Christian Right Does Direct Democracy

Did you know that abortion is the biggest item in “protest” activity? Yep. Wins by a mile.

In a review of a book on the Christian Right The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right by Jon Wright, Richard John Neuhaus notes how it is the Christian Right that has taken up the challenge for direct democracy that the SDS made in their Port Huron Statement in the Sixties.

“[S]ome 45 percent of respondents in the Citizens Participation Survey who reported participating in a national protest did so because of abortion. What is more, nearly three quarters of all abortion-issue protesters are pro-life, an unsurprising fact given that the pro-life movement is challenging rather than defending the current policy regime. Meanwhile, all other social issues, including pornography, gay rights, school prayer, and sex education, account for only 3 percent of all national protest activity.”

And you thought that the hottest issue right now was gay marriage.

Want to have some other media stereotypes challenged? It turns out that the pro-life movement is not really a movement of stay-at-home mothers against professional women.

[A] striking percentage of pro-life women are university educated, and many have given up professional careers to do pro-life work full-time.... “The pro-life movement,” he writes, “is actually quite diverse, and abortion politics more generally does not [as some claim] pit working-class Catholic housewives against professional, career-oriented women.”

In my view the rise of pro-life activism parallels the rise of environmentalism. Two hundred years ago, most people were fighting to make a bare existence on the land and to get a couple of children out of the nest. They didn’t have time for exquisite ideas about the sanctity of life and saving the planet.

But as soon as people moved to the city they started to have romantic ideas about Nature and the countryside. And as soon as women got free of the danger of childbirth and the heartbreak of infant deaths they started to develop romantic ideas about the delights of motherhood.

So it looks like we will have a sensible balance in the future. Liberals will champion the romantic view of Nature and conservatives will champion the romantic view of childbearing.

Naomi Klein's Latest Lefty Screed

Naomi Klein is a lefty journalist and author, daughter of anti-war Sixties parents that went to Canada during the Vietnam War.

In her No Logo, she railed against the Nineties economy. As I wrote for Liberty:

She is shocked by the megabrands, the brand bombers, and the category killers of the modern consumer society. For in the blaring public space of the brands there is No Space for artists and creativity, in the ravenous appetite of the Wal-Marts and Starbucks there is No Choice for consumers, in the new world of temporary jobs and contract workers there are No Jobs for workers.

It was, simply, left-wing rubbish. Yes indeed, so few were the jobs that half of Mexico came north to work at jobs that didn’t exist.

But now Klein is back with another left-wing tract. This time it’s called The Shock Doctrine and it argues that since people recoil from capitalism the capitalists have to trick the voters and consumers into accepting capitalism by staging crises and “shocks.”

That was before Democratic staffer Rahm Emanuel said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Exhibit A for Klein is—wait for it—Milton Friedman! Yes, he’s the trickster that got August Pinochet to liberalize Chile with his “Chicago boys.” (Yes. We get all the favorite lefty moments, like Chile, Tienanmien Square and so forth marshaled to show that the capitalists up and tricked us when we were feeling vulnerable.)

Johann Norberg in Reason does a good job of exposing the thinness of Klein’s argument. For instance, Klein writes that Friedman acted as “advisor to the Chilean dictator.”

In fact, Friedman never worked as an adviser to, and never accepted a penny from, the Chilean regime. He even turned down two honorary degrees from Chilean universities that received government funding, because he did not want to be seen as endorsing a dictatorship he considered "terrible" and "despicable." He did spend six days in Chile in March 1975 to give public lectures, at the invitation of a private foundation. When he was there he met with Pinochet for about 45 minutes and wrote him a letter afterward, arguing for a plan to end hyperinflation and liberalize the economy. He gave the same kind of advice to communist dictatorships as well, including the Soviet Union, China, and Yugoslavia.

But I suppose it doesn’t matter. Klein has her audience, and they’ll like what she says.

When you look at the shoddy stuff that the left puts out, you wonder: how long can this go on? The answer, unfortunately, is: a lot longer than you think.

And get your facts straight, Naomi. Milton Friedman was about as upfront and honest a guy as ever lived. To suggest that he ever proposed anything underhanded or tricksy is just fantasy. Or hate speech.

The Universe of Hope

If you want real Hope and Change, don’t expect it from a politician. You are committing a category error. Everyone agrees that soldiers and politicians are the fighters, businessmen and workers are the workers, and teachers, clerics, and writers are the prayers. It’s the job of the teachers and clerics in the moral/cultural sector to be in charge of the hoping.

So if you want to ponder the question of hope, the Christmas (or Hannukah, or Divali) festival is a good one to anchor your thoughts.

All these mid-winter festivals are about light or about new-borns. Light is hope, for it lets you see, and birth is hope because every new-born is a reckless expression of hope.

In fact, life is hope. Every living thing, from an irritable amoeba to a little plant struggling in the desert; from a bird flying around on a snowy day looking for food to a young human adolescent yearning to be grown up and free, every living thing is an impersonation of hope. Where there is life, there is hope, and where there is hope there is life.

But hope is not a dream. You cannot just sit back in a reverie and hope. That isn’t life. That’s just deliquescing. Real hope is a dream put into action. It is the young love of a human couple translated into marriage and children. It is the dream of creativity translated into step-by-step actions towards a goal.

And, of course, real hope often involves sacrifice. Maybe it is the sacrifice of the parent for the welfare of the child. Maybe it is the sacrifice of the soldier who dies that others may live. Maybe it is the impossible sacrifice of Christianity: God sacrifices his Son so humans don’t have to sacrifice theirs in expiation of their sins.

What is Hope? All you can do is have faith in Hope. Probably it will all come clear when Pope Benedict XVI issues his third encyclical, which should be due a year from now. Remember? The first was issued on December 25, 2005 and called God is Love. The second was issued on November 30, 2007 and called Saved by Hope. The third one? Something about Faith, I shouldn’t wonder, although, as the Holy Father writes, Hope and Faith are pretty much one and the same thing. But then you could say that Hope and Love are pretty much one and the same.

Faith, Hope, Love. There’s something about all three. Just thinking about them fills you with Faith, Hope and Love. Try it for yourself.

Merry Christmas from all of us at Road to the Middle Class.

NYT: Bush to Blame for Mortgage Meltdown!

Let’s say it up front. President Bush was not early enough or firm enough in calling a halt to the housing boom/bubble. For some years, it is clear, Bush just kept on the policy of mortgage-at-any-cost (especially to minorities) which has been the policy of the US government for decades.

But you’d have to have your head in a liberal bell jar to write a news story about the housing crisis and not mention “Community Reinvestment Act.” You’d have to try really hard not to mention the word “Dodd.” You’d have to try really hard not to mention the bullying of the banks by federal housing officials.

But The New York Times reporters Jo Becker, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Stephen Labaton managed it.

They introduce Franklin Raines as a helpless victim of Bush’s policies:

[Raines, once] Fannie’s chief executive, has fond memories of visiting Mr. Bush in the Oval Office and flying aboard Air Force One to a housing event. "They loved us," he said.

But the reporters don’t mention the congressional hearings in 2004 when Republicans were accused of being racists for criticizing the performance of Raines at Fannie Mae.

“It was not until 2003,” the Times complains, “when Freddie became embroiled in an accounting scandal, that the White House took on the companies in earnest.”

Well Geewillikins, reporters and reporterettes, if the White House had succeeded in reining in Fannie and Freddie back in 2003, we would all be home free.

But they didn’t. They couldn’t. And the reason is Democrats in Congress like Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA). And the reason is the law: the Community Reinvestment Act that more or less forced banks to loan money to poor credit risks.

There’s a good side and a bad side to this sand-box journalism and blatant bias. The good side is that these journalists probably really don’t know what they are talking about. That means that New York Times readers won’t either. As political partisans, we gotta love that.

But the bad side is that the educated elite of the nation—let alone the ordinary Americans who get their news from the educated elite—still don’t have a clue, and may never have a clue about what hit us.

If you can’t get off the Democratic talking points of greedy banks and lax “de-regulation” then you haven’t learned the lesson. And that means that ordinary Americans are going to be forced to go through the whole thing again.

But who cares, as long as the good guys get reelected?

Yes. We are conservatives, and we do care.

The Corruption and the Temptation

Up until the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt the Democratic Party was split between the “honest graft” wing and the squeaky clean liberal or progressive wing. (Let’s leave the Southern Democratic Party out of this.)

Liberals were embarrassed by the corrupt city machines, and the ward heelers were contemptuous of the egg-head liberals who were full of ideas but couldn’t get anyone to the polls.

Of course, both of these tendencies are bad, very bad. The routine corruption of city machines was a continuation by other means of the rule of the “eternal gang of ruthless men,” the politics of piracy and plunder.

But the liberal approach to politics, if anything, is even worse. Liberals are determined to do good, and that’s a good thing. But they want to do good on someone else’s dime. They want to force other people to fund their programs of social welfare. It’s a matter of compassion, they tell us.

Earth to liberals. Compassion is where you give your money to poor people. Compulsion is where you give other peoples’ tax money to poor people.

There was once a famous person who had the liberal temptation.

Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.

The great political achievement of President Roosevelt was to submit to temptation, to turn the Democratic Party from a coalition of city patronage machines and ideological liberals into a single national political patronage machine, led and run by liberals, focused on using political power to do good.

But he also started the descent into corruption. And anyone can see that in full operation as the Obama administration takes office. It’s not about Hope and Change. It’s just about getting back the levers of political power back from the Republican yahoos.

The great world historical achievement of liberals is this. They took a federal government that was spending about three percent of GDP and cranked it up to 20 percent.

What do liberals spend all that money on? Well, that’s what usgovernmentspending.com is for. Let’s take a look.

United States Federal
State and Local Government Spending

Fiscal Year 2009

Amounts in $ billion



Pensions: $891.1

Health Care: $958.2

Education: $873.7

Defense: $806.1

Welfare: $467.7

Protection: $325.0

Transportation: $247.8

General Government: $193.3

Other Spending: $403.6

Interest: $361.7

Balance: $24.3

Total Spending: $5,552.4

Government, especially national government, is there to defend first of all against enemies foreign and domestic. You don’t see a lot of that going on in the top spending categories. Why is that?

The reason is pretty simple. Liberals are running, in the Democratic Party, a political operation. It is not particularly interested in defense. It is interested in its left-wing government programs and its raw political patronage.

The tragedy is that the people most benefitting from all these trillions are well-born educated liberals. The people most hurt are the program beneficiaries, anesthetized by the liberal mess of pottage, who aren’t getting to learn the skills and the trust culture of the city. They aren’t moving up into the self-reliant middle class. And that is a shame. It is more than a shame. It is a crime.

Some day the American people are going to ask conservatives to reform this corrupt regime of patronage and ideological cant.

Until then, conservatives must develop and sharpen their indictment of this cruel, corrupt, and unjust regime.

Music Really Is the Food of Love

Count Orsino in Twelfth Night was one of the most pompous lovers ever. What did the plucky Viola see in him?

But he knew the importance of music:

If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

There you have the two themes of sex. Music and death.

Being holiday season and all, the London Economist has a long and learned disquisition on the question of music. Is it related to sex or survival, they wonder?

No contest. It’s sex. The research proves it.

One reason for believing this is that musical productivity... seems to match the course of an individual’s reproductive life. In particular, Dr Miller studied jazz musicians. He found that their output rises rapidly after puberty, reaches its peak during young-adulthood, and then declines with age and the demands of parenthood.

Interesting isn’t it, how music has degenerated in the last half century from the romantic ballad into the drumbeat pulse of sex.

Music tracks the sexually active years. But cooking does not.

But uniquely human activities associated with survival—cooking, say—do not show this pattern. People continue to cook at about the same rate from the moment that they have mastered the art until the moment they die or are too decrepit to continue.

The question is: are singers the sexiest people alive, more so even than ath-e-letes? You’d think so. Think Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix. And that goes for the more sedate world of opera, with Maria Callas, Luciano Pavarotti (sexy despite his size), and Plácido Domingo.

The other thing that makes you sexy is dancing ability. That’s why they call Tango “vertical sex.”

The Kennedys Ain't What They Used To Be

Nobody could say that the Kennedy political machine didn’t practice nepotism. Old Joe Kennedy would probably have made Gov. Blagojevich (D-IL) look like a piker if we’d known about his shenanigans. (Why do you think we use that Irish word to communicate the notion of dodgy political footwork?)

But at least Jack Kennedy actually ran and won races for the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. And at least Ted Kennedy ran for the Senate in 1962.

But now we have the latest Kennedy scion, Caroline Kennedy Schossberg, campaigning for an appointment to the US Senate.

How about the idea that this political novice should actually run for a political office before she works the system to get into the Senate by the back door?

Otherwise, who can complain about Sarah Palin, a woman without political connections, who has actually won three different political offices in open elections? Indeed, she won the governorship by running against the Republican political machine in Alaska.

Well, never mind. Democrats are Democrats, and Republicans are different, honey.

As the Brits used to say. Not really out of the top drawer, old chap.

Pushing on a String

At this stage of the business cycle pundits usually talk about the Fed pushing on a string. They mean that the Fed can’t actually make people start to borrow. All the Fed can do is print money and hope that economic activity starts to revive.

The usual response is that, of course, economic activity will revive; it always does. But until it does, who knows how long it will be before greed takes over from fear.

The worry is that the Fed is reaching the zone of “quantitative easing.” That was what the Bank of Japan used to do during the lost decade of the Japanese economy, after its big real estate boom left many of its banks insolvent and unwilling to lend.

Well, we solved that problem, didn’t we? We bailed out the banks by recapitalizing them. But do we know that the banks are out of the wood? After all, the banks depend on the quality of their assets, and that depends, in many cases, on the value of commercial and residential mortgages, and they depend on housing prices.

The Fed is working on that, according to the Wall Street Journal, and its action is already leading to a reduction in mortgage rates which will help to advance a revival in real-estate prices. But what’s really needed is not an increase in liquidity, but an increase in confidence.

Meanwhile, according to Larry Kudlow, the Obama team is planning a massive purchase of mortgage paper.

Team Obama is also drawing up plans for a massive purchase of mortgages in order to get long-term borrowing rates down to 4.5 percent — a full percentage-point drop.

But is that the prescription for recovery? What nobody seems to be suggesting is a tax rate cut, worries Kudlow.

But I still believe the best economic stimulus would be a move to cut tax rates across-the-board for individuals and businesses. No matter how much money the Fed prints, or how many roads or mortgages Uncle Sam buys, none of it creates new incentives for private enterprise, risk-taking, and investment.

Yes. It took Bush two years to get Congress to agree to tax rate cuts. And it looks like the same could happen with the firm of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi.

Were Talent-spotters Right on Obama?

Federal Appeal Court Judge and über-liberal Abner Mikva was an early patron of President-elect Obama, according to Tom Hundley. He “was among the first to spot the potential of the skinny young law school graduate with the odd name.”

"I use a Yiddish expression, yiddishe neshuma, to describe him," explains Mikva. "It means a Jewish soul. It’s an expression my mother used. It means a sensitive, sympathetic personality, someone who understands where you are coming from."

That’s cool, because there’s a national problem right in the cross-hairs of the national radar that needs just that sort of sensitive, sympathetic personality. It’s the Big Three auto mess. Michael Barone rather neatly describes how the mess came to be.

It all started with Taylorism, after the book on “the one best way” by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor’s brilliant idea was to measure worker productivity with time and motion studies and implement the one best way as a mandatory procedure for all workers.

Only one problem, of course. It treats workers like machines rather than people. So it provoked its nemesis, the Wagner Act of 1935, that legislated an adversarial relationship between business and labor. It worked great, for a while, as auto workers and steel workers won themselves fabulous wages and benefits.

Everyone thought that the new unionism was a wonderful idea, in particular liberal writers like John Kenneth Galbraith who made a fortune peddling conventional wisdom to a generation of liberals by telling them that he and they were intelligent iconoclasts that soared above mere “conventional wisdom.”

Well, it wasn’t such a great idea. It wiped out the steel companies a generation ago, and now it’s brought the auto companies to the edge of ruin, and brought the current generation of autoworkers to the edge of humiliation.

If President-elect is the genius that his patrons believe then he will use his yiddishe neshuma to lead the autoworkers and their union and their jobs back from the precipice.

But my guess is that he won’t. My guess is that he’ll choke on the chance to get the auto companies to reorganize and write Finis on the era of Wagner Act unionism.

The sensible thing for liberals to do would be to start a strategic retreat on their welfare state and its privileges, to preserve as long as possible the unsustainable privileges and subsidies they have awarded themselves and their servitors. But I don’t think they will.

My guess is that in the next few years the liberals are going to get themeselves suckered into the political equivalent of the Battle of Kursk. That battle, you will recall, was the last big offensive of the German Army on the eastern front in World War II. It seemed like a good idea to the German generals in early 1943 but by the time that Germans actually started the offensive the Russians were ready for them. So the greatest tank battle ever fought ended in failure. The Russians began a counter-offensive that didn’t stop until it reached Berlin two years later.

After all, Barack Obama didn’t run for president to sort out the labor union problem. He ran to lower the oceans and cure the sick. Much more fun.

Brit Laborites Propose Welfare Reform

They said it wouldn’t work. They said that millions of children would starve.

That’s what the experts and the advocates said when President Clinton signed the US welfare reform bill 12 years ago.

They were wrong. All that has happened in the United States is that the welfare rolls have gone down and poverty rates have decreased.

Now the British Labour Party, champion of welfare and social programs, has announcd a welfare reform plan for Britain. It comes not before time, as Brits have been regaled recently by several welfare horror stories, including the killing of Baby P by Mum’s current boyfriend. Then there was the disappearance of Shannon Matthews. She was one of seven children out of single-parent Karen Matthews by several fathers. Little Shannon disappeared because her welfare mum (it’s Mum, not Mom, in Britland) figured to get £50,000 in reward money. So she staged her daughter’s disappearance.

Anyway, Labour minister James Purnell last week announced a welfare reform bill in Britain. Even the Labour Party has a limit when it comes to turning a blind eye to the catastrophe of the underclass.

This may be Labour’s reform plan but it is the Conservative Party in Britain that is setting the pace on social reform, writes Tim Montgomerie. He quotes Conservative Party leader David Cameron in a recent speech about children trapped in the culture of social breakdown.

Raised without manners, morals or a decent education, they’re caught up in the same destructive chain as their parents. It’s a chain that links unemployment, family breakdown, debt, drugs and crime. Breaking that chain means recognising the scale of the problem and taking serious, long-term action.

Lots of people have sneered at David Cameron. That’s because he presents himself as a new kind of Tory. But if you look at the substance that the Conservative Party is developing, including radical ideas on education and welfare, you see a party that is setting itself up as the party of real hope and real change.

In many respects, David Cameron’s Conservative party is timid but on social reform it is groundbreaking. The Tories understand that the only way of reducing the size of the state is to cut the demand for government services by strengthening civil society. They understand, finally, that the Left has lost the war on poverty. And they are rediscovering that conservatism is at its best when politicians support and never supplant the Burkean little platoons of family, voluntary organization, and local school

Sounds like US and UK conservatives are all on the same page.

Of course, the Conservatives are in opposition. All they can do is talk. But whatever they are saying, the Labour Party seems to be listening and anxious to co-opt their ideas.

Double Whammy Morning

Faced with the failure of the auto bailout in the United States Senate and the collapse of a $50 billion Ponzi scheme markets plumm... well, they seem to have shrugged. At noon, 12/12/2008, the Dow was down 95.02 points and the Nasdaq was up 5 points.

So that just shows you. It’s not the end of the world. Yet.

Most likely, as long as the financial system holds up—and LIBOR rates are down sharply in the last two days—we can deal with the auto meltdown just fine. That’s what the bankruptcy system is for. You declare Chapter 11, you wipe out the stockholders. You make the bondholders the new owners of the company. You wipe out the labor contracts. And you keep going with special bankruptcy loans.

But why then did we have to bail out the banks? The answer is simple. We can’t let the banks fail because they’d bring down the whole credit system with them. We did a nationwide experiment on that in the 1930s. Banks failed left and right, and depositors lost their life savings. It brought the United States to a standstill and a ten-year Great Depression.

Don’t think you’d like a repeat of that? Then bail out the banks.

That’s not to say that there aren’t lessons to be learned. Lesson One is: Don’t get leveraged up like that. Don’t get leveraged up on home mortgages, or credit default swaps, or government sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But that’s a subject for beneficial legislation, if Congress is up for the job.

The interesting part, for me, with the bailout failure in the Senate is that Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) now proposes to go home for the holidays. Oh really? Can’t be all that urgent, can it.

The murmur you hear is that the Dems did the whole bailout thing as payoff for the United Auto Workers support in the election. And the bailout package failed because eevil Republican senators wouldn’t sign onto a bailout bill unless the UAW bit the bullet on wages and accepted “parity” in 2009.

So the Dems took a dance on the floor with the partner what brung them. But, it looks like the agreement was one dance only. Now the partner could be on their own.

Unless President Bush rushes into the breach.

But Mr. President. It looks like the market has already discounted an auto industry failure. And it looks like it thinks that it’s not the end of the world. So why worry?

Yes. There are all those “high net-worth individuals” who got taken to the cleaners by an accused Ponzi scheme. Oh well.

What About a Stimulus That Works!

Everyone agrees that what the world needs now is Stimulus.

But what kind of stimulus should it be? Should it be a tax rate cut, as Republicans and conservatives would recommend? Or should it be spending on stuff like infrastructure, as Democrats and liberals would recommend, and as President-elect Obama seems to prefer?

Harvard economics prof Greg Mankiw has some ideas on this. And like a true economist, he grades the different approaches by their “multiplier” effect. Here is what he means:

One way to think about the issue is the size of the fiscal policy multipliers. The multipliers measure bang for the buck—the amount of short-run GDP expansion one gets from a dollar of spending hikes or tax cuts.

That’s a fancy way of saying: If I spend a dollar on stimulus, how far would it go?

Guess what. Republicans are right and Democrats are wrong.

In their new blog, Bob Hall and Susan Woodward look at spending increases from World War II and the Korean War and conclude that the government spending multiplier is about one: A dollar of government spending raises GDP by about a dollar. Similarly, the results in Valerie Ramey’s research suggest a government spending multiplier of about 1.4.

Oh goody. The spending stimulus goes down like a lead balloon. But what about the prescription of eevil mean-spirited Republicans?

By contrast, recent research by Christina Romer and David Romer looks at tax changes and concludes that the tax multiplier is about three: A dollar of tax cuts raises GDP by about three dollars.

Well now. That is what you call a real bang for the buck, as they say Out West.

But this is exactly what conservatives would expect. What matters, we conservatives believe, following the 1870 marginal revolution in economics, is economic decisions on the margin. The way to stimulate the economy is to reduce the marginal cost for workers to work and investors to invest. You do that by cutting marginal tax rates on labor income and capital gains.

This is not rocket science. It is 140 year old science.

But liberals aren’t interested. If they were to accept the ideas of marginal economics then they would have to dismantle their vast, tottering patronage and client state.

Naturally, they won’t do that. Because their liberal client state is the foundation of their political power.

You’ll recall that all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. When you live by political power you get Chicago politics and politicians like Gov. Blagojevich (D-IL).

Something to think about, Mr. President-elect.

Politics and Programs and Corruption

Everyone is chuckling about the criminal allegations made against Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (D). His blatant determination to “sell” the vacated US Senate seat of President-elect Barack Obama for value received is so over the top that you can’t help but laugh. Even the Wall Street Journal was able to crack a grin.

Of course, the president-elect had nothing to do with this. Nothing.

But liberals, isn’t it time to look in the mirror as little? If you chaps insist on gathering up 35 percent of the national output every year and running it through the political system, this is what you get.

All that money sloshing around, not doing very much except rewarding supporters, sets up the occasion for corruption. It’s not helping people, it is stealing from people.

Now you might say that to make the United States into a patronage state, where people get their livelihood from their association with a great lord, is no bad thing. Indeed you could argue that the world as always worked this way and always will. Political rulers naturally fall into the role of patron, and the voters and minor party functionaries naturally fall into the role of client.

But I don’t think that liberals really believe that the patronage state is really the highest and best form of political association.

Conservatives certainly don’t. That’s why we are ashamed of the corrupt Republicans who spent the last eight years trying to stay in power instead of trying to reform government programs. And why we weren’t that sorry to see the Republican Congress defeated in 2006.

Conservatives believe in an America of trust and honesty, where government is limited and Americans get their livelihood from serving each other rather than by becoming the client to a great political lord.

Our Liberal Dominator Hierarchy

Is the bad old days of the feudal era and the patriarchy, if you can remember back that far, the world was ruled by Dominator Hierarchies.

But the progressive educated elite offered itself in the nineteenth century to end all that. No, in the future we would all be gently led into a new era of equality and end the marginalization of groups oppressed by the dominators and the marginalizers.

That’s what they told us. Now let’s think reality.

Was there ever a Dominator Hierarchy like our modern progressive educated elite that rules today? It occupies the commanding heights of the culture. Its ideas dominate the activities of government. And the mighty barons of the corporate world are summoned to bend the knee at its congressional levees (the Louis XIV kind, not the Louisiana kind). We are even seeing a return to sumptuary laws, as the lower orders are learning that they should not travel around in big, wasteful SUVs but in modest transportation more appropriate to their station.

usgovernmentspending.com, of course, is an eternal witness to the liberal Dominator Hierarchy’s implacable power. Just take a look when you have a moment.

Want to opt out of the centrally administered program of government pensions at $900 billion per year? Good luck chum.

Want to opt out of the centrally administered program of government health care at $950 billion per year? Out of luck, chum. The Dominator Hierarch plans to increase the level of compulsion.

Want to opt out of the centrally administered program of government education at $875 billion per year? You can, of course, but you still have to pay your share anyway. And the Dominator Hierarch is planning to extend its power and control to pre-kindergarten.

Want to opt out of the centrally administered program of government welfare at $465 billion per year? Good luck, chum.

Notice the level of compulsion and domination here? We have just reeled off 20 percent of GDP in force and compulsion, and we haven’t even got to defense and policing yet.

Funny thing, isn’t it? All this noble largesse isn’t free, and it isn’t voluntary. The Dominator Hierarchy has decided what is good for you and your job is to say how much you like it.

The charming thing about this implacable liberal Dominator Hierarchy, the most complete and powerful, perhaps, in all history, is that it experiences itself as an enlightened successor to a Dark Age of Domination, called to witness to the evils of domination and to gently minister to a grateful people its new order of diversity and inclusion.

But then, what is new about that? Every tyrant thinks himself a savior. The only fiend in all history that revelled in his evil was Othello’s tormentor, Iago. But he wasn’t real, just a fiction.

Wal-Mart's FEMA Actually Delivers

Liberals hate Wal-Mart. Well, they do. They hate Wal-Mart because it puts Main Street businesses out of business. They hate Wal-Mart because it’s non-union and it doesn’t offer first-dollar health insurance.

But Wal-Mart delivers Always Low Prices, Always. And that helps all people on low incomes. Funnily enough, Wal-Mart is doing fine in the current recession while Whole Foods is tanking.

And Wal-Mart is a good corporate citizen where it counts. Like in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as the Suburban Emergency Management Project reports.

You see Wal-Mart has an Emergency Operations Center at its Bentonville, AR headquarters. Whenever there’s a natural disaster Wal-Mart mobilizes to deliver. Part of Wal-Mart’s planning involves replenishing stores when there is a disaster alert. Wal-Mart has over eight Disaster Distribution Centers in its complement of over 100 distribution centers nationwide.

So when Hurricane Katrina struck, Wal-Mart was ready, even including an inspirational message from CEO Lee Scott to Wal-Mart associates.

This company will respond to the level of this disaster. A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level. Make the best decision that you can with the information that̢۪s available to you at the time, and, above all, do the right thing.

As soon as possible Wal-Mart was trucking in supplies into the devastated area. Of course it wasn’t easy. The public sector, at all levels of government, was slow getting moving. Also, governments had contracts with private-sector companies other than Wal-Mart who weren’t able to mobilize as efficiently. Pretty soon Wal-Mart found itself supplying government agencies with which it didn’t have a contract. But Wal-Mart delivered.

â€Å“Phillip Capitano, mayor of the New Orleans suburb of Kenner, reported, â€Å“The only lifeline in Kenner was the Wal-Mart stores. We didn’t have looting on a mass scale because Wal-Mart showed up with food and water so our people could survive.” Similar reports of Wal-Mart’s prompt and effective involvement came from community leaders across the Gulf Coast.

There’s no doubt that Wal-Mart has an interest in good PR, in building public support for its brand. So Wal-Mart is only helping Wal-Mart when it helps out in a disaster.

But let nobody forget that CEO Scott set the tone from the top: “Above all, do the right thing.”

Rebuilding the Conservative Story Part III: Elevator Story

We’ve spent the last couple of days talking about the conservative story. What is our Vision? What is our Mission? Now it’s time to define our elevator story.

Every enterprise needs an Elevator Story. It’s the spiel you give to someone in 30 seconds or less when they say: What do you do? Now that conservatives in their political instantiation in the Republican Party have been roundly defeated, we have to ask ourselves: What is our story? What’s the point of being a conservative?

If you’re going to tell a story then you should tell a story. You should start by setting the stage, define the essential conflict, point towards a resolution, and describe the happy outcome. So here goes.

Setting the Stage:
In America today, government is cruel, corrupt, unjust; and it just costs too much.

Isn’t this just about how conservatives feel? The current welfare state, in which the American people cough up for $900 billion of government pensions, $950 billion in government health care, $875 billion in government education, and $470 billion in government welfare, every year, is an abomination. Never mind the corrupt patronage system. There is the cruelty of a system that has destroyed the family in the underclass, the injustice of a system that screws the working poor and rewards the non-working poor. It. Is. Wrong.

The Conflict:
Liberals created this monster. Liberals believe that compulsory government programs are the way to help the poor and comfort the afflicted.
But they are wrong. Government is not compassion. Government is force. You cannot solve social problems by force.

This is the basic touch point between liberals and conservatives. Liberals believe you can solve social problems with government programs. Conservatives believe that you must solve them person-to-person, face-to-face. That issues out of the meaning of the word compassion, literally, “suffering with.” Running a government program with tax dollars to help the poor isn’t “suffering with.”

The Resolution:
Society is not social force; it is social cooperation. That’s why we must reform the welfare state into the welfare society.
In the welfare society the American people, not liberal experts, will be in charge of their own health care, their children’s education, the comfort of the afflicted, and the decent provision of pensions.

Liberals believe in the welfare state; conservatives believe in the welfare society. That issues out of the basic conservative belief, initially voiced by Edmund Burke, that “To love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of publick affections.”

When you are thinking about politics it is best to take advantage of our better angels than to work against them. And we humans are, first of all, social animals that must live together rather than apart. So conservatives believe that “social problems” must be solved by people in their little platoons--family, neighbors, friends, associations, and charities--and not by bureaucrats. That's not easy, of course. It means that we can't just pay our taxes and complain about the government. We have to get involved and help people.

The Outcome:
With conservative reforms America will truly become that shining city on a hill, “still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom.”

So there is our Elevator Story. The current situation is intolerable. Liberals are to blame. The solution is to get government out of the way and put people back in. And the future is glorious, just as Ronald Reagan promised.

Rebuilding the Conservative Story Part II: Mission Statement

Yesterday we triumphantly designed a Vision Statement to guide conservatives during our rebuilding process. Today, as promised, we are releasing a Mission Statement to the world.

As everyone knows, in the subculture of off-site team-building meetings, the Vision Statement is a gauzy, uplifting, inspirational definition of the goal of an organization. The Mission Statement is more down to earth. It answers the question: What are we trying to do today?

How hard can this be? The conservative Mission Statement is short and concise:

We fight to reform a cruel and unjust welfare state.

Yes, I know that there is the War on Terror, and in the week after the brutal massacre of the innocents in Mumbai, who can forget it for a moment? But actually, I don’t think that the War on Terror is the front-and-center thing that conservatives must do.

I believe that we can count on our liberal friends to do the right thing by the War on Terror. They just have one little problem. They don’t want Republicans to get all the glory. They want to fight the war in their own sophisticated, nuanced way. Republicans just don’t know how to do nuanced, they know.

But conservatives are called to reform the dreadful, cruel, corrupt, and unjust welfare state, or we are called for nothing at all.

Let us repeat the words of David Cameron, leader of the British Conservative Party:

There is such a thing as society. It’s just not the same thing as the state.

In that statement, Cameraon (the lightweight?) encapsulates the whole thrust of conservative thinking. We all want to help the least amongst us. We want to comfort the afflicted. The question is: How? Shall we do it will rational, expert-driven bureaucratic programs from the cental government? Or shall we do it as individual people, joined into voluntary assocations, working together to help our fellow Americans?

Conservatives say that the rigid, compulsory, expert-led, bureaucratic way is not the way to help people. In fact, if you try to help people with government programs and bureaucracy, you get this:

Do you see the same thing that I am seeing? A little over one generation ago, about one in eight of the children of the uneducated were denied the basic human right to live with mother and father. But thirty years later four out of ten children of the uneducated were denied this right, and lived in a single-mother home.

Want to know how this happened? The welfare state did it. Liberals who drive the intellectual foundations of the welfare state and who manage the great bureaucracies of the welfare state did this.

And it is wrong.

That is why I say that the mission of the conservative movement is short and sweet:

We fight to reform a cruel and unjust welfare state.

Tomorrow: the Conservative Elev    ator Story.

Rebuilding the Conservative Story Part I: Vision Statement

Before we get to the specifics and the personalities of the glorious conservative future—will it be Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal—let’s do the due diligence. Let’s start with a Vision Statement.

Yes, I know, all that off-site team-building stuff is awfully trite, but it has a point. It forces you to think about: Who we are, and what do we want, and why?

So let’s start with a Vision Statement. Here it is:

We believe in an America that lives and works together, with limited government, under God.

Alert readers will notice that we are covering the three sectors of Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Well of course we are. What did you expect? We are talking about the Greater Separation of Powers between the economic sector, the political sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

So when we talk about an America where we “live and work together” we are evoking the system of voluntary cooperation under law that we call capitalism. But we are trying to evoke a little more than that, because the notion of free enterprise is too guy-like. We must include the girl side of voluntary cooperation, and that means the community of women working together, sharing and caring. In the guy side, we are battling all the other guys for market share. Competition instead of cooperation. But for the girls we want to think of cooperation before competition. So we fudge it.

When we talk about an America with “limited government” we are talking about an America where the government doesn’t get its fingers into every pie as it does today. It would be an America where four of the five biggest government programs would not be: government pensions, government healthcare, government education, and government welfare. Instead the two biggest programs would be defense against enemies foreign, and defense against enemies domestic. Look at usgovernmentspending.com to get a feel for what that might look like.

When we talk about an America “under God” we are talking about an America where the dominant belief system is transcendent. We mean that the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not solvable by a secular religion of heaven on earth. Life is a mystery, and the meaning of life is not given to us. So we develop a faith in the value of life and the meaning of life, typically symbolized by the notion of God. “God” in this sense is a declaration of humility. We will not solve the meaning of life by reason, or experimentation. Of course that will not stop us from reasoning, or from experimenting to get a better understanding of life, the universe, and everything. But we understand that every time we advance human knowledge a step, the ultimate answer recedes a step. All we do is raise the stakes.

So there it is. Step One in rebuilding the conservative story.

We believe in an America that lives and works together, with limited government, under God.

Next up: A new conservative Mission Statement.

Anthro Knickers in a Twist

I’d never heard of Montogmery McFate. Well I do now. She’s the social scientist that inspired the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System in Iraq. Says Wired:

Today she is the senior social science adviser for the Human Terrain System, a $130 million Army program that embeds political science, anthropology and economics specialists with combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Oh no! Social scientists assisting Pentagon combat units! Isn’t that unethical?

Because you are a sensitive conservative you know that proper social scientists don’t ever touch the Pentagon. Not if they want a career in the university. How could Mitzi McFate do this? And bring American anthropologists into disrepute all over the world.

Actually, no problem for McFate. When she started injecting herself into the Iraq War she was an army wife and didn’t have a job.

But here’s the problem, according to Inside Education:

The president of the Southwestern Anthropological Association invited Montgomery McFate to give the keynote address at the association̢۪s spring conference in Las Vegas.

But McFate’s work is “hitched to an initiative that has been formally opposed by the AAA’s executive board.”

Well, I hope so. I couldn’t imagine that the American Anthropological Association would do anything other than try the stop the Pentagon from doing anything.

Few anthropologists would question the value of inviting McFate to speak — or the importance of having free speech and scholarly engagement on such controversial topics.

Oh, no. Of course not. But the problem is that some people think that inviting McFate to make a keynote address “implies an honor.” And we wouldn’t want that.

And anyway, McFate failed “to appear at a scheduled speaking engagement Saturday at the AAA conference.” She was supposed to appear at an event where her critics would have an opportunity to respond.

So now the scholars are all arguing about whether a keynote speech amounts to an honor. (And also whether McFate should ever be allowed to speak without an opportunity for her critics to respond.)

Yep. Our unserious Academy. You couldn’t make it up.

After Mumbai

The big question about “islamic extremism” is whether to consider it a global mass movement of militant conquest or whether to think of it as a Ghost Shirt movement.

We’ve seen a number of global mass movements over the past century or so: commmunism, socialism, fascism. There were certainly moments when it looked like those movements, at once modern and reactionary, looked like they might take over the world. Does islamic terrorism fit into that template?

Or is it like the late 19th century Ghost Shirt movement, the last desperate convulsion of the Plains Indians to halt the annihilation of their culture by the western European capitalist democratic moloch? Or another late 19th century eruption, the Boxers, the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, young Han Chinese trying to push back the advance of the western European capitalist democratic moloch?

My guess, even after the bloodbath of Mumbai last week, is that the Islamic terrorists are more properly understood as violent young rich kids, young men desperately trying to push back the advance of the western European capitalist democratic moloch into the islamic heartland.

There’s an argument to be made that Islam might one day take over Europe, and it is made well by Mark Steyn in America Alone. But could they take over the Hindu heartlands of India. I’ll bet that if you ask a Hindu he will say: Over my dead body. He’ll say: We didn’t spend a century of effort getting the Brits out of India and taking India back from the muslim Mughals in order to give it away to a bunch of Pakistani Kashmiri killers.

Or China. Ask a Han Chinese, and I’ll bet he’ll say that after the humiliation of the last two hundred years in which China, the Middle Kingdom, was humiliated by the west, invaded by the Japanese, and nearly wrecked by Mao ZeDong twice, China is not going to allow a bunch of muslim rich kids to stop the return of China to its rightful place at the head of the world’s nations.

And here is another reason, if you have the stomach for it. One of the central facts of the modern era is the emergence of women into the public square. Christianity is the woman’s religion par excellence. For instance, two-thirds of adherents in the Pentecostal movement are women. In the next few years you are going to see the Chinese house church movement going public. And we may even see Christianity making big inroads into the Dalits in India.

So I make the strategic judgment that the future does not belong to Islam.

It certainly doesn’t have a hope if we make a sensible transition to a nuclear-powered future and back out a lot of fossil fuel consumption with nuclear emergy production. If that happens there won’t be too much Saudi wealth available to fund the terrorists any more.

But then we’ll find something else to worry about.