British Conservatives in a Pickle

In Britain they are trying to dry out after 50 year floods.  But in the Conservative media they are drowning from the incompetence of Conservative leader David Cameron.  At least that’s what ASimon Heffer thinks. 

The leader of the Labour Party, he writes, has shown himself to be a “serious politician.”

The Leader of the Opposition, by contrast, has no programme other than a concatenation of stunts... He finds the traditional beliefs, and the traditional believers, of his party utterly detestable.

Not surprising, when you consider that his only proper job before entering politics was in PR.

Here in the US Cal Thomas has written off not just the British Conservative Party but the whole United Kingdom.  Reviewing the Conservative Party policy document on welfare reform, “Breakdown Britain” and the hostility of the British courts to religion he expects things to get worse, not better.

Britain is broken. The cause runs deeper than the Tories can address, even if they win the next election, which seems unlikely.

In the present political season Republicans in the US are not feeling too good.  The Iraq War is a mess and Democrats are raising a lot more money to fund the 2008 presidential election. But a look at Britain tells us just how good we have it.

The reason that David Cameron is struggling is that he is leading a center right party in a country with two center left parties.  He is in the same position as US liberals.  Living in a conservative country they have to pretend that they are patriotic and respectful of religion and traditional values to get elected.

But everyone knows that liberals think that patriotism is really nascent fascism, and God is a delusion.

In Britain the Conservatives have to pretend that they are really centrists, that they really love government schools and government health care.   When everyone knows they do not.

The Secret Life of Cars

You may not have wondered how a car makes you feel, but BMW has.  That’s what Richard Morrison found out.  Says the “driver interfaces psychologist” at BMW:

We’re constantly asking the question: what kind of psychological space is a car?

Well, of course, we’ve all wondered that.  And we’ve wondered how many people call their car by a nickname (26 percent of women), the importance of cup-holders (they make you feel safe).  And you’ve wondered how many people sing in the car (four times as many during the morning rush hour as the evening rush hour).  It’s all there in BMW’s Secret Life of Cars.

But the big question is why people drive their cars rather than take public transportation.  The answer is perfectly simple.

Time and again, car owners identified the “cocoon-like security” of the car — the enjoyment of personal space, the chance it gives for “me time” — as the reason why they prefer to drive, even where public transport is cheaper and more convenient[.]

But you knew that.

Democrats' New War on Poverty

Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards both want to declare a new war on poverty, writes Linda Chavez.

Mr. Obama wants to tie the minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index, which would price the lowest-skilled workers, especially young blacks, out of the job market, not to mention increase inflationary pressure on wages.

Mr. Edwards would have the government create 1 million new temporary jobs for the chronically unemployed, despite abundant research that shows these programs have no lasting impact in reducing poverty or increasing long-term employment among the poor.

Oh dear.  All this stuff has been shown to be nonsense time and time again, most notably by Charles Murray in Losing Ground.

So why don’t Democrats propose something that might actually work?

The elephant in the room, of course is family breakdown.  As Chavez relates:

Poverty rates for families headed by a single white woman with children under 18 were 25.3 percent in 2005; for similarly constituted black families, the rate was a shocking 42 percent. But for married couple families, the comparable rate for whites was just 6.1 percent, and for black families only 8.3 percent.

This really isn’t rocket science.  Government welfare benefits encourage family breakup and broken-up families reduced to the mammalian minimum of mother and child are much poorer than mother-father-children families.

Chavez writes that Democrats worry about not being “inclusive” or of being “intolerant” if they “talk up marriage.”

I wonder about that. 

The problem for Democrats goes deeper than inclusiveness and intolerance.  It’s not airy-fairy notions that hold them back from reforming the welfare state.  It is political survival.

Democrats’ whole political support system is built upon patronage and clientage, playing Lady Bountiful and distributing benefits to the tenants on the liberal plantation.  People that have risen out of poverty through work and family find that they don’t need government.  That’s when they stop voting Democrat.  And that’s when all the Democratic government employees find themselves out of a job.

And Democrats know it. 

The "New Victorians:" a Trend or a "Trend?"

It would all seem pretty sensible if it weren’t that the trendy New York Observer’s Lizzy Ratner was all over it.  According to  Suzanne Fields the new generation of twentysomethings are getting married earlier and having children.

Websites for "modest clothing" are expanding, and Wendy Shalit, who earlier wrote about "A Return to Modesty," has a new book called "Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good."

And in a telling comment, the daughter of sex goddess Erica Jong (Fear of Flying) illuminates the other side of the sexual revolution.

"When you’re 12," says Molly Jong Fast, "there’s nothing funny about your mother’s fourth wedding."

Erica Jong had books to sell so she had an excuse.  But the rest of womankind doesn’t do well with open marriages and a “sexual life.”  Women don’t do too well with abortions and empty cradles.  But a lot more women are going to have to be hurt before we change the culture to make it more friendly to families and mothers and children.

But is this really a trend?  Or just media hype?

Dean Barnett's 9/11 Generation

We know all about the Boomer generation, says 40-ish Dean Barnett.  Forty years ago, they (that is, we, since I’m a boomer) checked out of their generational challenge. 

Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers—those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation—took the opposite path from their parents during World War II.

But now we have the 9/11 generation.  And it is starting to look as if it is very different.  Barnett has been taking a look at the young people signing up for the armed forces and he likes what he sees.

Some of these men have Ivy League degrees; all of them are talented and intelligent individuals who... could have chosen to do anything with their lives.

Something about the culture has changed.  Barnett speaks about a young man who graduated recently from Harvard and obtained a commission in the United States Marine Corps.

After his commissioning, this freshly minted United States Marine returned to his Harvard dorm room to clean it out.

As he entered the dorm in his full dress uniform, some of his classmates gave him a spontaneous round of applause. A campus police officer took him aside to shake his hand. His father observed, "It was like something out of a movie."

So what is it about these young men? LTC Kurt Schlichter of the California National Guard has an answer:

"The direction comes from themselves. They like to be challenged."

Here’s another idea.  After the cultural revolution of the last half century young men have discovered that they have a real problem in choosing and living a life that has meaning.  Men have been marginalized and scapegoated out of their respected roles and fathers and providers and they have been forbidden to complain.

But what young men can do is what they have always been able to do.  They can offer themselves and their lives in the defense of the nation’s women and children.

Things haven’t changed that much after all.

What Do Women Want?

The feminists don’t want to hear it, according to Megan Basham, but married women are trickling out of the workforce.  And it’s because they don’t want to work full-time. 

Only 21 percent of working mothers report a preference for a 40+-hour work week, while only 16 percent of at-home moms say the same.

What could be driving this?  Feminists say it’s the post 9/11 economy.

Rather than admit the obvious, that women increasingly favor cutting back their careers when their children are young, some feminists are employing their own brand of voodoo economics. Women aren’t opting out, they’re being pushed out, they say.

There is this idea out there that working for a living, having a brilliant career, is the reason for living. Sorry to rain on the parade but it ain’t so.

Men work mainly so that they can get access to women.  Down the ages, women have preferred monogamy, and they have preferred men that didn’t look like losers—in short, men with jobs.  So men figure that they’d better get a job.

High status women, the ones that men fight over, are a different proposition.  Men with a taste for them need more than a job; they need a fortune, or a fortunate political career.

Women work because... Yes why do women go out to work?  Many women work because they have to.  Always have, always will.  But we are talking about the upper-class feminist ladies, women like the First Feminist Simone de Beauvoir and Second Feminist Betty Friedan.  What they wanted was liberation, liberation from the fundamental work of women, which is, of course the only really important work in the world, the work of generation. 

But a generation after the intoxication of the Second Wave of feminism many women are finding that the most important thing in their lives is children—their children.  So they are asking themselves why they are out in the world working themselves to exhaustion when all they can think about is their children.

It’s a good point.

When the US Leaves Iraq

Call me a conspiracist, but I believe that US political class has already decided to leave Iraq.

I base this on the behavior of presidential candidate John Kerry during the 2004 election campaign.  Time and time again he would rail at the Bush administration for not doing something—like ramping up training of Iraqi security forces—and then it would turn out six months later that the Bush administration was doing it, but just hadn’t splashed it all over the media.

It was as though Kerry knew what the Bush administration was going to do next week, and used the knowledge to accuse the Bushies of not doing it this week.

All this year the Democrats are pushing troop withdrawal resolutions in Congress.  Why would they bother except to whip up their netroot base?  In September, after Gen. Petraeus reports, the Bush administration will either announce that the surge has been a success, in which case it will start to draw down troops, or it will admit it not quite a success—and start to draw down troops.

Democrats are doing what Kerry did in 2004, demanding that Bush do what he is going to do anyway.

But we center-right people are better than that.  We are people with serious responsibilities and a serious strategic outlook. We should start thinking about what comes next.  To help us Austin Bay has set forth the seven likely scenarios in Iraq after the US leaves.  As he points out, he’s not the only one thinking about contingencies.

Business and government make plans. Every plan anticipates a future outcome. Since the future can’t be predicted, the best plans acknowledge uncertainty. Acknowledging uncertainty means accepting risk -- the risk of being wrong.

So here are the seven scenarios for Iraq post withdrawal.  Go read the whole thing if you want the details.

1. Three new countries
2. Regional Shia-Sunni war
3. Turkey expands
4. Shia dictatorship
5. “Gang-up” of Shia and Kurds against the Sunni Arabs
6. Chaos
7. The Iraqi center holds

Doesn’t look too promising, does it?

My own feeling echoes that of the Asia TImes’ Spengler.  He points out that  proper nations “have no room for irredentists and other rejectionists.”  They need people who show up on time and get along with the neighbors.

Having a civil war is de rigeur. All the right people do it. It shows that the prospective nation has the grit to sort out its own problems.

Sounds pretty shocking, doesn’t it?  But we had two civil wars here in the US.  And between them they pretty well took care of the rejectionists, first of all the Brit loyalists and secondly the Southern slaveholders.  Since then, we have gone without civil war, which is nice.  Everyone gets along with the neighbors except when liberals come along and heighten peoples’ group identity instead of their American identity.

But there are always some troublemakers.

In the Middle East the west has been keeping the safety valve screwed down for decades because we want access to the oil with no interruptions and no shenanigans while the natives fight it out to decide who gets the revenue from the oil.

But what about the people of the Middle East?  What do they want?