Is it Bush 3 or Clinton 3?

When President-elect Obama ran for office Republicans and conservatives were terrified that Americans would be electing a left-wing radical if he were elected.

Today the folks most terrified must be idealistic Obama supporters who really believed in “Change we can believe in.” President-elect Obama has appointed an economic team that the eevil Karl Rove likes.

[O]verall, Monday’s announcement of Mr. Obama’s economic team was reassuring. He’s generally surrounded himself with intelligent, mainstream advisers. Investors, workers and business owners can only hope that, over time, this new administration’s economic policies bear more of their market-oriented imprint.

He has proposed to retain Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and now General James Jones, according to Con Coughlin is regarded as a good bet for National Security Advisor. Writes Coughlin:

[Jones] is known as an arch-hawk on Iraq who, like Mr Gates, was a firm advocate in persuading President Bush to implement the successful surge strategy.

Some conservatives are all bent out of shape because Obama is stealing their clothes. But I think that we should be delighted. What Obama is saying by his actions is that there was nothing wrong with the policies of the Republican Party except that Republicans were in charge. It’s ok to execute from the Republican play-book as long as it is trusted Democrats that are executing the plays.

It puts the whole Bush era in a new perspective. The problem that the Democrats had, many of us felt, was that the stupid and incompetent Bush wasn’t a Democrat. The cold-cock politics of knocking down every Republican initiative was purely partisan.

Now that Democrats are in power they can legislate and execute based on the merits of the case, not on whether it is Republicans proposing it.

That has to be good for America.

Watching Science 2.0

The current scientific research model, call it Science 1.0, was invented by the Germans in the early 19th century.

In the chaos of French-occupied Germany after the disaster of defeat at the hands of Napoleon the Germans decided: Never Again. They determined to build up Germany so that the French could never be strong enough to invade the German heartland, as they had been doing with annoying regularity for nigh on 200 years.

Part of the plan was education, to educate Germans and strengthen the state. And part of the education plan was the research university with its tenured professors. Pretty soon, everyone was copying them, converting universities from churning out clergymen to churning out scientists and engineers. The first research university in the US was Johns Hopkins.

But there’s a problem with this plan, especially if we look at it from the perspective of Micvhael Novak’s Three Sectors: political, economic, and moral/cultural.

The research university and its professors are creatures of the political sector. In fact, you could say that today the education system exists solely to bolster the power of the political sector. Of course, that’s what the Germans had in mind in the first place.

But in the Novak system the idea of the three differentiated sectors of society is that they are separate and independent, and jealous of each other’s power, just like the three branches of government. In their separation and their jealous monitoring of each other’s power they preserve and defend freedom and justice.

You can see the problem when you look at physics, which got all its money because it could offer the politicians H-bombs. Or the social scientists, who could offer the politicians the tools to run (or at least pretend to run) the welfare state.

Now we have the global warming scientists, who get huge sums of research money to investigate global warming for the politicians. Not surprisingly they instinctively understand that the continuance of the research grants depends on a continuing crisis. So they deliver.

Enter Science 2.0. Today, thanks to the internet and to open-source software, anyone can open a blog and start analyzing the data from the government-grant-maintained scientists. As often as not, they find problems. After all, with all their money and their titles, and their powerful political patrons, these grant-maintained chaps are still bureaucrats.

Over the last week we have seen a couple of brilliant entries in Science 2.0 on the global warming front.

First of all there is the effort of Willis Eschenbach at Climate Audit. In an elegant analysis of Michael Mann’s hockey stick data, he showed that the hockey stick signal was carried by only 25 of Mann’s 95 temperature proxy series, and that all of the 25 were problematic. Take out the 25 problem series and you got a temperature series that looked like the old consensus view of the earth’s climate in the last millennium. You start with a Medieval Warming Period followed by a Little Ice Age, followed by the current warming period—which is still cooler than the peak of the MWP.

Second is a nice analysis by Bill Illis at Watts Up With That. Illis takes the global temperature record and removes the fluctuations caused by the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). ENSO is the primary fluctuation associated with the Pacific Ocean and AMO is the primary fluctuation associated with the Atlantic Ocean. What happens? Well, you get a lot less global warming, because we are just at the peak of the last AMO uptick that began in about 1975.The grant-maintained scientists have been telling us that the temperature increase since 1975 has been a global warming signal. They have not told us that we should take into account that the global warming signal has been amplified by the AMO and ENSO fluctuations.

Of course, these amateurs, Eschenbach and Illis, could be wrong. So could the government grant-holders. So could any man. But their analysis is out there, and anyone can take a whack at it. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. No harm, no foul.

There’s an inherent advantage to the Science 2.0 model. The Science 2.0 chappies don’t have careers at stake, so they don’t have to be as defensive as the Science 1.0 careerists who are, in the last analysis, only front men for powerful patrions in the political sector.

And politics, the postmodernists tell us, is all about building a narrative of power.

Obama's Center Right Team

Some conservatives seem non-plussed by President-elect Obama’s picks for Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, and his White House economic team of Larry Summers and Christine Romer. What’s this left-wing radical doing appointing a center-right economic team? What indeed?

But uber-supply-sider Larry Kudlow is complimentary.

There is nothing to be surprised about. Nobody could know what Obama would do. He had no track record on economic policy.

He had a track record that showed him associating with left-wing radicals on his way to power. But that could have been mere opportunism, knowing that lefties would like helping a young (and Harvard-educated) black liberal.

And there is no need to feel betrayed, that a President Obama will take credit for a supply-side economic policy that makes Democrats look good. Assuming that he actually executes a supply-side policy.

Let’s not forget what Ronald Reagan said about this. It’s suprising what you can get done when you don’t mind who gets the credit.

No. What we conservatives want is to bury forever the class-warfare client-state economic policy that liberals instinctively want. Just as we wanted welfare reform even if President Clinton got the credit.

We don’t just want a supply-side economic policy for ourselves. We also want it for immigrant and inner-city Americans who will never get out of poverty with welfare state policies, but will get ahead with supply-side welfare society policies.

When a Democratic president moves the playing field and becomes a little bit supply-side, then Republicans can say: if a little bit of supply-side is so great, why not a little more?

What’s not to like about that?

Occam's Razor Cuts Again

It’s a red letter day for us global warming deniers.

Over at Climate Audit Willis Escenbach has done some analysis on the temperature proxies used in Mann et al. (2008), the paper thay updated MBH98, in which Michael Mann introduced the "hockey stick" to the world.

That first paper in 1998 shocked the world by showing that the earth’s climate was pretty steady for the last 1,000 years, only shooting up when the industrial revolution got really started in the mid-19th century.

This was important because previously everyone had thought that the earth had been warmer than today in a Medieval Warming Period.

But Eschenbach’s analysis shows that the “hockey stick” signal is only carried by two sets of data series, or about 25 proxies out of the total of 95.

One set of data are three Tiljander lake sediment series from Finland. Tiljander has advised that these data should not be used as temperature proxies because they are corrupted by urban development in the last century and a half.

The other set of data are mostly the various bristle-cone pine series assembled by Donald Graybill. These are all from high-altitude pine trees in the US southwest. Writes Eschenbach:

[Graybill’s] work has been called into serious question by Linah Abadneh’s thesis, wherein she was unable to replicate his results.

What happens if you throw out the Tiljander lake sediments and the Graybill pines?

You get a chart that shows a Medieval Warming Period, a Little Ice Age, and temperatures today that are lower than they were a thousand years ago. What a surprise.

Here's Obama!

Everybody’s been asking: “Where’s Obama” on just about everything. What’s his take on the auto bailout? Rush Limbaugh wants him to issue a statement promising no tax increases for a few years.

But at least there seems to be movement on the auto bailout, according to Bloomberg.

President-Elect Barack Obama`s transition team is exploring a swift, prepackaged bankruptcy for automakers as a possible solution to the industry’s financial crisis, according to a person familiar with the matter.

That is what they call a trial balloon.

And it seems that, from the various quotes from Washington barons of the realm, that the idea has some support.

It would probably be my preferred option. But whatever it is, it has to include haircuts all round.

The whole point of a recession is the liquidation of the malinvestments of the previous boom. Well, we are well into the liquidation of the mal-mortgages of the previous boom. Now it’s time to look at the malinvestment of the previous half-century in sky-high wages and benefits for auto workers.

It seemed like a good idea half a century ago, to promise good wages and benefits out of the huge profits of the auto companies. But things got a bit out of hand, as they do when politics gets involved in anything. Now it is time to face reality.

It’s time to get past denial, as our liberal friends say.

What New Deal?

Rumor has it that Obama’s advisors are planning some sort of a Big Bang program in January. As Rahm Emanuel told the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council:

You should never let a crisis go to waste. [It lets us address long-term problems] in the health care area, the energy area, the education area, the fiscal area, [and] the tax area.

You can see what is coming, given that President-elect Obama represents the progressive educated elite. What is coming is an intensification of the power of the progressive educated elite expressed through the power of the political sector. They want to enact a hugely dirigiste program that puts government even more deeply into every area of American life. It’s a “new” New Deal.

That’s all very well, but as Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. writes in the Wall Street Journal, how about Obama cleans up the festering problems of the old New Deal that are just now wiping out the economy.

His real problem is the crack-up of the world FDR built.


Fannie Mae was a New Deal creation, subsidizing the securitization of mortgage debt. FDR’s successors piled on the subsidies for housing debt and incentives directed at low-income borrowers. Kaboom.


Then there’s the UAW, born in 1935. For decades the UAW steadily traded away domestic auto market-share to imports and transplants to keep its aging membership toiling away toward their golden pensions and collecting wages and benefits twice those of their competitors. It worked for a while.

But now Kaboom. Rahm Emanuel thinks that the answer to all these failed government policies is more of the same.

Of course, the problem wasn’t so much with the original New Deal policies, but the fact that the powers granted to the government and to its favored interests were so shockingly abused. The bright young men of the New Deal may have designed some useful programs. But then the bright young men went on to the next new thing, and the programs got taken over by time servers and placemen.

The same will happen to Obama’s government-centric ideas—assuming that they even work in the first place.

In my view, the increased centralization of health care, energy, education, and so on will hasten the day when the whole project of the progressive educated elite hits the buffers.

And the people that get hurt will be the trusting independent voters who just voted innocently for Hope and Change.

Not Your Father's GOP

Kathleen Parker is a conservative columnist who went off the reservation during the recent campaign with an article praising Christopher Buckley for endorsing then-candidate Obama.

Then she got some hate mail.

Now she’s got an article in the Washington Post that urges Republicans to get G-O-D out of the party.

The fact is that a number of elite Republicans don’t really like the idea of the Republican Party as the party of the aspirational white working class.

You’ll find, if you investigate, that a common denominator in aspirational groups is a belief in God. It goes back at least to the Protestant Reformation. And so, if the party of Lincoln becomes the party of Palin and Joe the Plumber you can expect a lot of God stuff. And that’s a problem to people like Parker.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.

I’ve heard this from a number of conservative friends, professional types with money in the bank. And I understand. Enthusiastic Christians like the Christian conservatives of today’s conservative movement have always been an embarrassment to established conservatives. Their naivete, their faith, their certainty—well they just aren’t out of the top drawer.

Sorry. Count me out of the exodus. If the Republican Party ceases to be the party of the moneyed professional class and becomes the party of the aspirational working class, then I’d rather stay than quit.

In my view the aspirational working class has taken it in the chin these last decades. The political elite has made it more and more difficult to be independent and aspirational and we know why. Ordinary people are only interesting to a political elite if they are useful to its program of power. In the present western world, ordinary people are useful to the elite if they are victims. They are useful if they are frightened. They are useful if they are dependent.

The aspirational working class is composed of people that used to be victims. They used to be frightened. They used to be dependent. But now they are climbing. Now they are succeeding. They’d like the nation’s politics and culture to recognize their achievement and honor their culture.

It seemed like it was only yesterday that the political elite loved the white working class to pieces. That was when they were the principal victim group that the elite wanted to sponsor. But the elite has gone on from class warfare to race politics and gender politics—that’s where they mine for new victims today. Today the white working class is an embarrassment, with its bitter embrace of God and guns.

Anyway, so what if the Republican Party becomes the party of working-class and middle-class aspiration? There might be more people interested in that kind of party than you might think, God or no God.

Bail-out for the Banks but not for Detroit?

If we can spend $700 billion on a bank bail-out why not spend a measly $25 billion on the auto companies?

The simple answer is that we can’t let the banks go broke. We tried it, sort of, back in September when Lehmen Brothers went belly up. The fallout from that nuclear explosion is still irradiating us.

But the bankrupty of an industrial corporation is not so bad. The railroads went in and out of bankruptcy with regularity in the 19th century. And the world didn’t end when the Penn Central went bankrupt in 1970 (in a recession, of course). Corporations go bankrupt when they run out of equity. In crude terms, the stockholders get handed their heads and the bondholders get to own the company.

When you look at the balance sheet of General Motors, today, November 18, 2008, you see Total Assets of $110 billion, Total Liabilities of $170 billion, for a Total Equity of minus $60 billion. That negative equity is mostly an Accumulated Deficit of $61 billion. No much to go on.

The best solution for General Motors is to go into bankruptcy. Then the creditors can get together and decide what to do to get something out of the wreck. And then the politicians could decide what they would be prepared to do to help out. General Motors could keep operating, of course, during all this.

A lot of people are going to have to take a haircut over the failure of General Motors. Right now, too many of them are still in denial. So they won’t agree to a haircut until General Motors actually goes broke.

The haircut can’t start until General Motors declares Chapter 11.

Those Pesky Russkie UHIs

Last week was great fun for global warming deniers. There was an almighty cock-up on the monthly temperature front as NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies released a “record” month temperature for October. Trouble was that the temperatures for a bunch of stations in Siberia were for September, not October. Not our fault, said the chaps at GISS. Blame the chaps at NOAA.

(Gotta love those government bureacrats and their CYA antics.)

But the real fun ensued later as the bloggers at Climate Audit and Watts Up With That started taking a look at the Siberian stations in question with help from Google Earth. The little Siberian towns where the temperature stations are located all have district heating systems, where steam is distributed from a central power station to heat the buildings in the town. What about the urban heat island effect from all that?

Then an alert commenter came in with the coup de grace. All the heat that is generated in a city, big or small, escapes into the environment, wrote Willis Eschenbach (04:05:35).

That’s why it doesn’t matter if the steam pipes are insulated or not … the main heat loss is from the houses and factories that are heated by the steam. All of the heat piped around the town ends up warming the environment.

Of course. The whole argument about the size of the urban heat island (UHI) effect is moot. Of course it’s there, and of course it is substantial. You just have to do an energy budget on a city, and figure that almost all the energy it uses, in electric generation, in space heating, in transportation, all of it, pretty well, is discharged to the environment.

And it ain’t chump change.

The Social Liberal/Economic Conservative Chimera

Why don’t conservatives just give up on the social conservatism, a lot of people argue? Then they could pick up the votes of all the social liberal/economic conservatives out there.

That would be a good idea, writes Jonah Goldberg, if indeed there was a great reservoir of social liberal/economic conservative votes out there. But the record is that they ain’t there.

Economically conservative social liberals are the “jackalopes of American politics,” in the words of the National Review Institute’s Kate O’Beirne. The press keeps telling us they exist out there in huge numbers, but when you go looking for them, they refuse to emerge from the bushes.

That’s because most people like that are really Democrats. They are really inviting Republicans to give up and become Democrats just like them. The truth is that social conservatism and economic conservatism go together.

For example, in Congress and in state legislatures, the more pro-life you are, the more likely you are to be a free-market, low-tax conservative. The more pro-choice you are, the more likely it is that you will be remarkably generous with other people’s money.

This makes sense. If you value life and big families then you will build up a social safety net around you of people related to you by blood who are likely to feel an obligation to help you if you need help. But if you don’t have children, don’t get married, don’t keep up with your family, then you are much more likely to feel the need for a government safety net. And why not? Everyone needs a safety net. So socially liberal people naturally gravitate to the economically liberal party—meaning the welfare-state party

In my view the famous social liberal/economic conservative crowd are people that are relatively well-off. They are active enough in the economy as business owners or as well-paid professionals to have faith in the economy to sustain them. They are rich enough that they don’t need to cultivate family ties as a practical way of maintaining a strong safety net. For them, their wealth and their income-generating potential serves as a safety net.

They are rich enough that they can afford to be socially liberal.

PJ's Lament

Poor old P.J. O’Rourke is singing the blues. In a post-election lament in The Weekly Standard he writes we’ve only ourselves to blame. “We blew it,” he writes.

The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We’ve had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.

It’s true. If there was a mistake to be made in the last 20 years, conservatives and Republicans made it. And made it in spades.

Only trouble is: That’s always the way. That’s what humans do. We make every mistake in the book, all the time. That’s why we’ve developed these outsized brains of ours. So we can figure out how to climb out of the holes we dig for ourselves.

So let’s think this through again. Given that we conservatives are all fallible mortals, and given that we are battling against the progressive educated class, the ruling class of the modern era, how much better could we have done?

OK, all right. We could have done a lot better.

The main thing is to learn from our mistakes, and do better next time.

But, the big problem really has nothing to do with us. Try as we might, there’s not much we can do to promote truth, freedom, and the American Way if the American people really prefer the “free” services of the nanny state.

So cheer up P.J.  Things could be a lot worse. The Democrats could have won 60-40 in the presidential election and be up 65-35 in the Senate.

President Bush a Conservative?

Is Bush really a conservative? That’s what some conservatives were asking back in 2000 when then Governor Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative.” And conservatives are asking it again as conservatives go out into the wilderness following the presidential win of Sen. Barack Obama.

According to Jonah Goldberg there are two sides to the argument.

In one corner, there are a large number of bright, mostly younger, self-styled reformers with a diverse — and often contradictory — set of proposals to win back middle-class voters...


In another corner are self-proclaimed traditional conservatives and Reaganites, led most notably by Rush Limbaugh, who believe that the party desperately needs to get back to the basics: limited government, low taxes and strong defense.

Maybe, writes Jonah, the two sides will see how much they have in common when Bush is out of the way.

But blaming Bush is besides the point. In 2000 the voters were tired of plain-Reagan conservatism. With the budget in balance they wanted government to step out a little, and Bush responded as a good politician must if he wants to be elected. And in the cold-cock era with Democrats stopping all genuine reform of their welfare state including the dreaded Fannie and Freddie Bush had limited ability to enact conservative reform.

In four years, or maybe eight years, Americans will once again say that it’s “time for a change.” Then there will be another chance for conservative reform.

But the big prize, in my judgment, is a generation away. That moment will come when women decided that men make better husbands than the nanny state. When they do that then it will bring the whole edifice of the welfare state into question: the government pensions, the government health care, the government education, and the government welfare.

Today all that stuff costs a little north of $3 trillion per year. In a generation from now? Well, let’s not think about that.

But when women turn that corner, and they will, then we will really be able to talk about a conservative era.

Honoring Our Veterans

This world is not a world of peace and justice. It is a world of violence and plunder. Thus it is that governments are organized amongst mankind, to defend against the destructive forces in the world, to defend against enemies foreign and domestic.

Those most particularly called to defend us are the young men and women of the armed forces, the young and strong that are called upon to defend the old and weak.

The veterans of our armed forces were called upon to make sacrifices that may have cut them off from the fulfillment of a normal life: a decent job, a happy marriage, and flourishing children.

So on this day we honor our veterans, those who have stood in the line between order and chaos, between free exchange and brutal plunder.

Many of them have seen horrors that will haunt them all their days; many of them suffered wounds that will diminish their lives forever. And some, too many, have made the ultimate sacrifice, and died that we might live.

There is no recompense that society can give to its veterans for their sacrifice. What they have lost in our nation’s service is lost forever.

But we can show them our respect and honor, and always keep in our minds the service and sacrifice they have rendered up to our great nation, to fight that we might live in peace.

Defining the Modern Foundation

I’ve been reading liberal Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor recently, for a very simple reason.  I want to know the best that liberals can think.

Then I want to write about how liberals every day in every way betray and corrupt their principles in the vanity of their corrupt and hypocritical rule.

So let’s look at this quote from the end of Sources of the Self and tease it out a little.  Taylor is talking about the “moral imperatives” of our “modern culture.”

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.

He means that the central driving forces of our modern culture are our faith in freedom, in helping others, and in valuing and honoring the trajectory of ordinary life, the life of work and family, of marriage and children.  This last item is new, because in the old days ordinary life was considered rather demeaning.  Only the higher life, the courageous life of the warrior or the bios theoretikos of the philosopher was worthy of respect.

Taylor marshals three sources of meaning that underpin the moral imperatives.  They include the inheritance of Judeo-Christian religion.  In his formulation, perhaps the most significant contribution of theistic religion has been the banishment of magic to the periphery.  There are no longer good and evil spirits wielding their power in the world.  Only God.

Then there is the influence of modern science, what he calls “disengaged reason,”  Everyone knows how science permeates everything we think and do. 

And finally there is “Romantic expressivism.”  All of us, even conservatives, are driven by the Romantic notion of the creative individual, creating something new, breaking the mold, making a mark, challenging the status quo.

We conservatives believe in a balanced faith in all these notions and symbols.  Our liberal friends do not.   We conservatives believe in a balanced faith in freedom, in helping others, and in the trajectory of ordinary life through youth, marriage, children, career, and old age.  And we believe that life should be lived as far as possible outside the orbit of force and compulsion.  Our liberal friends believe in universal compulsion.

We conservatives believe in a balanced application of religious values, of science, and of creativity.  Our liberal friends do not.  They believe in self-expression in a consuming cult of creativity, in science when it supports their creative life, and religion when it agrees with their secular pursuit of power.  All these things are for them alone.  Other people must do what they are told.

We all agree on the same things.  It’s just that liberals don’t believe in living up to their principles.  That’s because they have the power, the interior lines on political and cultural power.  As George Maroutsos says: You don’t have power unless you’ve abused it.  Power without abuse is just responsibility.

Excited?  So was General “Chesty” Puller when it was reported that his Marines were almost surrounded.  We’ve got them just where we want them, he growled.

The Party of Aspiration

The New Republic was nosing through the election results earlier this week, and discussing the long-term trend in party affiliation.

Over the last several decades, the country has seen two swing groups move in opposite directions: Working-class whites exiting the Democratic Party, and more affluent, educated voters leaving the GOP.

But in this election the working-class white trend bifurcated.

Among all whites without college degrees (40 percent of the electorate), Obama lost by a whopping 18 points. But among whites making $50,000 per year or less (a quarter of the electorate), he lost by a mere 4 points.

Which makes sense, if you ask me. Because the Republican Party is the party of aspiration. It is the party of people who are aiming to improve their lot in life. That is why aspirational working-class whites are exiting the Democratic Party and non-aspirational working-class whites are not.

The Democratic Party is the party of credentials. Get the right credentials, and get a government job (as a union worker, a teacher, health worker, or professor) and you get set up for life.

You often learn more about yourself when you fail than when you succeed. In the greatest failure in modern Republican Party history, the election of 1964, the party faithful found out that they had a rising star in Ronald Reagan. For the next twenty years, Democrats sneered at him as a lightweight and a B-movie actor. But he still became president of the United States.

The standouts of the recent election were, obviously, Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Both of them are aspirational Americans, in the process of improving their lot, or at least dreaming of improving their lot. So we may look back at the election of 2008 and say: that was they year that the Republican Party as a Middle America party of aspiration was truly born.

Maybe not. You can never tell. The sky is always full of portents. But most of the portents signify nothing.

The telling part about it all was the viciousness of the liberal attack on Palin and Joe. There was obviously something profoundly offensive in Sarah and Joe to the liberal mind.

It’s not hard to understand why. Liberals don’t like aspirational people. They don’t like them because they don’t fit in the liberal plantation. In fact you could say that aspirational people look like troublemakers to the overseers of the liberal plantation.

But it is still astonishing to realize that, for our liberal friends, people like Sarah Palin and Joe Wurzelbacher are an offense to all good-thinking people, and must be destroyed.

I’m still finding it a bit hard to get my mind around that.

Back to Basics

OK. We’ve congratulated President-elect Barack Obama on his victory. Now it’s time to get back to basics.

It’s the old question after a defeat in battle. What are we here for?

For the conservative movement the answer is the same as it was always been since Edmund Burke invented conservatism in 1790 with his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Conservatives stand for a balanced understanding of human life and human meaning. We assert a fundamental ignorance about our human destiny. That is why we stood against the French Revolution, as Burke did. We also stand against communism, fascism, socialism, and all the secular religions of the modern world, including the progressive religion of our liberal friends, the educated elite.

In putting flesh on the bones of this bare understanding of the human condition I turn to the ideas of Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.

In Spirit Novak develops the idea I call the Greater Separation of Powers. There are three differentiated sectors in modern society: the political, the economic, and the moral/cultural. They are and ought to be separate and individual centers of power, and need to be separate and independent of each other. Each has its power, and each is checked and balanced by the jealous critique of the other sectors. But no one sector should ever obtain dominance over the others, and no two sectors should be allowed to gang up on the third sector.

Viewing our society through the lens of the Greater Separation of Powers we can see that our society suffers from three major diseases.

The first I call The Rape of Honor. It is a disease of the moral/cultural sector. In his book Honor: A History, James Bowman begins by defining honor. He says that, in men, it is bravery, the courage to stand in line with your brethren and not run away in the face of danger. In women, it is chastity, the reputation for right action, that is, the good opinion of other women. In our society we have allowed a sustained attack on these two anchors of right living, and the more that people allow their lives to deviate from the practice of honor the more their lives wither and decay.

The second disease I call The Weight of Government. It is a disease of the political sector. Our governments in the world today are too big, too powerful, too ineffective, and too bossy. “It’s the spending, stupid,” you might say. And if you don’t believe me, go to usgovernmentspending.com. Big government infantilizes us, and subsidizes the Rape of Honor, because people without honor are people who cannot live outside the sheltered liberal plantation of big government.

The third disease I call The Sweating of Business. It is a pollution of the economic sector by the political and moral/cultural sectors. Back in the 19th century, everyone knows, the world was full of sweatshops that worked people long hours for low pay and no benefits. Well, today, businessmen and women are like the sweatshop workers of old. The political sector uses business like a piggy bank, and the moral/cultural sector uses business like a punching bag. The other two sectors have ganged up on business to humiliate it and to reduce its reputation and its power.

Our conservative destiny to to cure these three diseases of the body politics, and right three great wrongs. We must rise up to end the degradation and the violence of the Rape of Honor, to reform and remove the great Weight of Government, and to liberate our Sweating Businesses.

It’s not that complicated, now, is it?

A Great Day for America

Yesterday the voters of the United States elected their first non-white president. Although I wouldn’t exactly say that there has been a racial “barrier” to the presidency as our liberal friends seem to think today is an historic moment, a marker that says that the old tribal ways of the world are slowly dissolving.

At this moment on November 5, the New York Times shows that President-elect Obama is leading by 349 to 162 votes in the Electoral College. In the popular vote he leads by 63.0 million votes to 55.8 million for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). That’s 53.0 percent to 47.0 percent. It’s a solid victory for Sen. Obama.

It’s also a solid victory for Democrats as they increase their majority in the US Senate to 56-44 (including three seats in which Republicans are leading) and 252-173 (with 10 undecided) in the House of Representatives.

For Democrats the eight years of frustration as they railed against the illegitimate or unintelligent President Bush have been redeemed with a return to power. And it looks like it is First and Ten for Democrats as the financial markets signal an end to the meltdown. So now they’ll have the opportunity to complete the welfare state with a government takeover of health care.

But this election is also the best of all possible worlds for Republicans. Sen. Obama won the presidency witha solid win, but not a landslide. Democrats have made gains in the Senate, but nowhere near a filibuster-proof 60 seats. And 22 Senate Democrats will be up for reelection in 2012.

The Duke of Wellington is the guy to look to at a time like this. The great test of a general, he wrote, is “to know when to retreat, and to dare to do it.” Republicans today have been beaten in battle. The challenge now is to dare to retreat and get the exhausted troops to a safe stronghold. With a good retreat we can return to the political battlefield in two or four years refreshed, retrained, and eager to win.

Am I Still a Conservative?

I did it. I ventured out into a nest of happy voting Democrats in the heart of Baghdad Jim McDermott’s Washington 7th Congressional District and voted for Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL).

Not because I think he’ll make a good president. No, I think that Obama has all the wrong fashionable liberal opinions on everything, from his youth as a community organizer in the cruel and unjust template of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, to his oh-so-fashionable views on global warming.

No. To me it’s a matter of political hygiene. I think that the voters should switch parties about once every eight years (and definitely after twelve years).

There are two reasons to do this. First of all, any party gets corrupt, and we need to sweep the rascals out on a regular basis, on principle.

But the main reason is this. You just don’t do any serious thinking when you are in office. All you do is try to stay in office, and we can see where that got the Republicans.

There are great and worthy reforms that Republicans and conservatives need to offer to the American people, but right now the Republicans need to go into winter quarters at some modern version of Valley Forge and think about how to talk to the American people about their vision of the future.

In four years, or maybe eight years, the American people will be ready to listen to Republicans again, and then we can hope to start on a new age of conservative reform, and truly begin to roll back the cruel and unjust politics of the welfare state.

Vote for Barack Obama? Or Fred Smith?

If you vote for Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) maybe he’ll spread the wealth around. He’ll take money from the rich earning more than $250,000 a year and give it to 95 percent of the American people. Obama is a student of Saul Alinsky, who wrote Rules for Radicals. Alinsky’s idea was that you organize poor people to demand justice and their share of the economic pie. You can read all about Obama and community organizing from Stanley Kurtz.

Or you could vote for Fred Smith. Fred Smith is the guy who wrote a paper in business school on the idea of an overnight package business. Today FedEx Corporation owns 300 planes and employs 290,000 people. But back in the day his business school prof didn’t think the idea would work.

Fred Smith is frustrated. He’s built his company on blue collar and community college types, according to an interview with Stephen Moore at the Wall Street Journal. The high flyers won’t go to work at ordinary industrial companies. They want to earn the big bucks in the finance industry. Or they did.

He says that most of FedEx’s first line managers come not from the top flight universities, but out of community colleges and the military. "The top talent has wanted to go to Wall Street."

But if you want to spread the wealth, according to Fred, you want to forget about Obamanomics.

"The politicians deplore the fact that we have a disparity of income," he says, but "the only way to make a blue-collar person earn more is to invest in capital, training and infrastructure. So the more you tax capital, the more you hurt workers." He estimates that about 70% of the return from FedEx capital expenditures is captured by workers in the form of higher wages as their productivity rises.

You mean that the way to help ordinary Americans is not by government spread-the-wealth but by corporate invest-in-capital-training-and-infrastructure? My, that’s radical!

Notice that Fred doesn’t mention education. The way to make a blue-collar person earn more is to invest in capital, training and infrastructure, he says.

Fred Smith deplores the high leverage in the financial industry.

"Rather than in our business where you have to have a dollar of equity for, 10 cents or 15 cents of debt," he explains, "it’s exactly the opposite in the financial sector where you have one dollar of equity for 10, 25, 50 times risk."

The thing about having 1 to 10 debt to equity rather than 10 to 1 like the finance industry is that, when things go south, you get to survive. In today’s economy that has to mean something.

Fred argues that the way to encourage corporations to reduce debt load and increase equity is to tax equity less, starting with lowering the corporate income tax rate from 38 percent down to 25 percent.

Now that would be something.