Democrats Do Too Stand for Something

Republicans have been enjoying for some time the idea that Democrats don’t stand for anything. It goes along with the idea that Republicans are thinkers and Democrats are feelers.

Even Peggy Noonan agrees, sort of. She criticizes the Democrats for obsessing about Bush.

[I]f you're going to turn away from [Bush], you'd better be turning toward a plan, and the Democrats don't appear to have one.

Actually, the Democrats do have a plan. It’s just that they can’t talk about it. Rush Limbaugh understands them when he says that Democrats can’t admit who they are, because if they admitted who they are they couldn’t win the support of the American people.

The Democrats’ plan is to defend their turf. The problem is that it is huge. After a century of the welfare state they are strategically extended like the Germany Army in Russia in 1942.

You want to know how huge? Take the government share of GDP today and substract the government share in 1930. Start with all the New Deal legislation, all the Great Society legislation. Then add the huge expansion in education and health care. All this is Democratic dollars and Democratic votes.

If you are a Democrat your job is to defend this. All of it.

That’s why Democrats aren’t much interested in growing the economy. They aren’t much interested in fighting for freedom, justice, and the American Way. They have concerns much closer to home. They must fight to defend the funding for the government programs that keep them in yeasty Victorian houses, Toyota Priuses, and soulful weekend retreats.

Don’t forget that President Bush’s Ownership Society is a strategic project, a Schwerpunkt, aimed at the heart of the Democratic project. If it ever gets seriously off the ground then the American people will start to say: why do I need all these Democrats eating their heads off at my expense? What have they done for me lately?

When we say that the Democrats don’t have a plan, we mean that they don’t exactly know how to counter the encroaching Ownership Society, except to oppose it. All of it.

Google's For-profit Foundation

When Bill Gates set up his charitable foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I was disappointed.

Here was a guy who had revolutionized the world of the computer, but when it came to philanthropy he was just doing routine stuff.

Of course, he had to, because liberals were all over him like a cheap suit asking him why he wasn’t giving it all away yet.

But the Google guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are different. Their foundation, Google.org, will be a for-profit foundation. What a concept!

Of course, the agenda for their foundation is depressingly blah—tackling “poverty, disease and global warming.” Oh dear. As if everyone and his brother isn’t already spending billions on all this.

Give me a billion or two and I would reinvent education, health care, and the social safety net on the model of the Road to the Middle Class. But hey, that is just my crazy idea.

Guess who is going to be director of Google.org. None other than Dr. Brilliant.

No, seriously! According to Katie Hafner in The New York Times,

Dr. [Larry] Brilliant, a 61-year-old physician and public health expert, has studied under a Hindu guru in a monastery at the foothills of the Himalayas and worked as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Aparently he applied for the job with an email to info@google.com, but they didn’t pay any attention.
Then “Dr. Brilliant was awarded the TED Prize, an award given at the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference” and Google invited him to give a talk at the company.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Wal-Mart and the 3.3 Million Job Gap

Even conservative pundit George Will is joining the Up With Wal-Mart campaign with a piece about the Wal-Mart store just outside the city limits of Chicago. He writes about the resentful Wal-Mart shopper who didn’t get a job at the new store because

the person doing the hiring "had an attitude." So why is the woman shopping here anyway? She looks at the questioner as though he is dimwitted and directs his attention to the low prices of the DVDs on the rack next to her.

But the big question is not old economy jobs at Wal-Mart but the on-going mystery about the 3.3 million job gap at the Department of Labor. If you have one of those missing jobs, writes Ashby M. Foote III,
“contact Secretary Elaine Chao at www.dol.gov.”

The 3.3 million job gap is the difference between the job count in the Department of Labor’s Household Survey and its Establishment Survey.

[T]he BLS uses two monthly sample surveys conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. For the top-down view, 160,000 businesses and government agencies are contacted for the Current Employment Statistics (CES), which is referred to as the “payroll” or “establishment” survey. This is the “headline” number, and it is the survey focused on by the press and the financial markets. For the bottom-up perspective, 60,000 households are contacted for the Current Population Survey (CPS), better known as the “household” survey.

Problem is that there is are 3.3 million jobs more in the Household Survey and nobody can figure out why.

Foote suggests that we should look to Chris Anderson and his book The Long Tail. According to Anderson there are three forces that are creating jobs at small “boutique” businesses, the ones that don’t show up on the radar of the Establishment Survey

Force 1: The democratization of the tools of production. (The obvious example is the PC as a tool for publishing and multimedia.)
Force 2: The democratization of the tools of distribution. (For instance, the combination of the PC and the Internet makes everyone a distributor).
Force 3: Connecting supply and demand. (Search filters and feedback loops like those found on Google, iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix help niche content find interested buyers and users.)

Still, you have to respect Wal-Mart and its 1.3 million old-style jobs. Because it is taking people with an attitude and little in the way of job skills and making them into productive members of the twenty-first century society.

Pity it didn’t have a job for the lady in Chicago.

The Transformation of North Korea

You gotta read this stunning analysis of North Korea, “The Natural Death of North Korean Stalinism,” by Andrei Lankov.

He writes that the regime of Kim Jong Il is imploding as its Stalinist system has been slowly relaxing by the natural difficulty of keeping extreme political repression going. In the last decade, though, this process has accelerated as a result of economic collapse in 1991-95 and famine in 1996-1999.

The three big factors facilitating this process include:

Information: It used to be that people could only get their hands on radios, and that when doing military service. But now prosperous North Koreans can buy used DVD players and VCRs smuggled in from China. What they like to view are South Korean TV soap operas. These TV programs give the lie to the idea that 7 million South Koreans are unemployed and live in unimaginable poverty. In fact, North Koreans are non-plussed that South Korea is apparently richer than the border area of China—which looks pretty rich to them.

Economic System: When the Stalinist economy broke down the North Korean people had to develop an informal capitalist economy. It had all the bad features of informal economies everywhere including rapacious moneylenders and necessary bribes to officials. But people had to adapt or starve.

Diminishing Political Control: The economic crisis of the 1990s has led to the demoralization of the party cadre. Now they are willing to “turn a blind eye to certain phenomena, especially if monetarily rewarded to do so.” Anyway, since survival is achieved for most North Koreans by small-scale business activity, what’s the point of listening to powerless officials. The social hierarchy has changed too with formerly persecuted Japanese-Koreans and Chinese acquiring wealth and status through their foreign connections and businesses.

It’s an amazing story, and we will read more of it in the coming months and years.

The Divide Between Evangelicals and Libertarians

Ever since the beginning of the modern American conservative movement there has been a tension between traditional conservatives and libertarians. For traditional conservatives the greatest good is virtue. For libertarians the greatest good is liberty.

Now comes Ryan H. Sager, columnist at The New York Post, worrying again about a split between conservatives and libertarians in the Republican Party. He has a book about it: The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party.

Ryan’s critique centers around the widely shared idea that the Republican Party abandoned its principles shortly after it gained control of Congress in 1994. Instead of cutting spending it took fright in the budget showdown of 1995 and caved in to the spenders. Now Republicans are in favor of big government as long as conservatives are in charge of it. Except that libertarians aren’t going to take it any more.

It is frustrating. We all know that big government is leading us down a road to national and moral bankruptcy. But try telling that to the beneficiaries of government programs and to the special interests that browse on government spending.

The complainers, I believe, do not give Bush and Rove enough credit. The cornerstone of the Bush/Rove politics is the building of an Ownership Society. They are slowly trying to move the federal government’s posture away from benefit programs and to build societal structures that empower people and expand choice.

Presumably their strategy is guided by a view that conservatives cannot expect to wean people away from government dependence until they have made them independent of government, or at least developed a clear path to independence. In this way the reduction in tax rates and the development of a network of individual choice initiatives like Roth IRAs, Health Savings Accounts, and school vouchers are all works in progress towards the ultimate goal: a society criss-crossed with safety nets built and maintained by the people not by government and
its experts.

Libertarians should take care about pushing their side of the argument too far. If the divide is between evangelicals and libertarians then it may be in fact a divide between women conservatives and men conservatives.

Modern Christian believers are said to be about 70 percent women. This is certainly true in the more enthusiastic sects like the Pentecostals and the Chinese house churches. Libertarianism has always been a rather muscular male thing.

Let us not open a divide in the conservative community between more community-minded women and more agent-minded men. It isn’t worth it.

Teaching Students About Tortured Souls

After a spate of student suicides in the 2003-04 academic year, New York University has come up with a response. It is a musical “The Reality Show: NYU,” and over 5,000 incoming students have seen it already, according to Karen W. Arenson in The New York Times. The production, which

will be shown twice more this month, tells of drugs and date rape, drinking and anorexia, depression and suicide.

Suppose that a spate of suicides had been reported at a Christian college. Might not questions be raised about the dangerous religious culture at the university, and how it was driving students to depression and suicide?

But this is a liberal university, so the college culture does not come into question. Instead we titillate the students with warnings about depression and date rape.

Of course, ever since the invention of the tortured creative soul back in the early days of Romanticism and the suicide of the German poet Hölderlin there has been an assumption that dark thoughts go with a creative commitment, the sensitive artist’s reaction to an uncaring, insensitive world.

Or maybe there is something utterly rancid at the bottom of the creative culture and its ideal of the tortured genius.

Like it or not, that is what we are stuck with until someone comes up with something better.

But can’t colleges come up with a soaring vision with which to inspire its new students? That, after all, is how religions, voluntary associations, and businesses do it. They indoctrinate their members with a sense that they are part of something bigger than themselves.

A General's View of the War on Terror

You’d expect that Gen. John Abizaid, commander of the U.S Central Command, would have guarded opinions to give to talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. But you would expect to be able to glean some unexpected insight into what the US military sees happening in the Middle East.

Here are the take-aways for me.

1. Abizaid does not seem to be raising any red flags over the sectarian violence (or civil war, if you prefer) in Baghdad. “[W]e're confident [we] can, over time, move Baghdad in the right direction.”
   
2. “[W]e've got to keep the flow of natural resources moving through the Straits of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, and the Babel Mandeb, which take an awful lot of air and naval power.” Hmm.
   
3. “I think a nuclear armed Iran in the region is very, very unstabilizing for the region. It would create a regional problem with all of the other major countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It would certainly create a problem for the Turks... And certainly, it creates a problem for Israel.”
   
4. “I also see a growing problem with Iran's internal stability, as people there become less and less satisfied with the quality of life that their government's given them.”
   
5. “And you certainly will see continued instability in places where the extremists continue to operate, such as in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In many ways, the long term health and prosperity of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are bigger strategic problems for us, and we need to do all we can to help the legitimate governments there fight against the extremists the way that they've been doing.”
   

In this view, the two problems are Sunni and Shia extremism, and the significant risks are the extremist threats to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The other big problem is the idea of Iran possessing nuclear weapons.

It’s a different view than the MSM template of Bush Lied and the Mess in Iraq.