!

Pushing Back Against "Bush Lied"

Although it is true that the Republicans direct all three branches of government and the political power that goes with it, they do not own the culture, the media, and the academy. And the do not own the rank and file that actually do the work in the governments of the nation.

That is why the Democrats can successfully operate a campaign of deceit like the ongoing “Bush Lied” campaign, the accusation that Bush lied the nation into the Iraq war.

But any thoughtful student of political affairs would have observed how carefully the Bush administration built its justification in the months leading up to the Iraq war. You could tell that every sentence had been carefully parsed, probably in light of the Vietnam experience, so that its meaning could be justified by the facts and analysis to hand at the time.

And anyway, how come the left started the “Bush Lied” campaign even before the Iraq invasion. Did they know something that we didn’t know? Or were they merely taking their cues from their handlers? And who were they?

Pundit Michael Barone takes aim at the “Bush Lied” folks.

The propagators of the big lie against President Bush are trying to delegitimize not only him, but all the progress due to Iraq, progress toward freedom for Middle Easterners and toward a Middle East that no longer threatens the United States.

The tactics of the Democrats in the last decade have been openly obstructionist, issuing, one supposes, from the rage at being displaced from the center of power, first in 1980, then in 1994, and most humiliating of all, in the dead-heat election of 2000. You can understand why. It’s about power.

Their whole existence and reason for being is bound up in the continuance of the 30 percent of GDP that they have built up into a vast patronage machine over the last century. Now the chickens are coming home to roost: a vast government machine that does not do very much with a lot of money; unsustainable entitlement programs; privileges and subsidies that are threatened by the new global economic order.

The only thing that Democrats have thought to do about their strategic position is to counterattack, whether it is Social Security, tax cuts, Hurricane Katrina, or Iraq. They can get away with it because the mainstream media lets them get away with it. Imagine Republicans attacking a Democratic president and blocking his program. The mainstream media would make the Republicans into mean-spirited monsters. (Oh yes, they did.)

Sooner or later, Democrats will have to think of something smarter than mindless obstruction. But it doesn’t look as though that will happen any time soon.

And that is a pity. Because the American people are going to have to pay the bill.

Government Workers Earn More

Sixty-year-old baby boomers all across the nation are reporting a curious experience. When they go to their 40-year high school reunions they discover that their old school pals that went to work for the government have already retired. Imagine that! The humble toilers who opted out of the fast lane have already left the rat-race for a comfortable retirement. Who would have thought it?

Of course, it’s worse than that. Not only do government employees retire earlier, they get paid more than workers in the private sector, as Steve Malanga reports.

Take teachers. Everyone knows they are underpaid. But according to the National Compensation Survey, public school teachers earn about 20 percent more in hourly pay and benefits than professional workers in the private sector.

The federal government’s national compensation survey estimates that local public school districts pay teachers an average of $47.97 per hour in total compensation, including $12.39 per hour in benefits — figures that far outstrip not only what private school teachers earn, but also the average of what all professional workers earn in private business, a category that includes engineers, architects, computer scientists, lawyers, and journalists.

OK, but that is just teachers. What about ordinary workers? Well, state and local government workers earn about $35 per hour in wages and benefits while private sector workers earn a little less than $25 per hour. Wow. That means that the average public sector worker makes about 40 percent more than the average private sector worker.

No wonder that liberals are trying to do a number on Wal-mart. If they could force Wal-mart to pay more then it wouldn’t seem that liberal government workers are overpaid. Never mind that, if we arbitrarily raised worker pay with minimum wage laws and mandatory benefits we would end up with European levels of unemployment.

Still. Forty percent more! That starts to make private sector workers look like mugs. What is the point of accepting the risk and the challenge of private sector work if the tenured, lifetime employment government worker earns more?

You tell me.

A Question of Belief

As everyone knows, the world is moving progressively down a path of secularization, away from a traditional language of myth and magic and towards a reality-based world of science and logic. Why then, asks Frank Furedi, is the modern world full of “life coaches, lifestyle gurus, professional celebrities, parenting coaches, super-nannies, makeover experts, healers, facilitators, mentors and guides?”

These modern sources of spiritual authority seem to have stepped into the social space formerly occupied by traditional authority figures.

Yes, it has become fashionable to treat traditional forms of authority — monarchy, church, parliament — with derision. Criticism of traditional institutions has become so prevalent that it bears all the hallmarks of classical conformism. Scientists, doctors and other professionals have also experienced an erosion of authority. But the diminishing influence of conventional authority has been paralleled by the rise of a new ‘alternative’ one.

So we have the curious situation today that people distrust politicians but trust celebrities. Sir Bob Geldorf possesses the moral authority to browbeat elected politicians about aid to Africa. People question the actions of the scientifically-driven drug companies and trust the folk remedies of the herbalist.

The people that patronize herbalists and shop at natural foods stores are often the same people that are contemptuous about the beliefs of the creationists and Intelligent Design folks.

It is perhaps too extreme to say that people who don’t believe in God will believe in anything. But they certainly will believe in something, and if they do not submit themselves to the moral authority of priests and ministers they will submit themselves to the authority of life coaches and gurus.

Perhaps Paul Bloom is on to something in “Is God an Accident” when he writes that children from an early age learn to differentiate between moving objects and immovable objects. They project into the moving objects the notion of purpose. Moving, objects, “psychological things” possess “minds, intentions, beliefs, goals, and desires.” If humans develop the notion of purposeful things as a way of explaining to themselves the behavior of moving things, then it is a short step to ascribing purpose to the whole world of moving objects and the Author of it all.

When you decide that the Author is dead then you soon find you need to replace Him with substitute guides. You still need to learn about your purpose in this world and to divine the purposes of others. You head off on a journey to the other side of the world and find yourself back where you started.

The War over Medicare Drugs

In case you hadn’t noticed, November 15 marked the start of enrollment
for the new Medicare drug plan. Naturally liberals and their willing accomplices in the media are pushing the idea that seniors are all confused about it and that the whole plan is a disaster.

Not so fast, writes Gary J. Andres. It’s true that the plan offers seniors choices. But choice is a conservative principle that is worth defending.

Market-oriented health care reform proponents have a huge stake in the successful rollout of this new program. If it thrives, the innovative changes provide new momentum for market-oriented,consumer-driven policies. If it fails, we move backward, to a government-run, one-size-fits-all program. We now stand at a fork in the road in American health care. Liberals understand that, but do conservatives?

Having choice in health care means, of course, that if you want to maximize your benefits under the new law you have to do a little work, and it’s true that older people are not as good at analysis as they might have been in their youth. But conservatives had better make sure that liberals do not get to define reality on the Medicare reforms. There’s a lot riding on the success of these reforms.

Maybe conservatives should take a little time out over the holiday season and have a talk with a senior. Let us all make sure that our elderly parents understand their options and choices under the new Medicare plan. A simple precaution like that could go a long way to cutting the liberals off at the pass.

Aside from the practical political aspect of this there is the bigger question. If Americans got to choose their health care arrangements, what would they choose? Liberals might be surprised. Conservatives might be surprised. We might all be surprised.

The Senate Goes Wobbly

With the United States Senate voting in one week to let federal judges rather than military commanders determine who is an enemy combatant and to send a sense of the Senate resolution to President Bush to tell them how he plans to get out of Iraq we must look at the possible consequence of “going wobbly.”

Here we are, what Lee Harris calls the western team arrayed against the “eternal gang of ruthless men.” What happens when come of our chaps go all wobbly and work to weaken the current western effort to contain the ruthless men?

We have a historical reference for the current situation, because the history of the twentieth century was largely the story of the western commercial empire battling against the ruthless secular religions of fascism, Soviet communism, and Maoist warlordism.

Except for the advent of Soviet communism, each eruption of the ruthless men could have been easily contained: the Hitler phenomenon in the mid 1930s, the Mao phenomenon at any time up to about 1947-48.

The comparison of the rise of Mao and the current eruption of Islamo-fascism is apt. Mao was a ruthless man who maintained an army in China for twenty years courtesy of the Soviet Union and the vacillation of the United States. When he gained power he used the entire wealth of China to try to project himself onto the world stage as a superpower. But it couldn’t be done. China was an agricultural country, and didn’t have the wealth to sustain a bid for global hegemony in 1950.

If the Islamo-fascists gain control of the Middle East they would, of course, obtain the oil income of Saudi Arabia, say about $180 billion a year. It might not be enough to sustain global hegemony, but it would certainly be enough to cause global mischief and disruption. It might be enough to conquer Europe.

For two hundred years the peripheral world has fought against the emerging global commercial empire, represented in the 19th century by the British and in the 20th century by the Americans. The Islamo-fascists are just the latest reactionary movement that has arisen to oppose it.

For a long generation, since the emergence of the McGovern wing, the Democratic Party has flirted with the reactionaries, only getting serious when they were in the White House.

Maybe we need to elect a Democrat to the presidency in 2008 to force the national Democratic leadership to deal with global reality and stop playing footsie with the Angry Left crazies.

If Republicans Don't Stand for Tax Cuts...

If there is one thing the Republican Party stands for it is tax cuts. That is because it is Republicans who actually pay taxes. Over 95 percent of federal income taxes are paid by the top 50 percent of taxpayers.

So why then is Republican US Senator Olympia Snowe
balking at the extension of the 15 percent dividend and capital gains taxes enacted in the great Bush tax cuats of 2003? Is it just grandstanding, or is she using the tax cut issue to push her pet project?

Republicans had better watch out, writes investment guru
Larry Kudlow. Even if the Democrats insist on disrespecting the investor (and risk-taking) class in their eternal drumbeat about tax cuts for the rich, the investor class might want to teach Republicans a lesson if they don’t deliver on an investor-friendly tax regime.

Republicans may be alienating their most natural supporters. In recent elections, nearly two out of every three voters were stock owners. Where will they turn if the Republicans they put into office no longer represent them?

The problem for investors is that they really don’t have an alternative. Ever since the early 1980s the Democrats have set their face against the supply-side menu of low tax rates. They persist in a vision of the economy as an enlargement of the federal budget. You take money from the taxpayers to fund programs for Americans.

But that is not how the economy works. The economy is a world in which people make goods and services for other people in society so that they can get in exchange the things that they want: food, housing, transportation, health care. The results are in on how to make the economic system work better. You create a level playing field without hills of privilege and subsidy and the valleys of high tax rates and punitive regulation. The more you enact privileges and subsidies—the more that Congress does what comes naturally—the more you distort the relationship between producers and consumers, and the more you leach prosperity out of the system.

In Europe the Fire This Time

Here’s the best piece yet on the French mess. Columnist
Minette Marrin tells about the little village near
Montpellier in which
she used to have a house.

For years we were the only foreigners and while nobody
paid us much attention, everyone was pleasant enough. By the end we
were on friendly terms with quite a few people.

I say by the end, because we left. We sold the house a few years ago
because the atmosphere of the village had gone sour. There was
something almost frightening in the air. It is strange to me that
people have been so surprised by the past few weeks of burning and
rioting in French cities, including Montpellier. It has been obvious
for at least 10 years, even to a
foreign visitor, that something was badly wrong.

What went wrong? Well, first the Marrins noticed a lot of new people, North Africans, hanging around. And they noticed how much the local people hated them. Of course, as tolerant Brits the Marrins took a high line with all this. Until their house was burgled. Until their car wheels were slashed.

Then they sold up and left.

For as long as any living American can remember the European educated elite has had a grand old time wagging their heads at the race problems in the United States.

So it is odd that it has taken the French so long to wake up to the alarming failure of their much vaunted un-Anglo-Saxon society to accommodate its Muslims.

Or maybe it is not surprising. After all, the European educated elite at no time ever thought to analyze the race problem in the United States with a view to learning lessons for their own continent. They analyzed it in the spirit of anti-Americanism, as a way of sneering at the uncouth snaggle-toothed yahoos of North America.

Now it is too late. Now a frightening storm has descended upon Europe. Now it is going to take a war to set it all straight.

Trying to Explain the French and the World

Does it seem cynical that, in the misery of the recent French riots, all the commentators are projecting their ideas upon the suffering French and deftly demonstrating how their ideas show exactly how the French got into their mess and how they could get out of it?

Not really. That’s what humans do. We try to understand the world according to the template that we carry around. We keep at it until our template utterly fails us. And even then we may still continue to worship it.

For economist Arnold Kling understanding the world means attacking the social model of Berkeley cognitive scientist and
liberal George Lakoff. Lakoff divides the world into people that want government to act like a “strict father” and those that want it to act as a “nurturant parent.” You can figure out which US political party is the Daddy party and which is the Mommy party in this formulation. Lakoff believes, as a liberal, that the correct government model is the nurturant parent one.

Kling, as an economist and a libertarian, asks the obvious question. Enough with this parent stuff, already. Why not junk the parent model and have an America without a parent. Just as we have separated church and state, why not separate family and state?

To the traditional Left and Right, one question raised by the riots is how the French welfare state affects Muslims and other minorities. The Right worries that it provides too much support for "alien" immigrant "parasites." The Left worries that it does not provide enough education and employment opportunities.

To libertarians, the welfare state is something that is economically ineffective and morally wrong for everyone, not just for ethnic minorities. Families and non-coercive institutions, such as charities and churches, ought to provide for basic needs. Education and health care ought to be primarily the responsibility of families, not of the state.

But the bigger question is: Why do most people, excepting a tiny minority called libertarians, want the state as parent, differing only in their preference for a Mommy state or a Daddy state? How can we explain this?

We can turn to a model that does a better job of understanding what is going on than the models of Lakoff and Kling. It is called Spiral Dynamics.

In the Spiral Dynamics model there is no binary opposition, between Mommy and Daddy state or between family and state, but a hierarchical model of people in different stages of existence. First of all there are red impulsives, people that experience the world as a cockpit of power and themselves as the victims. But some of them climb out of this power hell and become blue purposives. They believe in the One Truth and, in our western model, the love of the Lord Jesus Christ. The children of blue purposives often rebel against the totalism of One Truth. They discover that you can change the rules, if you want. Life is a game, they believe, and they become orange creatives. But the children of creative egos often rebel against the life of the ego. They believe in sharing and caring, the demolition of power structures and hierarchies. They become green communitarians.

The power of this model is that it can accomodate both the binary world of Lakoff, his strict vs. nurturant parents, and the world of Kling and his separation of family and state. Strict parents are blue purposives believing in the One Truth. Nurturant parents are green communitarians, visualizing world peace. And libertarians are orange creatives, believing that you can settle everything with agreed-upon rules.

But what about men of power, you ask, like Mao, Stalin, and Hugo Chavez? They don’t appear in the models of Lakoff and Kling. But we can understand them in the Spiral Dynamics model. They are red impulsives that worship power. Their natural modus operandi is to organize helpless victims into political armies in their march to power.

As things get serious in the years ahead, it is going to be important to have the best model, the one that understands the world as nearly as possible. It may be a matter of life and death.

Spiral Dynamics is not that model. But it is a start.

Steyn on Europe: It's the Demography, Stupid

Don’t order the casket for Europe just yet, but it is time to start taking measurements.
That’s what
Mark Steyn is saying about Europe. It’s the demography, stupid. It’s all very well to have the finest in Euro Social Models and to boast about it to your hick American cousins, but what happens if nobody has any children except
the Muslims on welfare? You really want to know?

It’s Au Revoir to the Euro Social Model. That’s what.

OK. We all knew that. But the New Hampshire philosopher introduces a new concept into the public square, an ambitious and decisive idea that may change the world as we know it.

American firearms owners have a popular slogan: ’If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.’ Likewise, if you marginalise religion, only the marginalised will have religion.

In fact, American gun owners do not say that. They print bumper-stickers that read:

WHEN GUNS ARE OUTLAWED ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE GUNS

So how does Steyn’s concept translate into a bumper-sticker?

WHEN RELIGION IS MARGINALIZED ONLY THE MARGINALIZED WILL HAVE RELIGION

Not quite snappy enough, is it? Let’s try again.

WHEN RELIGION IS KILLED ONLY KILLERS WILL HAVE RELIGION

How about that?

Wait Till Next Year

Everyone is busily projecting the results of this week’s election out to 2006 and 2008, wondering if they point to a Democratic revival or to continued Republican dominance. Especially significant, especially for Democrats, is the gubernatorial election in Virginia in which the Democrat Tim Kaine beat the Republic Jerry Kilgore by 52% to 46%.

Liberal Thomas Oliphant sees the seeds of Democratic revival, a chance to increase taxes and government services. For

a red state is not always what it seems. Instead of being increasingly populated havens for megachurch social conservatism and low-tax conservatism, these [outer Virginia] suburbs demonstrated that they are also places where middle-income adults flock in a desperate search for affordable housing and where they show a deep concern about threats to open space and wetlands, gridlocked traffic, and quality public education.

Conservative Fred Barnes sees the world differently. He thinks that the Democrat won in Virgina because he ran a campaign on local issues.

Virginia is a Republican state with a habit of electing Democratic governors. And it’s really not hard to see why. Democrats run on state issues like education and roads. Democrat Tim Kaine stressed these in handily defeating Republican Jerry Kilgore in Tuesday’s election for governor. Mr. Kilgore ran on what voters, at least here in Virginia, perceive as national issues: guns, immigration, gay rights, death penalty. That strategy failed.

Barnes points up the real challenge for Republicans. We want to reform education and local government, and the Democrats want to preserve the status quo, the vast patronage machine of welfare state programs, jobs, and benefits that they own.

Average Americans are right in the middle. They move to the ex-urbs to get away from liberals and the poor, buy a house they can afford, and send their children to half-decent schools. They grumble about the bumbling inefficiencies and corruption of the government services that they use. But they have no stomach for the radical reforms of education and the welfare state that Republicans long to enact.

Republicans only get a chance to reform the welfare state when it breaks. We got to reform welfare, finally, when everyone except die-hard liberals agreed it was broken. Rudy Giuliani got to clean up the crime wave in New York City when everyone except die-hard liberals agreed that something had to be done.

Until things fall apart, we radical Republican reformers must play a waiting game.

Hugo Chavez: What's the Point?

The real problem with oil is not that it is despoiling the earth through global warming. It
is that it ruins nations. Like Venezuela. The great problem nations of the world are often
oil-rich.

In an oil-rich nation, the people become a cost. But in a resource-poor nation, the
people are a resource.

That certainly goes for Venezuela. The oil revenues of Venezuela are a piggy-bank to
pay for the ambitions of the leader of Venezuela. Right now, the leader is
Hugo Chavez, a Castro-type
lefty whose ambition is to bestride Latin America like a colossus. His foreign policy
is to
oppose whatever the US proposes.

Right now, the US proposes a Free Trade Area of the Americas, a continent-wide
market in which all can participate. But
Chavez
went to the recent pan-American summit determined

to "bury" the trade plan, arguing that it would "enslave" Latin
American workers. He called the plan for a Free Trade Area of the Americas an
"annexation plan" that would destroy local industries and give
the US political and economic domination over the region.

OK, pal. Go ahead. From the US point of view, the free-trade plan is really
little more than charity. Our major trading partners are Canada, Mexico, Europe and East Asia.
If South America doesn’t want free trade, it really doesn’t make much difference to the
US.

Of course, according to generally accepted economics, a free-trade pact will
make a big difference to the workers and the emerging economies of Latin America, bringing
the benefit of “global best practice” into their economies. But if they don’t want
it, or Chavez can persuade them that they don’t want it, why bother?

The lesson of history seems to be that nations that don’t allow a free competive
economy just stagnate and wither. As Venezuela will stagnate once the current oil-price
bubble pops.

Wake Me When It's Over

We live, most of us, most of the time, in a dream. So says
John Derbyshire
as he thinks about the aftermath of the riots in France. Even as the
dream of the welfare state is turning into a nightmare there are people running
around with tee-shirts exhorting us to MAKE POVERTY HISTORY

by dint of "fair trade, debt relief, fighting corruption and directing
additional resources for basic needs — education, health, clean water, food, and care
for orphans." Good grief! How come nobody ever thought of this before? Billions of poor
people out there, and all we have to do is direct some additional resources! It’s so
simple! Yet for decades
we’ve been doing nothing! Shame, shame, shame on us!

In the British Guardian the edit page invokes the Kerner Commission
as though we had learned nothing from the generation since the 1960s. No doubt
the Kerner generation correctly diagnosed
the illness—“frustrated hopes and powerlessness.” But then they proposed a foolish
remedy of more government spending and payments for not working that took a generation
to unravel.

Derbyshire directs his readers to the BBC website where the children of the welfare
state propose their solution to the French crisis. To them

the solution to the rioting in France is plain. Respect! Give them jobs!
Set up some post-colonial studies programs!
Work together! Socialism! Love! End poverty!

The children of the welfare state have been well taught. The educated elite has
taught them to believe that their welfare state, their “social model,” is the way of goodness and truth.
But the
truth is that the welfare state is a cruel and oppressive system. It is not
a social model but a feudal model that privileges
the educated elite and reduces the rest of society to powerless
adolescence, coopted and anesthetized with pensions and welfare, but deprived in
independence and responsibility.
It will take a generation to unlearn that, and in the meanwhile many people will suffer.

Young Men Want to Fight for the Tribe

Young men like to fight. That is a truth that has been obscured over the
last generation as advocates of “peace” have monopolized the public square. But whatever
they say, young men like to fight. Even left-wing young men like to fight. They call
it “activism.”

So it can’t be surprising that young men are signing up to fight in the War on Terror.
The surprise is that anyone would expect otherwise. Here we have a generation of boys
that have been tranquilized on Ritalin but that have spent every waking hour engaged
in violent warlike video games. Here we have a generation of boys that, given a choice
on TV, watch sports and
the History Channel rather than the relationship fare of the sitcom. And we are
surprised that they choose to join the armed forces?

W. Thomas Smith Jr.
gives us the details. Recruitment goals in the regular armed forces are generally
being met although the reserves are not doing so well.

"There is a sort of vendetta because of 9/11," says Staff Sgt. Jose Guerreiro, a senior drill instructor at Parris Island.
"Some recruits have even had family members killed in Iraq. We tell them
chances are they’ll be going," the sergeant said. "We explain to them that not
everybody’s going to be kicking down doors up
front, but they know combat is likely for all Marines."

This is as old as the hills. The way that young men serve their tribe or
nation is by stepping up to offer themselves as the ultimate sacrifice. That has always
been the way, for studies show that until recently only about half the young men in any
generation got to project their genes into the next generation.

A lot of people think that the age of war and violence is over. That we have
entered a new era in which the lion will lie down with the lamb. Chances are they are wrong.
Humans are animals, and animals live by killing. Some animals only kill vegetables, but
all animals are in the business of killing to stay alive and to feed their young.

Democratic Politicians and the Angry Left

Conservatives are waking up this week to the possibility that our Democratic friends
may indeed be nailing their colors to the mast of “Bush Lied!” and that they are
prepared to face the American people on the proposition that the current administration
tricked the American people into an illegal and immoral war on Iraq. This
would represent a political polarization worse than the Vietnam War.

Yet it comes at a moment when it must be clear to anyone not hiding in a bunker
that there really is a war going on between radical Islam and the west. There are bombs
in Britain, riots in the Paris suburbs, bombs in Bali, murders of Christian schoolgirls
in Indonesia, genocide in Darfur and, last but not least, the insurgency in Iraq.
The military historian Victor Davis Hanson wonders how Democrats could be
so blind. The columnist
Jonah Goldberg complains that the partisan Democrats just don’t care.

The frisson of worry and of exasperation issues, of course, from the realization that
we are coming up for a fight. With the Democrats turning sharply away from the war and
anything to do with it, for whatever reason, the next two elections culminating in the
presidential election of 2008 are shaping up as divisive as the elections of 2000 and
2004.

It is clear that the national Democratic elected politicians are throwing in their
lot with the Angry Left base symbolized by the left-wing web sites MoveOn.org and
dailyknos.com. This is confusing to Republicans, because for us they represent the left-wing
equivalent of making the John Birch Society the center of the Republican Party. Republicans,
led by William F. Buckley, Jr., read the radical right out of the conservative movement in
the formative stage of the movement, and cannot understand why the Democrats would embrace
their extremists.

In fact, of course, there really are a lot of Angry Lefties. The system
encourages them and condones their extremism. The “no enemies on the
left” tradition in liberal circles and the radicalization of education in the
universitymeans that extreme
left-wing ideas do not get filtered out of the national political discourse.

Recent demographic studies such as
The Politics of Polarization argue that it is folly for the Democrats
to adopt the politics of division because the Republican conservative base
is bigger than the Democratic liberal base.

But you never know.

The Failure of the Social Model

Decades ago a much-loved European pleasure was to shake the head in
knowing exasperation about American race riots. Those Americans just didn’t have a clue.

But now the tables are turned. There is nothing more delicious than for an American
to sit back and enjoy the social problems of Old Europe. And this week we have
a ringside seat at the race riots in Paris. Or are they religious riots? We
can chuckle as French government leaders issue
firm statements
about the rule of law
and preserving peace. And as rivals for the French presidency snipe at each other.

One of the key responsibilities of any government is to control the volatile spirits
of young single males. As Lee Harris has written, the civilized world is in a
neverending battle with the “eternal gang of ruthless men.” The gang of ruthless men
has always found a ready source of recruits among young single men. Legitimate government
needs to get to the young men first before the ruthless men—the revolutionaries, the criminal
gangs, the religious warriors—do.

In the modern welfare state, as
Theodore Dalrymple writes, we have built an almost perfect system for
delivering angry young men to the gang leaders. The brilliance of our progressive thinkers
and policymakers in bringing this about is almost breathtaking.

First of all, they have made it possible for single women to raise children without
having to marry their fathers. This is helpful in raising a generation of gangbangers.
Then they have set up a rigid labor market that vitiates the traditional employment at will
contract. There are minimum wage laws; there are licensing requirements; there are
penalties for firing employees; there are generous unemployment benefits. All of these
worthy measures discourage employers from hiring combustible young men and they discourage
combustible young men with limited skills from seeking employment.
And then there is the whole left-wing discourse of social justice, discrimination, and
multiculturalism that condones and encourages alienation in the lower orders.

So what do these young men do? They do what comes naturally. They join a gang, and
hang out looking surly. From time to time they have a rumble.
In the case of young Muslim men from South Asia, the rumble takes the form of suicide
bombing.

A highly secularized Muslim population whose men nevertheless wish
to maintain their dominance over women and need a justification for doing so;
the hurtful experience of disdain or rejection from the surrounding society;
the bitter disappointment of a frustrated materialism and a seemingly perpetual
inferior status in the economic hierarchy; the extreme insufficiency and
unattractiveness of modern popular culture that is without value; the readiness to
hand of an ideological and religious solution that is
flattering to self-esteem and allegedly all-sufficient;

What is left for the disaffected youth but the holy sacrifice of suicide bombing?

UN Discovers Property Rights for the Poor

Here’s a man bites dog story. The United Nations is setting up a commission on the
property rights of the poor and the hurdles and obstacles the poor face as they try to
make a living.

It’s surprising because, for more than a century, the global bien-pensant elites have
brushed aside the question of property rights. They have experienced that the way
for the poor to advance was by clientage to the political power of the educated elite.
Vote for us, the educated elite told the poor, and we will have our experts look after you.

But now, according to
Alejandro Chafuen,
the UN is taking a look at the narrative developed by Peruvian businessman Hernando De Soto.
And guess what. The new “High Level Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor” will be
led by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright—and Hernando De Soto himself.

Founder and director of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) in Lima, Peru, and author of the landmark 1986 book on property rights, "The Other Path," Mr. De Soto has demonstrated to policy makers worldwide that an organized "legal property system" is the single
most important factor -- the "hidden architecture" or "missing link," he calls it --
that will determine whether individual entrepreneurs and national economies have even
a chance of achieving success.

In capitalist economies, Mr. De Soto notes, business transactions are made
possible by widely accepted rules governing legally defined property. Such concepts
often don’t exist in the developing world, where existing legal systems (or the lack
thereof) may not recognize the assets and transactions of some 70 percent of the
population.

And if that doesn’t persuade you there is the testimony of William L. Lewis in
The Power of Productivity in which he shows that the biggest problem faced by anyone,
rich or poor, is the lack of a flat and fair playing field for economic competition. Usually,
Third World countries are hobbled by vast structures that favor producers over consumers and
distort the economy with a miasma of subsidies.

Of course, all the UN is proposing to do for now is to talk. But still, progress is progress.

A Great Opportunity

It was the fall of 1987 when Senator Edward Kennedy opened a new era in American politics.
In fact, it is perhaps his signature contribution to American politics. An hour after President Reagan
nominated Appeals Court Judge Robert Bork to a seat on the United States Supreme Court, Kennedy spoke
these words on the floor of the United States Senate:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into
back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police
could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids,
children could not be taught about evolution

It was the beginning of the Bork era, in which Democrats arrogated to themselves
the right to attack with ruthless character assassination any candidate for the federal bench who did not hew
to the liberal line on abortion and the other various “rights” that had been
legislated from the federal bench in the era of judicial activism that began in the 1950s
with the Warren court.

Ever since, Republicans have walked in fear of being Borked, and Republicans have suffered
again and again from vicious campaigns of character assassination from Democratic activists.
For Republicans never seemed to be able to avoid getting spattered with mud when Democrats
jumped into the gutter.

Central to the Democrats’ power to administer these public floggings was their
willing accomplices in the media. Most journalists were liberal and they wanted
to preserve the great liberal rights decisions that the Supreme Court had made in the
previous generation.

Now they are trying it again. Senator Schumer of New York has stepped into the shoes
of Senator Kennedy with a speech made this time moments before President Bush announced
the nomination of Samuel Alito for a seat on the Supreme Court, implying that Alito was
a racist:

A preliminary review of his record raises real questions about
Judge Alito’s judicial philosophy and his commitment to civil rights, workers’
rights, women’s rights, the rights of average Americans which the courts have always
looked out for.

Now, it’s sad that the president felt he had to pick a nominee likely to
divide America instead of choosing a nominee in the mold of Sandra Day O’Connor
who would unify us.

America needs unity now. America needs reaching out to one another more than ever.
But the president seems to want to hunker down in his bunker and is more concerned
about smoothing the ruffled feathers of the extreme wing of his party than about
governing all of America and changing history for the better.

For conservatives and Republicans, the issue cannot be clearer. After twenty years cowering from
the monstrous calumnies of liberal senators and liberal activist groups, the Bork era
must be brought to a close. Conservatives and Republicans should not live in
fear of Borking and character assassination.

This time, once for all, the Democratic
tactic of character assassination and obstruction must not stand. It must fail, and
be seen to fail in a national convulsion of disgust with the politics of
“the eternal gang of ruthless men.”

Fortunately Republicans now have the tools to do the job: our own publicity machine
that can meet or beat the organs of the Democratic Party and their willing accomplices
in the mainstream media.

Bring. It. On.