Netroots: On Chait in TNR

Here is how the netroots experience their birth in the aftermath of the contested 2000 election in Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga and Jerome Armstrong’s book, Crashing the Gate:

Five years ago, the Republicans took over the government through nondemocratic means. Establishment Democrats, for the most part, stood back and watched as a partisan judicial body halted the counting of presidential votes. While conservative activists led the charge on behalf of their party, there was nothing happening on our side.

That is a version of reality that conservatives and Republicans would certainly contest.  But never mind.  That’s the netroots’ story and they are sticking with it.

It is certainly true, as Jonathan Chait writes in The New Republic, that the netroots experience themselves as another great political movement like the conservative movement that hit the radar with the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency 16 years later.

And he certainly captures in his article the flavor of the netroots, at least from the perspective of one who is not a member.

What is interesting, for a conservative, is how much he gets wrong about the conservative movement.  That is always a frustrating, but also an exhilirating experience.  After all, if mainstream liberals don’t really “get” the conservative movement, after all these years, so much the better.

The bigger question is: Just what is the netroots movement for?  For it is the difference between the netroots and the conservative movement that is most telling. 

The conservative movement went critical in the 1960s in a coming together of political activists, books, interests, and scholarship.  It was a coming together of people who believed that the welfare state was the wrong road for the modern world and who wanted to think and organize around the project of reforming it and/or replacing it.  On the way the original fusion of libertarians and traditional conservatives developed into a big tent that included evangelical Christians, Jewish liberals mugged by reality, and Reagan Democrats that felt uncomfortable in the post-patriotic McGovernite Democratic Party.

The question is: who do the netroots represent, beyond a cadre of angry college-educated children of the welfare state?  Where do they want to take the United States?  What do they want to change?  Where are their books?

In Chait’s view the netroots don’t really have a philosophy and they don’t really have an agenda.  Pushed to say what they believe in they regurgitate a fairly conventional liberal agenda.  Only more so.

Let’s look at it another way.  Conservatives formed a movement because they wanted to change the welfare state.  That’s what movements are for, to mount an insurgency against the establishment by political organizing and winning elections.  Conservatives wanted to move the nation away from top-down management by experts and activists.

The netroots appear to be forming a movement to oppose the establishment for not opposing the insurgent conservatives with enough energy.  Maybe that’s a brilliant idea: putting some backbone into wimpy liberal establishment types and make them fight for the programs that help poor people.

Or maybe it’s a catastrophic error.  It could just as well split the Democrats, as the right-wing patriotic side of the party splits off from the left-wing netroots.  Or it could move the whole party to the left, away from the center where the independent voters are.

I come back, again and again to the analysis of Lee Harris in Civilization and Its Enemies.  To him we are talking about the war between the western team and the eternal gang of ruthless men.

Why it is that the netroots seem, rather obviously, a gang of ruthless men?

Center-right Sarkozy Wins In France

Because the left has liked to represent Nicolas Sarkozy, the next president of France as “fascist” and “right-wing”it is important to state that Sarkozy is a conventional center-right politician. 

Sarkozy believes that the science is in on the economy, that capitalism and limited-liability companies work for the average person, and especially for the marginalized.  That’s about what everyone on the center-right believes.

Sarkozy thinks that there ought to be sensible control on immigration and that immigrants have a responsibility to integrate with the land in which they wish to live and work.  That’s about what everyone on the center-right believes.

But Sarkozy has a problem. When the center-right Reagan/Thatcher revolution began a quarter of a century ago in the Anglosphere it was founded upon a widespread understanding among the voters that something was wrong and something had to change.  As the folks at  Mark Steyn agrees, but in more colorful language.

[The French are] sick of crime and unemployment and on the whole could do with rather fewer Muslims on the streets, but they’re not yet willing to give up on the economic protectionism and lavish social programs that lead, inexorably, to the crime and unemployment and a general economic and demographic decline leaving the nation dependent on mass immigration and accelerating Islamization.

After all, why should they?  The preachers of the left have taught the French people for a century that they deserve a life of security and sinecure and tenure by right.

We wish the best for our French friends, but fear that things will have to get worse before they get better.

Don't Frighten the Horses

Analyzing the British local elections of last week Charles Moore conducts a seminar in the politics of the twenty-first century.  He is talking about the consequence of the ascendancy of New Labour under Tony Blair, but everything he says applies to our own Democratic Party.

The brilliance of Tony Blair is that—even though schools don’t educate and government health care doesn’t work and the nation is overrun with immigration and surly youths have turned the streets into a battlezone—people don’t think that anything can be done about it.

While New Labour has been throwing money at schools and health care they have been enormously increasing the size of the public sector.  And in that public sector there are “privileges in employment and pensions which are quite beyond the reach of the rest of us.”

But it is not just the public sector that has been increased.

These changes enormously increase the political class. Again as in other parts of the EU, thousands of people can now have entire, well-paid careers working for political parties in commodious offices. They start as staffers to the elected; then they get elected on list systems over which the voter has no control; then, if they are lucky, they become MPs.

Of course, in politics as in the Church, many are called but few are chosen.  No problem. If they can’t become elected officials,

they can get jobs as regulators and governance experts and special advisers or even-better-paid versions of the same thing in Brussels. The power of party political patronage is now 18th-century in its abuse, but thoroughly 21st-century in its enormous size. 

Sound familiar?

But here is the corker.  Despite all this huge government failure: services that don’t work, government workers that don’t work, huge taxes, endless meddling and regulation, if you propose to change it the voters get scared and go running back to their incompetent welfare state party bosses and ward heelers.

So just like America’s Republicans, David Cameron cannot propose sweeping changes that will end forever the dull failing mediocrity of the lefty welfare state.  Oh no.

[O]ne longs to advise Mr Cameron to proclaim an arresting analysis which breaks decisively with all the dreary Continentalism described above, but I am sure that at this point it would not work. He is right that the Tories are still "in recovery" rather than fully accepted. If they try to be clever, dangerous, bold, they will just frighten people.

This is what is so maddening.  We know what to do about the welfare state.  The science is in.  It has been for at least a generation.  Abolish the government pension programs; they never work because the politicians always over-promise.  Abolish government health care.  It doesn’t do much for life expectancy.  Abolish government education.  It doesn’t really do much educating.

But anyone who advances the modest agenda of ending government programs that don’t work is ruthlessly stigmatized as a madman.  It just isn’t fair.

Actually the voters are right.  As much as the political class loves bold, persistent experimentation, the voters instinctively understand rapid change is not for them.  They know, the ordinary people, that they are the folks that get left with the mess when the suits move on.

So the way to reform the welfare state out of existence is by baby steps, with a little reform here and a minor privatization there.

As Senator Everett Dirksen used to say forty years ago, a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real money.

It’s just like the antarctic Shackleton expedition a century ago.  When they took the sled dogs out to kill them, they took them out individually and applied the coup de grace out of site behind a hill.

That way the other dogs wouldn’t get nervous.

Tories Advance in Brit Local Elections

Britain’s Conservative Party oustripped forecasts of 600-700 by gaining over 875 seats in the British local council elections.  As the BBC put it: 

It may not have been the surge many had been hoping for, but Mr Cameron has always stressed the party has an electoral mountain to climb if it is to win the next general election and, with around 800 seats gained, it outstripped its forecasts.

But the goal of the Tories was to make real improvement in the North (wiped out in the 1997 general election) and to chip away at the Liberal Democrats (many disaffected Conservative voters have been sojourning with the LibDems).

And that is exactly what the Tories achieved.  They had some notable successes in the north of England, and in their 875+ gain they took almost 500 seats from Labour and almost 150 seats from the LibDems.

The centerpiece of the Cameron strategy is to appeal to centrists with themes like work/life balance and global warming.  Those centrists are the LibDem voters that the Conservatives must attract if they are to win the next general election.

After the Debate: Romney

You could say that the reason I’m a Romney guy is because of the unrelenting Romney-boosting on the Hugh Hewitt radio show.  Hugh has his book A Mormon in the White House to promote shamelessly and so it’s been Romney, Romney, Romney now for weeks.

Still I couldn’t help but notice the centerpiece of Mitt’s campaign.  In China they would call it the Three Strongs. 

• Strengthen America’s Military
• Strengthen America’s Economy
• Strengthen America’s Families

He got in his licks on the Three Strongs on the Tonight Show on Wednesday here.

Then he got it in on the debate in Simi Valley on Thursday evening here.

We’ll probably get sick of it before we’re done.  But of course it exactly fits the center-right agenda.

Notice how it also dovetails with the women’s agenda as expressed by 18 Doughty Street Brit Iain Dale:

They want to feel secure in their family, in their home and in their community.

There is also this important plug on Romney from Hugh Hewitt.  It has to do with Romney’s media presence.  Romney, he writes, is a candidate

who has had a graduate school education in hadling the MSM, broadcast and print variety... Watching the second President Bush debate was perhaps the greatest trial GOP activists had to endure in the campaigns of 2000 and 2004.

I’ll say.  Expecially if you happened to be watching him with a Democrat.

But Romney excels in debate and on TV.  Imagine him easily trading one liners with Jay Leno. Imagine being relaxed every time your candidate comes up to bat, and expecting him to deliver a solid base hit every time he’s at bat.

And imagine a candidate who, every so often, lofts the ball over the fences.

The Heart of the Education Problem

In Britland they have recently discovered that social mobility is going down not up.  As Anne McElvoy writes in The Spectator:

[Children] born in 1970 are more likely to have ended up poor themselves than the children born in 1958. There is no sign that the trend has changed.

So guess what: more central government education programs are needed.

You see, back in 2002 the London School of Economics published a study:

comparing able children from a disadvantaged background [Group A] with less able children from middle-class homes [Group B]. The two lines on the graph cross over shockingly early. Group A’s progress falls off sharply at the age of four or five. At the same point Group B begins to race ahead. The poor-but-bright child all too easily falls by the wayside in this race[.]

The solution is obvious, apparently.

I would certainly argue for pupils to be taught in ability groups when they reach secondary level... We still need to do much more to encourage autonomous new providers of schools within the state sector who come in to do things better, and force existing schools to emulate their achievements.

Notice that McElvoy takes for granted the essential assumption of welfare state politics.  The disadvantaged are helpless.  Everything is to be done for them by the experts.  Ability groups are to be instituted, new providers encouraged, existing schools are to be forced to emulate.

Here’s a concept.  What do the disadvantaged actually want for their children?  Do they want them to get an education?  If so, what are they prepared to do to bring that about?

I recently listened to Ruth Messinger, CEO of American Jewish World Service, tell a fundraiser that in their microloan program in the Third World, the women recipients immediately apply their earnings to the education and the health care of their children.

You mean to say that in the Third World the poor actually spend their own money on their children to improve their life chances?

Then why are the poor in the First World considered to be helpless to seek the welfare of their children, requiring 24/7 supervision by the academic middle class?

"Make No Mistake"

After President Bush vetoed the Democrats’ emergency war funding bill everyone got together at the White House to discuss what to next, reports the Chicago Tribune:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the meeting “positive.” held in “good faith.” Her Republican counterpart, Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, called it “very productive,” reporting no tense moments.

But they hardly decided what the outlines of a new bill would look like.

“Make no mistake,” Pelosi said, “Democrats are committed to ending this war.”

If Democratic leaders had their druthers it would probably be for President Bush to withdraw from Iraq before the 2008 election.  Then any subsequent problems would be Bush’s fault.

But President Bush has probably no intention of allowing such an outcome.  Let the Democrats withdraw from Iraq in 2009.  Then any subsequent problems would be the Democrats’ fault.

Don’t like it?  You think that politicians should just do the right thing, irrespective of partisan advantage?