Trying to Explain the French and the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steyn on Europe: It's the Demography, Stupid

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

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

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

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

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

WHEN GUNS ARE OUTLAWED ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE GUNS

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

WHEN RELIGION IS MARGINALIZED ONLY THE MARGINALIZED WILL HAVE RELIGION

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

WHEN RELIGION IS KILLED ONLY KILLERS WILL HAVE RELIGION

How about that?

Wait Till Next Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hugo Chavez: What's the Point?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wake Me When It's Over

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

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

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

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

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

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

Young Men Want to Fight for the Tribe

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democratic Politicians and the Angry Left

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

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

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

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

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

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

But you never know.