Obama's Great White Whale

You expect politicians to have hackneyed political ideas, and President Obama doesn't disappoint.

It's been obvious all along that his central concern is "inequality" and a post-election piece by Zachary Goldfarb points that up.

As Obama did in legislative fights during his first term, he also will be striving to reduce a three-decades-long wave of rising income inequality that has meant that fewer Americans have prospered while more struggle to get by.

Three decades, you'll note, takes us back to the beginning of the Reagan administration.  It means that the astonishing economic boom of the 1980s and 1990s was a mirage.  It's the basis of  "you didn't build that," of Joe the Plumber and "spread the wealth" and just about everything the president has done.

And the rest of the liberal political culture is not far behind.  That's what all the nostalgia talk about "good jobs at good wages" in the 1950s is all about.  Back then we had big corporations and strong unions and the working stiff made out well.  Today with outsourcing and greedy bankers and vulture capitalists like Mitt Romney the little guy is getting screwed.

That's the liberal line.

The conservative line comes out of people like Charles Murray and his Coming Apart.  The conservative line is that the mechanical liberal administrative welfare state hurts the very people it is supposed to help.  It encourages people in dependency, breaks up families, gives the children of the poor a lousy education, puts government under the thumb of government employee unions and business into the corruption of go-along-to-get-along crony capitalism.  Oh, things are going swimmingly for the cognitive elite, the people that are good at going to school and getting credentials and navigating bureaucratic hierarchies.  But if you are a meat-and-potatoes kind of person, one that learns by doing, and that lives in a face-to-face rather than a memo-to-memo culture--well tough luck for you.

But there's another troubling aspect to this, and it is coming out int he fiscal cliff crisis.  We learn from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that the basic fiscal-cliff proposal from the Obama administration is basically $1.6 trillion in tax increases.  If this is true, it means that the Obamis are not advancing a serious proposal for entitlement reform.  It means that, if there is any entitlement reform, it will be just a bargaining chip in the power struggle between the two factions of our ruling class.

This tells us a lot more than you might think.  Republicans and conservatives would like to reform the government entitlements so that they are self-financing, so that the federal government finances can get onto a long-term balance.  They want to get the government out of the middle of all this.  The Democrats don't.

When the Democrats stopped observing the Budget Control Acts after 2009 they opted for the annual cliff-hanger like the 2011 debt-default crisis, and now the fiscal-cliff crisis.  They are reducing policy to an annual national cage fight.

In my judgment this is a serious betrayal of the "little people," the welfare-state dependents that rely on those government programs.  It shows that the Democrats don't really care about them except for their votes.

Because when the crash comes, Arnold Kling's "sudden stop" when the government has to balance spending and revenue because it can't borrow any more, then the welfare-state dependents are going to be hurt the most: "women and minorities hardest hit" as the headline goes.  Eating the paint off the walls, as the Russians say.

But really, anyone that relies on a government to keep themselves in groceries deserves what they get.  Government is force, politics is for bullies.  If you cast your vote with the bullies, you get what you pay for.

I don't think that President Obama is really interested in the long-term fate of the dependent classes.  He has a facile answer for all that: "inequality."  Just lower the level of struggle for the struggling classes by making the rich pay a little more, and you can make America a better country.

There's another way of putting this.  Just let politicians do what comes naturally, dividing people by income and class and looting the producers to pay off their supporters, says President Obama, and all will be well.

Well.  The whole thrust of modern conservatism since Edmund Burke has been that you surrender society to "sophisters, economists, and calculators" at your peril.  He means, in our modern argot, that society cannot be reduced to system and administrative routine.  We humans are social animals, not mechanical animals.

Conservative Storytelling

Liberals tell their story better than conservatives.  That's the message from Lee Habeeb and Mike Leven.  Habeeb is a VP at conservative Salem Radio Network, home of Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager, so he should know.  Conservatives should tell our stories better.



No doubt.  And the liberal advantage goes back to the invention of the movie.  Even conservative icon Margaret Thatcher was affected when the movies came to Methodist Grantham in the 1920s.  What a world outside the dull Methodism of the old ones!



But it's not just storytelling; it's hegemony.  Liberals get to force their stories down our throats and stigmatize our stories as racist, sexist, homophobic.  That is the key.  Liberals sit in the cultural catbird seat and they don't intend to give it up or anything else.



And anyway, the main consumers of cultural product, young people, want edgy stuff that annoys their parents.  How are they to tell that the real "parents" are the edgy liberals running their schools and their TV shows?



The reason conservatives are in such a world of hurt is that liberals have deliberately hitched up their efforts at cultural hegemony in the last couple of decades.  Let's say it goes back to the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was carrying all before him.  Liberals responded with the Clintonian New Democrat feint and with efforts to corral their supporters into ethnic enclaves. with naked racist appeals.  Along the way liberals taught themselves to stop listening to conservative critiques.



It is a mistake to imagine that the culture war is merely a matter of competing stories.  That's not the way the world works.  Each era has a dominant culture, the taken-for-granted stories about the way the world works and came to be.  That dominant culture doesn't really get challenged until it starts to fail.



The reason that Obama got elected and reelected is because liberals ran a full-court press to sell the idea that Bush had failed, and the American people bought the idea.  Never mind that the main reason for the Crash of 2008 was the popping of a 30-year real-estate bubble, and the biggest reason for the pop was the loans to people that couldn't afford to service them.  Nothing to do with greedy bankers and crazy derivatives.  Just bad liberal government policy.  And the fact is that liberals have the cultural power to push their narrative on the American people.



Liberals will find that their stories will cease to persuade when things start going wrong.  Oh they'll blame the insurance companies for the failure of Obamacare, and they will keep blaming class size for the failures of public education.  But in the end, people will stop listening and just say: things aren't working; we have to change.



At that point people will be ready to listen to another story.  It is then we will need conservatives with a story to tell.

After Patronage Politics Fails

Conservatives are full of foreboding these days.  The debt isn't $16 trillion; it's much, much worse.  The student debt problem is yet another case (after mortgage subsidies) of good intentions screwing the people it was meant to help.  Ditto Affirmative Action at the university.



The basic divide in this country is between two ideas of the individual.  There is the "responsible self," a notion that Robert Bellah attributes to the Axial Age when all modern religions got their start.  And there is the client self, the powerless peasant that attaches himself to a powerful patron.



Thus it makes sense that the average Republican thinks of himself as a "typical American" and the average Democrat thinks of himself as a hyphenated American.  If you adhere to the notion of the "responsible self" then you don't need and don't want to think of yourself as an embattled class.  But if you adhere to the idea of yourself as powerless, then you need to group together and identify a powerful patron, someone that will protect you and your group from a cruel and heartless world.



What I wonder is what happens when this breaks down, when the powerful patron can't or won't deliver.  In our terms, what happens when the entitlements run out.  What do the people do, and what do the leaders do?



The simple answer, from David Hackett Fischer in The Great Wave, is that you get default, revolution, and war.  The end game of the patronage/client business, when there is no more money, provokes people to seek an answer in the street.



Of course, the war and the revolution don't really solve anything.  Their contribution is to focus and concentrate the rage of the disappointed in a great battle.  After it's over the rage subsides, people accept the result, and life goes on.  The glorious principles to which people vowed solemn oaths lie trampled in the mud and blood, and people make do with what remains.



As the endgame unfolds in the near future we can expect that the client groups of the Democratic Party will lunge to grab more loot with tax increases.  And they will partially succeed.  The responsible selves of the Republican Party will try to tame the entitlements, and they will partially succeed.



Then we will come to the real default and the real disappointment.  All predictions and prophesies will disappear into the fog of war.



That's the whole point of war and revolution.  When you are brutally disappointed, you make one last violent gesture, to mix it all up and hope that after the confusion you come out on top at the end.



Medium term, you can see what is coming.  Barack Obama has set federal spending at about 25 percent of GDP.  Federal revenue has never really got about 19 percent of GDP.  When the current effort to make the rich pay a little more raises federal revenue to about 19.5 percent of GDP then the Democrats will call for a Value Added Tax.  Guess what.  That will fall on the middle class and the Democratic voters.



And what will the clients and the victims do then, poor things?

Does Kant Rescue Cause and Effect from Hume?

Perhaps the stickiest wicket that Kant faces in his Critique of Pure Reason is to roll back Hume's argument that there ain't no such thing as cause and effect.  For Hume, all we can say about events in the world is that B follows A.  We can never say that A caused B.

Since the Brits invented cricket, you can see that the German Kant would have to be really on his game to deal with the googlies from bowler Hume.  (Although I don't know if googlies had been invented yet).

In a way, Kant's whole transcendental machinery is designed to deal with Hume's challenge: what warrant can there be for any assertion of A being the cause of B?  The whole idea of the external experience of objects as appearances rather than things-in-themselves is the center of Kant's cunning plan to deal with Hume and his tricky bowling.

Kant makes his argument that, for any experience in the world, there must be a rule that predicts the occurrence of an event from a previous event, for if there were no rule in the mind connecting events then indeed all sequences of perceptions would be merely subjective, received impressions having no connection with any outside object.  On that view there would be no way to cognize any outside object.

The cunning trick is, of course, that we are not talking about events-in-themselves or outside-objects-in-themselves.  The events are appearances, impressions that the mind processes into unified judgments about what is going on out there.  If I see a boy in the neighbor's yard in the act of throwing a baseball towards my house I take note of that appearance.  If half a second later I receive the impressions of a crash and tinkle in the front room and a a boyish squeak from the neighbor's yard, I am justifying in applying a rule that baseballs thrown at my house are quite likely to hit my house and that the appearance (or hear-ance) of a crash and tinkle shortly after the appearance of the neighbor boy and his baseball justify my judgment that it was the boy wot done it.

It all revolves around the appearances vs. things-in-themselves game.  In the game of appearances I could always be wrong.  It's possible that I didn't see the other kid across the street and his baseball.  Or it could be that a meteorite came out of the sky and broke my window.

But none of that matters.  What matters is that Kant's transcendental machinery describes how my sensibility receives impressions from the outside world, which I process in accordance with my forms of intuition about space and time and then combine them into a manifold using the categories of understanding.  Then I apply judgement to bring the manifold to a unified experience of possible external objects of experience.  But those objects are only appearances, not things-in-themselves.

Good old Kant.  Gin clear, as always.  And four runs for the Königsberger against the best bowling in England.

Kant's Problematic Refutation of Idealism

Immanuel Kant came up with a wonderful idea.  Let's just say, he writes, that we can't see things "in themselves" but only as appearances.  In that one idea he elegantly avoids claiming that we can ever know the whole truth about life, the universe and everything.

Kant's idea is, of course, not much different from St. Paul's talk about seeing through a glass, darkly.  And it is echoed by the quantum mechanical dictum that you can't see anything in the sub-atomic world without disturbing it.  So you do not see an item "in itself" but only after you have nudged it, with some kind of electromagnetic or sub-atomic energy.  So whatever you are looking at, it is not the same as it was.

But Kant feels the need to demolish his predecessors with his Refutation of Idealism.  He wants to dispatch the Dogmatic Idealism of Berkeley and the Problematic Idealism of Descartes.

Problem is that most everyone agrees that Kant doesn't quite pull it off, thus violating the first rule of politics that if you come to overthrow the king you had better succeed.  Or else.

Kant wants to refute the Cartesian idea that the outer world is "doubtful and indemonstrable."  Kant crosses over Descartes' division between knowledge of internal and external states by setting out to prove that the "empirical consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me."  Kant's argument is based on the idea that I am conscious of my existence in time and the presupposition of something "persistent in perception" and so on.  

The commentators all seem to agree that Kant doesn't finish the job.  Actually, they begin with contesting the first premise of his proof: "I am conscious of my existence as determined in time."  They say he doesn't even start the job of refutation properly.  

Even a tyro like me can see the problem.  Way back in the Transcendental Aestshetic Kant declares that time is a form of intuition that resides in the mind.  So we are using an intuition cooked up in the mind to argue for the existence of the real world?  Come on Immanuel.  You can do better than that!  You are really arguing Descartes' point that the only thing we can be sure about is the thinking "I"!

Really, Kant should stick with the beauty and the elegance of his central creative insight.  We can't know things in themselves.  Everything we know about anything (including our internal self) is founded on belief.  We believe in an "I"; we believe in an external world.  And until our brains start to rot in old age, that belief seems to work for us.  It gets us food, shelter, and a new generation on the ground and out of the nest.  

There's a refutation of idealism for you: grandchildren!

Kant and "Dogmatic Idealism"

Kant set himself a big task in his Critique of Pure Reason. It was not perhaps as big a task as that of the Rev. Edward Casaubon in his "Key to All Mythologies," but big nonetheless.

Kant wanted to spike Descartes's skeptical idealism, that the "I" was indubitable, but the world not so much. He wanted to whack Berkeley for his dogmatic idealism that the world was an illusion.  But he also wanted to deal with Hume and his denial of cause and effect.  Never mind that he also had a mind to derail the whole global industry busily proving that God existed, not to mention the rapidly growing atheist startups aggressively insisting that God didn't exist.

Common sense tells us that the world exists; that's what Dr. Johnson insisted by kicking a stone with his foot and saying of Berkeley's idealism "I refute it thus."  Common sense tells us that every effect has a cause, even if we didn't see the cause coming before the effect.  So somehow those clever Dicks had to be wrong.

Now you might think that Kant was also a dogmatic idealist.  After all, his repeated insistence that we do not know things in themselves but only appearances suggests that we do not have knowledge of things in the outside world.

I prefer to interpret Kant as setting out the first modern attempt to figure how our mind/brain actually deals with the outside world.  He does this by accepting (even as he insists he refutes) the positions of his predecessors.  Yes it's true that we cannot be too certain about the outside world (Descartes) and that it could all be an illusion (Berkeley) and that cause-and-effect is a tricky business (Hume) especially if you get the cause for an effect wrong.  So what?

So Kant sets up what we would call a "model" of the way that humans deal with the outside world, whatever it really is.  We possess "sensibility", the "capacity... to acquire representations" from the outside world.  From the representations we form "intuitions" based on the forms of intuition inside us about space and time.  We apply the categories of the understanding to our intuitions and then form a unified judgment about the result through the power of "apperception" or self-consciousness.  This judgment is made about the object given in sensibility, its appearance as conditioned by our intuition our understanding and so on.  But what the object really is, in itself, can never be known to us.

It all comes down to common sense.  We know, if we know anything, that we should never assume that we have nothing left to learn, that we have grasped the complete truth about life, the universe, and everything.

Because the moment that you figure you have everything figured out, the world will refute you, "thus."

Can Kant Comprehend Sub-atomic Particles?

Kant's transcendental philosophy is an odyssey between the Scylla of rationalism and the Charybdis of empiricism.

He does not deny that thoughts are real, or that the world is real.  He just says that we cannot know the world as it is in itself.  We can only know appearances.  Our knowledge of the world is constructed upon the way that we manipulate and synthesize sensation into a unified object of experience.

But what about quantum physics?  The recent discovery of the Higgs boson was predicated on the statistics of the recording of certain energetic events on certain detectors at a government-funded particle accelerator designed especially for the discovery of the Higgs boson.  Does that count as sensation?

Locke speculated about a "microscopical eye" that could  see into the "secret composition and radical texture of bodies".  And Kant in the Architectonic of Pure Reason talks about the limited reach of an idea, for the elaboration of the idea into a scientific schema "seldom corresponds to the idea; for this lies in reason like a seed... hardly recognizable even under microscopic observation."

But does the gigantic apparatus of a particle accelerator boil down, in essence, to a microscopical eye or a microscopic observation?  Is the experimentation of modern physics contemplated by Kant's transcendental machinery?  He says that the "capacity (receptivity) to acquire representations through the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility."  Does sensibility extend to the eye reading the report on the statistics prepared by a team of physicists detailing six months of particle collisions in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva?

So if we accept the results of the physicists, does that make the Higgs boson an "object of possible experience"?  Here, of course, we are getting beyond individual experience to the notion of science as the project of a social community of scientists, as divined by Thomas Kuhn.

The larger purpose of Kant's first Critique was to deal with the conundrums arising from Descartes, who thought that the "I" was indubitable but the world was dubitable, to Hume who argued that knowledge was a rickety construction built on a bundle of impressions, to the impossibility of proving God's existence on reason alone.  Yet here we were in Kant's time with science burgeoning and generals using the results of science in their very real artillery.  Kant built the first detailed analysis of human cognition, recognizing it as what we would call a feedback loop.  Objects act on us through our sensibility and we form judgments about objects as objects of possible experience.  But we do not know them as they are in themselves.  We only know them as they appear to us and as we think them.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of modern science and technology is how they have changed the way that objects can act on our sensibility.  Years ago I remember watching a TV science program in which they showed how human objects on a beach appeared in different forms of light, from infrared to ultraviolet.  Things look very different when you illuminate them with different light.  And how really do they look "in themselves?"  All we know is how they appear to us, as illuminated to us.  A snake has infra-red detectors, all the better to detect warm-bodied mice in the nighttime.  Why not?  Sense organs are not there just for the contemplation of the ineffable; they are there for survival.

Of course Kant didn't predict everything.  But he did set the stage for us moderns.  Don't think that what you see is what you get.  The "thing-in-itself" may be very different from its appearance.  If indeed there is such a thing as the "thing-in-itself."

The Liberals' Discarded Mistresses

Why does a woman ever consent to become a mistress?  Is it because of love?  Anyway, the old saying,"hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" is presumably the epitaph on the grave of every discarded mistress.



But what about liberalism's discarded mistresses?  Or more exactly, what about that woman of a certain age, the white working class?



Who can forget how liberals pursued her back in her abundant youth.  Oh, the promises they made, the jewels they bestowed, the poems they penned to honest toil, the programs they created to minister to every need of the working class.



And then Barack Obama told us back in 2008 what liberals really felt about the working class.

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

So.  All along, liberals have looked down on the calloused hands and the simple verities of the working class.  Just votes to be harvested until other bright young things came along: blacks, Hispanics, women.



But there's a twist, of course.  Now that we've seen the numbers from the 2012 election the experts have realized that the Republicans are about 3 million votes short.  Who were those voters?  The white working class.



You've got to hand it to Obama's people.  They told us a year ago that they had given up on the white working class.  But it turns out they had a plan.  They would carpet-bomb the bitter clingers with negative ads, to remind them how the Republicans hated them, and keep them home on election day.



Oh didn't you know?  That's what negative ads are all about.  They are not about getting your side out to vote.  They are about demoralizing the weak supporters of the other side, so they decide that it's not really worth going out to vote.



So now we know.  After romancing the working class voters, and putting them in a little Social Security apartment complete with Medicare furniture and Unemployment electronics--all of which are now falling apart--there is one thing the liberals absolutely will not allow.



They don't want the favors of the white working class, but they are determined that nobody else will have her.



But hey girls, why don't you just give up and come join the Republican Party, even if we are a party of plutocrats and puritans?



Well, we know why.  The Republican Party is the party of people who believe in the central dogma of the middle class, the Invisible Hand.  We believe that you make a living by going out into the world and offering your skills.  You don't try to make it by piracy and plunder, by political intrigue and union muscle.  You thrive by offering yourself to the market, surrendering to the verdict of society on your usefulness and your talent.



The working class voters just aren't ready to do that.  Because they still believe all the beautiful lies the liberals told them all those years ago.  Girls are like that.



Don't laugh, "Julia".  You could be next.

Don't Panic on Demography!

Every time the GOP loses--and even when it almost loses--well meaning people urge it to do outreach to minorities.



And of course the chaps that wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, say that the Dems will bury the GOP with a coalition of minorities, the educated, and the young.



Maybe, but the fabulous Barack Obama won reelection by 2 percent, probably by suppressing the vote among the white working class.  And Megan McArdle wonders how well it is really working out in practice (H/T LI).

1. That majority sure isn’t emerging very fast.



2. Ethnic coalitions are inherently unstable.



3. We are heading for a showdown between public sector unions and taxpayers.



4. We’re heading for a showdown between the recipients of old-age benefits, and recipients of all the other kinds of benefits.



5. On social issues, Democrats are badly positioned for the future.



6. Mitt Romney was a uniquely bad candidate for 2012.



7. GOP tax cuts have enabled Democratic spending promises.

I'm more inclined to go with Michael Barone.  In his New Americans he compares the immigrant ethnics of a century ago with today: yesterday's Irish vs. today's blacks; yesterday's Italians vs. today's Hispanics; yesterday's Jews vs. today's Asians.  Notice that two of the three ethnics of yesteryear are moving pretty firmly into the Republican camp and the Jews are just beginning to move.



But back to McArdle.  I like to think about items 3, 4, and 5 on her list.



On public sector unions we have to remember that special interests do best when they operate below the radar.  When they get too successful they attract enemies and unwanted publicity.



On oldsters vs. young 'uns, I'd have to advise my fellow senior citizens to keep your finances in order.  At some point the average young working stiff is going to realize just how much he is paying for wealthy seniors--I don't mean the really rich but the elderly couple with a half-million dollar home and a nice income.



Then there are the social issues.  Democrats have done a bang-up job keeping the social issues at bay in the last decade.  But my prediction is that abortion will become the new slavery issue.  Why?  Well think about it.  Back in 1800 slavery was a great convenience for the textile consumers (cotton plantations) and the tea-and-coffee drinkers (sugar plantations).  Yet a century later plantation slavery had been abolished in the western world--only to stage a revival in the progressive socialist countries in the 20th century.



Abortion is all about the great convenience to a woman in controlling her fertility.  But is it?  Or is the convenience for the benefit of her casual sexual partner?  Despite all the talk of women's liberation, some of us troglodytes think that the real liberation in the sexual revolution was for unmarried young men.  Now we can argue that "if you love me" you should go to bed with me, and we often do.  What woman ever wants to deny love?



There's another, deeper reason to suspect that morality will rear its ugly head again.  The only deadly serious question for humans is to survive and reproduce.  We have seen that the modern dispensation, of prosperity, welfare state and fertility control, has occurred simultaneously with a precipitous decline in fertility among modern, educated women.  Something that can't go on forever, won't.



The scientists tell us that a universal genetic trait is always essential for survival.  Religion has been universal among humans, so it must have a survival value.  Maybe, just maybe that old doggerel is true, and the contribution of religion to humanity is to keep the human eye upon the donut, and not upon the hole.

Kuhnian Conservatism

Why don't the American people get it?  That's what conservatives ask themselves deep down.  Why don't the American people understand that the welfare state is doomed and that the only question is just when it goes over the cliff.

It helps to realize that nobody has the inside track on reality.  We are all, following Kant, looking at appearances.  Nobody gets to look behind the curtain at the really real, at the thing-in-itself.

If indeed there is such a thing as a thing in itself.

The guy that popularized this approach is Thomas S. Kuhn of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  He argued that most of the time scientists do "normal science;" they trog along taking their current "paradigm" of how-the-world-works for granted and solve the latest problems.  When they get a result that doesn't compute the ignore it as "anomalous."  But eventually the anomalous results start to pile up and the paradigm breaks down, at least to the satisfaction of the young-uns.  A period of revolution ensues with all its chaos and disappointment.  Eventually the old generation dies out and the new generation takes over doing normal science using the new paradigm.

For conservatives, the old paradigm of the administrative welfare state has broken down.  There are anomalous results as far as the eye can see.  Obviously, we argue, the Crash of 2008 was caused by decades of mortgage subsidies and liberal bullying of bankers.  Liberals, of course, don't agree; they think that the Crash was caused by greedy bankers and an out-of-control Wall Street.  If only the rich would pay a little more then everything would return to normal.  Taxes and regulation, that's the ticket.

The American people, of course, are stuck in the middle.  They are inclined to believe liberals that tell them that they deserve their entitlements and very likely free contraception.  But they sense that something is amiss.  But, like Scarlett, they will worry about that tomorrow.  But the main thing about the American people is that they don't really have a theory of how the world works.  Unlike conservatives, they don't passionately believe in the Invisible Hand and the power of the market to provide universal prosperity.  They are employees and their experience of hands is more the Visible Hand of the boss or the layoff notice.  But unlike liberals they don't have a deep and abiding faith in the power of large-minded liberals in rational programs to organize health, education, and welfare for other people.  To them, liberals are just another kind of boss.

Liberals got into trouble a generation ago when their economics and politics got the US into the Carter malaise with 10 percent inflation and 10 percent unemployment.  The result was that a conservative with radical ideas about cutting spending and tax rates could get elected president.

Now we are in another era where liberal ideas are failing miserably.  But they aren't yet failing miserably enough.

But obviously, the Kuhn approach speaks volumes to us.  In our era "normal politics" is the liberal approach of tax and spend and regulate.  But liberal politics ends up in inflation and debt default then people will experience that the old ways have broken down; it will be time for a new approach.

That is why I write about the era of the Welfare State Smashup.  People don't look for new ideas just for the fun of it.  They look for new ideas when the old ones don't seem to work any more.

The only way for conservative ideas to get a real tryout is for liberal ideas to demonstrably fail.

The Next Great Moral Movement

Everyone keeps telling Republicans to lose the social issues.  Which is great advice, until the next great moral movement arrives.  Then you'd better get with the movement or disappear from the public square.

What do I mean?  I mean that human society runs partly on self-interest and partly on morality.  You may think that everyone operates purely on self-interest, but they don't.  People want to believe that they are on the side of the angels, and they spend a lot of energy persuading themselves that their nasty little hypocrisies are just minor and temporary diversions from the straight and true.  That is why they say that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.

If we look back at the modern age, we have seen two great moral movements.

The first was the anti-slavery movement.  The argument was simple.  Here we western chappies were drinking our tea and coffee with sugar from slave plantations, and making a nice little packet of money out of it too.  We were treating the slaves that put the sugar on our tables as mere human resources, human machines that we could exploit and use up without regard to their humanity.  The philosopher Immanuel Kant put it this way.  We should treat people as "ends" not as "means."  The plantation slave is the ultimate in treating a human as a means, a mere resource to be used and burned up like coal or oil.

The second great moral movement was similar to the first.  It was the socialist movement.  The argument was almost exactly the same.  We were treating the people that worked in factories, in mines, and mills, as if they were machines, to be worked hard until they were used up.  Again, like the plantation slave system, the factory system treated the worker as purely a means, a mere resource, rather than a brother or sister human.  It was inhuman.

It is easy to describe and to oppose such crimes against humanity, but much harder to really do something about them.  The battle against slavery ended in a century of Jim Crow for the liberated slaves, and the liberation of the worker spawned the most cruel and oppressive political regimes imaginable.

There is a reason why these noble movements went so far astray.  They put their faith in government and government is always and everywhere a system of force.  So, the activists decided that the solution to a system of exploitation and force was to substitute another system of force.  Tell me another one.

The upshot is that we have our modern gigantic governments careening out of control and enslaving their peoples in the name of liberation.

Obviously this will not go on forever.  A moral movement will arise to fight the injustice and the hypocrisy of a system that professes sweetness and light and practices the arts of oppression and exploitation.

Reenter the social issues.  The modern conservative critique of the liberal culture is that it is a culture of pure selfishness and encourages its votaries to treat all other humans as a means to an end.

Sex?  You can couple and uncouple as the mood takes you, but No means No except when it doesn't.  Marriage?  Critical for gays but optional for everyone else.  And babies.

Yeah.  A woman has the right to control her body.  And that means she can terminate the life of her "fetus" or "unborn baby" as she chooses, treating the life within her purely as a means rather than a end.

My guess is that, sooner or later, we will see a great moral movement arise about the whole question of sex, marriage, and abortion.  Whatever liberals say, the sexual revolution has been a mixed blessing to women and children--and men too.  You can see the results in Charles Murray's Coming Apart.  Marriage and family is doing fine in the upper-income educated class.  It is collapsing in the underclass and seriously damaged in the middle class.  Social collapse is really hard on the kiddies.

Nobody can predict the timeline on the next great moral movement, any more than people can predict the stock market.  My guess is that it will really get going in the debris of government debt and default that is coming in the next few years.  Probably it has already started, but we boobs can't see it because we are looking in the wrong places.

But when it comes it will change everything.

The Indictment

Conservatives have only one real problem with the administrative welfare state. Our problem is that the welfare state is unjust. Of course, we don't like the fact that it is also cruel, corrupt, wasteful, and anti-human-welfare, but the extras are just penumbras on the basic indictment.  Don't agree?  Let me count the ways.

Force.  Government is force, and big government is big-time force.  The result is that many social functions become exercises in force.  We are forced to send our children to school, and for the overwhelming majority, that means a government school run by government supporters.  We are forced to contribute to a government pension scheme, and the government manages the scheme badly.  We are forced to contribute to a government health-care scheme for our retirement years, and the government has badly underestimated the resources it will take to deliver the promised services.  What is the solution?  For government, more force.

Division.  Government is the means to defend against enemies, foreign and domestic.  But government cannot fight the foe unless it unites the people against the enemy threat.  Thus politicians are experts in the art of uniting.  But that also means they are experts in the art of dividing.  If there is no foreign threat that politicians can use to unite us then they will unite one half of the nation, in a political party, to fight against the other half.  There is nothing sinister about this; that's just what politicians do.  Obviously the more the government does, and the more money it spends, the more scope there is for uniting and dividing.  You can do it with class, you can do it with race.  You can set employees against business owners, and health-care consumers against insurance companies.  The more division you can create, the more that you can mobilize your supporters against the evil greedy ones.  There has to be a better way.

Freeloading.  Freeloading is the great issue for social animals.  We derive enormous benefit from our social engagement with each other, but every society has to deal with the freeloaders, the people that want to get their share without contributing their share.  In the past, societies have developed ingenious ways of dealing with freeloaders short of force, including naming and shaming and divine justice.  Of course, societies have long accepted that some people just cannot contribute, for no fault of their own.  But now we have developed the cult of the victim, in which people are encouraged to define themselves as indigent and unable to contribute their fair share.  Politicians use the cult of the victim to build support.  Where once leaders frankly offered loot and plunder to the warriors in their feudal host, now they offer loot and plunder to people that vote for them and define themselves as victims.

Patronage and Clientage.  In the agricultural era the food producers lived under a peculiar disadvantage.  They needed to store food against the next harvest, but any pirate or plunderer could come by and steal their store.  So the food producers ended up as clients of feudal patrons; they became serfs to warriors that could keep the plunderers at bay.  Since the warrior lords were predatory as well as the pirates, you might say that the cure was often worse than the disease.  Now the bourgeois revolution in the early modern era proposed to ditch this patron-client social relationship with the national state model.  The monarch got an army to defend against marauders, and the people were free to produce and consume in a market economy without having to truckle to a powerful patron.

It is clear, from the history of the last 200 years, that when people first arrive in the city from the country they bring their old patron-client culture with them from the countryside.  All immigrants to the US have begun by joining some sort of patronage machine, from Tammany Hall to the modern Democratic Party.  That is what they understand.  It is only when they get confident and competent in the world of the city that they come to embrace the individualist creed, which asserts the notion of the responsible self that confidently offers services to the community based on the faith that the money will follow.

But really, do we need a patron-client relationship to govern government employment?  Do we want basic social services to be delivered by powerful bosses?  Do we want favors distributed to grateful clients on the basis of race or class?  That way lies injustice.

Impossibility of reform.  The market economy is a process of constant adjustment.  No job, no fortune is guaranteed.  Every participant must consider, every day, how to serve the consumer.  That is why so many of us look to government to guarantee our jobs with labor legislation and preserve our fortunes with crony capitalism; we just don't have confidence in our ability to serve the consumers.  But the result is that government makes impossible promises to its supporters that cannot be withdrawn without a fight.  That is what is happening in Europe right now as people riot in the streets to protest the cuts in social services.

Any system that cannot reform itself short of riots in the streets is a failed system.  The welfare state system is a process of political warfare, a battle to divide the spoils of taxation and borrowing and regulation.  But the winners in each battle seem to think that they have won for all time, and are willing to fight to assert that right of victory.  There has to be a better way.

There is a better way.  Conservatives have recommended a limited government since the dawn of the modern era.  But Marxists have come a close second.  It was Marx that wanted to free the workers from the alienation of wage labor in factories so they could develop their human capacity to the fullest.  It was the Marxists of the Frankfurt School that argued that government and business both had dominatory tendencies, reducing everything to the mechanics of rules and system.  There had to be another way, a social way, that resolved issues of social cooperation in communication and persuasion rather than rules and penalties.

Everybody wants a better way.  Liberals call it "peace and justice."  Conservatives call it "limited government and peaceful cooperation."  The question is how do we get there from here?

Why Romney Lost

Leaving aside all the usual stuff about Republicans losing the black vote, the Latino vote, the youth vote, the single women vote, there is this.



Romney lost the working class vote.  Here's what happened, according to Fred Bauer.

However, for those households making between $30,000 and $49,999, he underperformed: McCain lost those voters by twelve points, while Romney lost them by 15. Moreover, because of the economic travails of the past four years, members of those working-class/lower-middle-class households rose from 19 percent of the electorate in 2008 to 21 percent in 2012.

So the Obamis were smart after all.  They spent the whole summer on negative ads demonizing Mitt Romney as an uncaring capitalist, and it worked.



It's funny really, if it weren't so sad.  The whole prosperity of the working class depends on the ability of entrepreneurs to create jobs out of nothing.  But the Democrats have made a political empire out of demonizing those same entrepreneurs.



Meanwhile the Democrats destroy the economy with their credit subsidies and their interventions and succeed in blaming the greedy bankers.



Well, that may be so.  Look, nobody really understands the modern economy.  We all pontificate, conservatives about the wonders of markets and liberals about the wonders of regulation, but nobody really knows what they are doing.



And really, the voters are right in voting for Democrats.  Those folks who have lost out in the aftermath of the Great Recession are probably never going to rise again.  Many of them, we know, are settling for a disability pension, and are getting ready to live out the rest of their lives on the dole.  So they are voting for the dole.  That's a good idea as long as the checks keep coming.



So what happens next?



You can choose the Marxist prophecy, which says that the change in the economy changes the relations between people and prompts the creation of new "classes" mobilized to fight against injustices visited upon society by the old regime.



Or you can choose the moral movement notion, that politics is moved by moral movements, such as Great Awakenings, that work their way into politics and change the rules of governing.



When you think of it, they are saying the same thing.  Look out for new "classes" or moral movements to arise in the future as people respond to the stresses and the injustices of the age.



What will these movements look like and what will they want?



Nobody knows.  But they will surprise us and surprise the political experts.

The New EERA

My point is that, whatever we are fighting about on the front lines of politics, the real issues can be found by stepping back a bit.



In my weekly oped, I announce the new era of the welfare state smashup.  The welfare state smashup will occur because, the promises that have been made cannot be delivered.  What is more, they should not be delivered.



It's a new EERA, and I think that the defining issues will be Entitlements, Economy, Race, and Abortion.



On Entitlements, we must realize that, not only are entitlements eating up the budget, they are eating up our society.  The great issue of any society, from a family to a nation state, is freeloading.  The benefits of society are enormous, there is no such thing as an "independent" human.  We would all perish without society.  But equally, for each of us there is an eternal temptation to ride on the labor of others.  One of the central tasks of religion, according to Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct, is to control freeloading, by naming and shaming and, if that doesn't work, with divine justice.  But the welfare state creates a springtime for freeloaders, encouraging people to define themselves as victims that cannot be expected to contribute.  It dissolves the notion that we should all try to contribute as much as we can, rather that try to get away with as little as we can. or as beneficiaries who deserve to get back what they put in.  Then there is the systems aspect of entitlements, the idea that you can set up an administrative system that defines for all time what people should contribute and what they should receive.  Such a mechanical system is bound to fail.



On Economy, we must stop the government trying to game the economy.  No doubt there is a place for the government's system of force, but if we have learned one thing over the last two centuries of the industrial age it is that the government's attempts to second guess the market has almost always failed.  On the credit system, governments have again and again debauched the currency and stolen the savings of ordinary people.  On the market system, governments have again and again favored special interests and economic chimeras over the natural discovery process of the market.  And while the government is tending its cronies, the wind farmers and the government employee unions, the ordinary fraudsters and bunco artists thrive.  Why on earth did Bernie Madoff not get shut down by the regulators?



On Race, we must stop the monstrous betrayal of the civil rights revolution.  I can understand that the Democrats may have thought, after the civil rights acts, that they deserved to hand out some goodies to their supporters, but the hypocrisy of quotas and "diversity" 50 years later is an outrage, and the way that Democrats have ghettoized blacks into voting 90-10 for Democrats can only have been achieved by naked appeals to race.  What the civil rights revolution was supposed to curb in the racist South.



On Abortion, liberals need to rethink.  My prediction is that abortion is going to become the great moral issue of the age.  Think back to slavery.  Back in the 18th century, Europeans were doing a fine business in the slave plantation business.  It brought sugar to the breakfast tables of Europe, and built great mansions in the country.  But then the Quakers decided that it was wrong.  A century later, slavery was dead.  Today, we can agree that abortion is, after a fashion, tremendously liberating for women.  They do not have to be a slave to their reproductive role.  That's the good side.  But there is a cost to the convenience of abortion.  It cheapens the central business of life, which is reproduction.  There is a reason why women and children have been made sacred and set apart.  It is because we forget the central importance of reproduction at our peril.  When we see the child per woman rate down at 1.3 in Western Europe, when 2.1 is replacement rate, we know that something is wrong.  That something is the marginalization of sex, marriage, childbearing and childraising.  We talk about careers for women as more important than children for women.



We humans are social animals, but we are also easily distracted from any tasks and run off at tangents.  Instead of concentrating on the job at hand we run off into the weeds.  It is the job of the great social institutions to turn us back to our tasks.  On Entitlements it is to realize that the great social engagements of health care, education, and welfare cannot be shoved aside as mechanical administrative programs.  On the Economy it is to realize that the economy is something to which we must all contribute before we can get our reward.  On Race it is to refocus on what unites us rather than what divides us.  On Abortion it is to realize that our central creative task is to produce children not great products, great cities, or great works of art.



We can either re-channel ourselves to our central human task, or we can drain away into the sand, like every other civilization in history.  Our choice.

The Politics of the Smashup

I mourned for a day, but now I see the future.  The era of conservative reform is over and the era of the smashup is about to begin.



For fifty years conservatives have been offering a way to veer gently off the folly of the administrative welfare state by limiting the expansion of government.  But with the confirmation of Obamacare, President Obama has welded shut the door of the iron cage.  We are now trapped in the cage until we can smash it up and escape.



The four walls of the iron cage are government pensions, government health care, government education and government welfare.  The cage is designed, whether its designers understand or not, to replace the natural human instincts of social engagement with the mechanical steel of the administrative bureaucracy and the rulebook.



Karl Marx may have been the most unpleasant man of his generation, and he may have been dead wrong about the "immiseration" of the working class, but he had one thing right.  When the economy changes, as it did in 1760 with the textile revolution and again in the 1820s with the railroad revolution, then necessarily society changes too.  The old elite inevitably succumbs as the culture and the politics change and new men come forward.



So here we have the death of the old world of "good jobs at good wages" that we witness in the failure of General Motors and the devastation they say you can see from the Acela is it runs through Camden and Philadelphia.  And anyway, the workers hated those jobs.  We see the new world of smaller, agile companies that will demolish the big business model, and we see the prospect of on-line education that will utterly transform the big education model.  We know that big welfare is a total failure.  And here's my nickel that says that big health care is on the cusp of a revolution.



If the Economy of the Bigs is on its way out, then society itself is going to change.  So then what will happen to the biggest big of all, our modern big government?  Who knows?  But one thing is for sure: It will change.



It will change because it will run out of money.  Inflation, debt default, financial repression, confiscation, riots in the streets: Greece and Argentina writ large.  It's all a real shame, because women and minorities will be hardest hit.

Forget the Tactics and Messaging

Reading the postmortems on the 2012 election I see a lot of people worrying about tactics and messaging.  We didn't appeal in the right way with the right candidate with the right messages.



All true, but don't forget that the Prussians won the Franco-Prussian war despite some severe tactical mistakes.  They won because they had the better strategy; they had their larger formations in the right place.



That's why I believe we should take a deep breath and step back. The larger question is the question of the administrative welfare state.  Is it a social and political system that is: just, practical, sustainable.



The obvious answer is that the welfare state is profoundly unjust, for it merely instantiates the age old rule of the stronger over the weaker.  Welfare state politics is nothing more than the mobilizing of regime supporters with the promise of loot.



The welfare state is impractical because it does not have the bandwidth to manage society and its millions of transactions.  The administrative method can work for an army, although only just, because an army has a limited goal and it frankly admits that it uses its soldiers as cannon fodder.  In an economy and a society, we have the idea that the ends do not justify the means.  It is the means that matter and that means we cannot use the administrative method which treats everyone in its structure as a means.



Finally, the welfare state is profoundly unsustainable because, like all political systems, it cannot respond to change.  Politics is a human way of resisting change, of trying to set things up for all eternity.  That is a mirage.  A wise political system limits the power of government because it knows that it cannot anticipate every need and every accident.  We have a system for that; it is called capitalism.



In these days the world looks very dark for conservative ideas.  President Obama has cunningly characterized the utter bankruptcy of liberal ideas as President Bush's fault.  He can do that because when a Democratic president says something the mainstream media do not insert those snappish little paragraphs that begin "But critics say..."



But now the president must "do something" about the budget and about the economy.  My guess is that, whatever he does, nobody will be happy.



As Winston Churchill is reputed to have said, America always does the right thing. In the end.

End of an Illusion

The basic idea behind modern conservatism has been that we can persuade the American people to move away from their client relationship to the administrative welfare state, and build a different society, one based on freedom and free association, in particular the free associations of civil society.



The historic reelection of President Obama means that the conservative dream has become an illusion.  With the confirmation of Obamacare we now have in the United States a four-sided iron cage of administrative confinement.  For old age we have government pensions, for health care we have government health care, to educate the children we have government education, and for the relief of the poor we have government welfare.  And we will have all of that that until it breaks.



It will break, that we know.  The one great lesson of history is that people don't give up their free stuff without a fight, so governments like ours are forced to give out more and more out of a dwindling "stash."



The great blessing of the free market is that it offers humans a way of adjusting their behavior to the needs of their fellows.  If you have a job, or if your company makes a profit, it means that you are rendering valuable services to your fellow humans.



But government is different.  It is a system of force.  It is, always and everywhere, an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to provide for its supporters.  In the past these supporters have usually been a warrior elite, but in our day the government's supporters are the entitlement program beneficiaries and the government employees.



In The Great Wave David Hackett Fischer has described how an age of rising prices ends.  It ends in social collapse, in inflation, in disease, war, and famine.  Fischer isn't a very good economist, and still less a political philosopher.  But he can shovel out the facts.  In each era of rising prices governments start to live beyond their means, and they resort to borrowing and inflation.  They do that because to disappoint their supporters and reduce their stipends would deny the government's very reason for being.  And anyway, people denied their benefits usually resort to the streets.



Program beneficiaries are like NRA members who say you can get their guns out of their cold dead hands.  It is not just that they are selfish: we are all selfish.  The beneficiaries of the welfare state have organized their lives around their benefits.  They are, as they self-describe, people on "fixed incomes."  They don't propose, and maybe cannot, "do something" about their situation if it heads south, except to demonstrate and riot.



In our case projected government health care costs alone are going to eat the federal budget.  They cannot be paid and they will not be paid.  The same probably goes for the national debt.  We have three states already, California, Illinois, and probably New York, that are going broke.  With the reelection of President Obama they are probably going to get bailouts, meaning that they will not be forced to reduce spending.  Then we have the hyper-regulation of the Obama state that will probably keep business hunkered down on its capital strike.



Is there hope?  Of course there is.  We conservatives can continue to work on what comes after.  After the present welfare state of the educated liberals and their clients runs out of money and blood.



Our chance may not come for a generation.  Of maybe it will come in four years.  Who knows?



Paradoxically, the solution to our problems has probably received its most penetrating analysis from the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School.  It is they that realized that all instrumental reason, whether used in government or business, leads to domination, and a triumph of system over people.  The solution, Juergen Habermas realized, was a balance between our modern rational systems and the human-all-to-human lifeworld.  Or as we conservatives say, civil society, where free people in free association join with their fellow citizens face to face to meet their social needs and solve their social problems.

Today's the Day

Today's the day on which we Americans decide if Barack Obama's huge gamble pays off.



Back in 2006, if you remember, Democrats decided that they had learned from the Bush 2004 victory and they ran a lot of moderates for Congress.  It was a great success and the Dems picked up 30 seats in the House.



Then they ran the healer Barack Obama in 2008 and America voted for its first black president in the hope that he would end the centuries of race war.  The Democrats also picked up 25 seats in the House.



But President Obama did not govern as the healer.  He governed as a man in a hurry.  Galvanized by the almost filibuster-proof Senate, he decided to go for broke and pass every item on the liberal wish list while there was still time.  He passed a stimulus bill, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank.



The American people were outraged and in 2010 sent 63 more Republicans to the House of Representatives, including a Tim Scott, a black insurance agent to represent Charleston, SC, and Allen West to represent a district in SE Florida.



The question today is whether we return the president to office, in which case his signature Obamacare will probably endure, or whether we counterattack, and roll back his ambitious effort to "transform" America.



If the president gets reelected then he will go down in history as one of the most daring and successful politicians ever.  If he fails then he will be dismissed as just another reckless fool that tried to take a bridge too far.



Of course, beyond the issue of the president and his daring gamble for the laurels of history, there is this.



Politics is civil war by other means.  The idea is to take advantage of your opportunities, but not so that your opponents decide that their only option is civil war.  The way you do this is, as Noam Chomsky puts it, by manufacturing consent.



When you want to pass a great health care bill you figure that you have two options.  You could go for broke with a bare partisan majority and create a head of rebellion in the opposition.  Or you could broker a compromise and pass a "bipartisan consensus."  Then you can argue that your bill was a "bipartisan" bill and that only a rump of extremists voted against it.



President Obama went the bare partisan majority route and rammed his programs through in the teeth of opposition from the American people.  I suspect that his decision will echo down the decades to come in rancor and conflict.



The result, of course, is likely to be sovereign debt default and the collapse of the welfare state, and maybe worse.



Women and minorities will be hardest hit, as usual.



But then, that's what usually happens when transformative leaders start transforming.

At Election Time, Government is Force

I confess I was a little shocked last week scanning the links at RealClearPolitics.com.  The liberals were all extolling the wonders of government.  Yeah, they said.  You sure need big government when Nature comes calling.



Of course, everyone is in favor of big government where their pet project is concerned.  Conservatives think that, on the view that the job of government is to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic, that the armed forces and the police are a good thing.



Liberals disagree.  They are paranoid about Pentagon generals, and watch local police forces intensely for any sign that they are committing police brutality on the poor and the marginalized.  But they are all in favor of the enforcement of environmental laws.  Because that will save the planet.



So there's real agreement in America.  Everyone is paranoid about the use of government force for things they don't like.



The question is: to what extent are we willing to reduce the use of government force on our pet projects in order to accommodate the fears of our friends in the other party?



Conservatives say that's why we need limited government and the separation of powers.



And I say that's why we need to go beyond that to the Greater Separation of Powers, to keep a separation between the great power sectors of society, the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector.



We already agree that there should be a separation between church and state, between the political and moral/cultural sectors, except that we violate it every day with government schools instructing the young and government support for the arts.  Of course, the truth is that you cannot separate politics from morality and culture, because morality and culture inform the decisions we make in politics.  But we can at least try to get the politicians and the moralists from getting in bed together.



The next great challenge is to separate economy and state: the political and the economic sectors.  This is particularly a pressing issue for the modern age, because government and business have grown from cottage industries into great and powerful systems that threaten to dominate and run over everything in their path.



It was Marx who first made the power of business into a scandal.  He used the tools of the classical economists, their confused ideas of exchange value and use value, to contrast the difference between "social labor" and "abstract labor," of work performed face-to-face and work bought and sold on the labor market.



But it took a new generation of Marxists, the Frankfurt School, to realize that it wasn't just business that threatened the social nature of humans, it was instrumental reason and its systems.  We are talking here about both business systems and government systems and their universal tendency to domination.



Then Juergen Habermas developed the ideas of Husserl and Heidegger into his system-and-lifeworld model.  System is the mechanical world of businesses and governments, of rules and subordination.  In Husserl's conception "The ‘lifeworld’ is a grand theatre of objects variously arranged in space and time relative to perceiving subjects, is already-always there, and is the “ground” for all shared human experience."



The problem for humans is that, unless we restrain the big and powerful systems they will dominate and sterilize the lifeworld.  That's because the systems want to reduce everything to their system.  So we have government, the system of force, and economy, the system of money.  We also have organized religion, the system of faith.  And each of them threatens us with its power.



Conservatives have a parallel view to Habermas and his systems vs. lifeworld view.  We believe in the limitation of powers, that is the restraining of the systems.  And we believe in the protection of "civil society" which is pretty close to the German concept of lifeworld or Lebenswelt.



But here we are, with an momentous election, determining whether we go full tilt towards an uber-systems government with bigger and more powerful systems.  Or whether we start in a different direction, de-privileging the systems and trying to find a new balance between our powerful systems of government and business and our essential humanness?



The thing about systems, of  course, is that they work really well right up until the moment they break.

The Paradox of the Enlightenment

At the core of Immanuel Kant's great attack on his philosophical predecessors, from Descartes to Berkeley and Hume, is the great Paradox of the Enlightenment.

Here we had the most stunning development in human thought, Newtonian mechanics, that showed how us how the world worked.  Yet against that we have Descartes saying that "I" can't be sure of the external world, Berkeley saying that the exterior world is an illusion, and Hume saying we can't be sure about cause and effect.

Just when Newton has reduced the operation of the external world to a few equations that allowed, e.g., artillery officers to predict where artillery shells would land, the philosophers said: Don't get cocky, kid.

One of the places in in Critique of Pure Reason where Kant really concentrates his fire on his predecessors is in the "paralogisms," i.e. the logical mistakes of his predecessors.

In the Fourth Paralogism, Kant takes on the doubtful existence of outer reality, the real world.  In the first edition, Kant put the paralogism this way.  Things that can only be inferred from perceptions are doubtful.  All outer appearances are inferred.  Therefore "objects of outer sense" are doubtful.

In the second edition, Kant takes a different tack in a rather confused paragraph (B409) that already assumes the error.  He seems to be arguing against this syllogism:  I am distinguished from things outside me.  Other things are those that I think of as distinguished from me.  Therefore I exist as a thinking being.  Or maybe not.

But Kant drills a hole in this argument before he makes it, for by the second edition he can't be bothered too much about making the arguments of his predecessors.  His point is the Great Argument of his entire critique.  If I am confident that the "I" exists, then how could I know it without experience of the outside world?  For against Descartes, Kant argues that we cannot have any knowledge of ourselves apart from our moment to moment experience of self-consciousness as we deal with and process data given to our senses, and try to make sense of it.

Kant's "I" is a component in the human machinery that receives sense impressions, combines them with forms of intuition, gathers the sense impressions and intuitions with the categories of the understanding and creates, using the "I" of apperception (self-consciousness), a unified object of appearance, a judgment about the outside world.  And don't forget that this object in the outside world can only be known as an appearance, not as a thing-in-itself.

If you think about the world like Kant, then all the mind games about mental substances and material substances, the indubitable I and the dubitable outside world, all these things fall away, because they are all integrated together into what we would now call an OODA loop.

Notice that if you subtract the "I" of self-consciousness from Kant's machinery, then you still have a working model of existence in the real world, but one that applies to the "lower" animals.  As far as we know, they get their sense impressions and unify them with intuitions and categories of the understanding.  What they do not do is then apply reason to their unified understanding to get to judgment.  Their judgment is hard-wired rather than flexible.  So they operate in the real world without an I at all, but instead, as we highly advanced humans suppose, in an egoless flow of consciousness.

Since Kant's time, of course, the Paradox of the Enlightenment has increased and deepened.  For now we may know much more about the sensible world, and even in the interior mental world, yet we know less and less "what it's all about."

Obama: Breakthrough or Bridge Too Far?

Let us suppose that Mitt Romney wins by 3-5 percent next Tuesday and gets a Republican Senate.  For President Obama and his left-liberal supporters, will it all have been worth it?

As John Podhoretz opines, you have to hand it to the president.  When he had the power he rammed through as much of his left-wing agenda as he could cram through Congress.  And as we know, it is easy to create new spending, and almost impossible to roll it back.

In his first 16 months as president, from his inauguration through the signing into law of ObamaCare, Obama arguably altered the trajectory of the United States in a manner that neither Mitt Romney (should he become president) or the president who succeeds Obama after his second term concludes in 2017 will find easy to redirect — if he or she even wishes to.

It starts with the big numbers, the $700 billion of TARP.  After that, the $800 billion of stimulus and supposed $1 trillion of Obamacare is just more of the same.

That TARP program utterly changed the terms of the Washington debate about the economic crisis and the nature of the government’s role, especially since its colossal size barely slowed its rapid adoption into law. The voices raised against it were basically dismissed as being on the fringe. The system needed an expression of confidence and an explosion of liquidity.

 So the question is whether the Obama interlude is a replay of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society when liberals seized an opportunity to enlarge government power and reach by handing out "free stuff" in a way that could not be reversed.

My guess is both Yes and No.  Yes, Obama has put government deeper into health care, and that will not change.  Paradoxically, his Obamacare was designed in part to try to put a lid on Medicare, the government's biggest problem, by instituting back-door rationing.  So Obama would hasten the time when the whole government machine shudders to a halt.  If the Romneys roll back Obamacare and reform Medicare they might actually make the entitlement program last another ten extra years.

But the basic problem is that people will not give up on their entitlements until the whole system crashes, as I wrote about yesterday.  When it comes to their Medicare, people are like the members of the NRA.  Like the NRA member's proverbial gun, you can get my Medicare from my cold dead hand.

People will only give up on their entitlements when the government goes broke, wrecks the currency, and defaults on the debt.  And maybe not even then.

That is America's real problem.