The Politics of Demonization

Why do Democrats hate Karl Rove so much?  And why do Republicans hate Senator Clinton, asks political scientist Jay Cost? 

He quotes from the e-mail of a partisan, who believes that Karl Rove has “a serious lack of ethics.”  Rove is “capable, vindictive and mean-spirited... and he has run dirty campaigns...”

Leaving aside the obvious code words from the Democratic side of the divide, Cost reminds us what this is all about. 

It’s all because of the necessities of politics. 

Both political parties offer us a ready-made worldview, a lens through which we can look at our political environment and make sense of it... These partisan worldviews... are explicitly crafted to induce us to political action. One way that we can be induced to political action... is if we believe that our political universe contains heroes and, of course, villains. The demonization of Karl Rove (and, for that matter, Hillary Clinton) is therefore part and parcel of a partisan worldview.

The easiest way to summon people to action is through hate and rage.  That’s why politicians do it.

But if you try to think about the other side using a “good faith assumption,” writes Cost, then you begin to perceive politics not as a battle between good and evil but a “conflict between competing interests.”

Then we can look at the Democratic Party as a coalition of the single, the secular, and the government employee.  And we can look at the Republican Party as the coalition of the religious, married with children who work in the private sector.

And we can see that each party’s goals and interests are sensibly aligned with the interests of its partisan supporters.

And obviously the actions of the other party’s political actors in blocking our own party’s agenda is unethical and mean-spirited.  Or worse.

Women Like Big Government

Yes, they really do.  John Lott has run the numbers in his new book Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t, says Bill Steigerwald, and he’s found that government expenditure starts a rapid climb anywhere as soon as women get the vote. 

And the climb in government spending pretty well tracks women’s vote count.

Let’s take a look with John Lott at a woman over her lifetime “(men pretty much stay the same over the course of their lives in terms of their political views, for better or worse)”:

• Single young women are liberal relative to single young men.
• When women get married they get more conservative — about half of the gap between men and women is eliminated.
• When women get married and then have kids, about half of the remaining gap — or about 75 percent of the original gap — gets eliminated.
• When women get divorced, with kids, they become much more liberal than they were to begin with.

And I think that we can also add that when women become widows they also become more liberal.

What we see here is the fundamental practical outlook of women.  Woman understands that she needs backup.  If there’s no husband in her life then she chooses government as her backup.

My own feeling here is that women do what they are told.  They go to school and actually learn stuff—unlike men.  So of course when they are taught at the government school to love government they lap it up.  Until they get married and have children and find out that the government is taking too much money away from them, their husbands,  and their children.

Women are not like men.  For women, life is serious and you don’t get any second chances.  So what makes women really mad is to get a bum steer, so that they look back on the last ten years and feel it was all wasted.

My judgment is that some time in the next generation western women are going to figure out that government really screws up a woman’s life.

When that happens, watch out liberals!

A Conservatism of Fraternity

Let’s do some serious thinking.  That’s the watchword now we’ve reached the end of the Bush era.  What should conservative ideas be based on and how should we persuade the American people that our ideas help them in their lives?

Danny Kruger is a special adviser to David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom, and he’s recently published On Fraternity: Politics beyond liberty and equality, a paper that appropriates for conservatism the rather neglected third part of the slogan of the French Revolution: Libert&eacute! Egalit&eacute! Fraternit&eacute!

Think of it this way, he writes:

• Liberalism is the philosophy of the individual. Its ethic is liberty and its characteristic is autonomy -- the freedom of the will from external constraint. It says ’I shall!’.
• Socialism is the philosophy of the state. Its ethic is equality and its characteristic is coercion -- the power, in the last resort, to exert force over individuals and groups. It says ’you must!’.
• Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority -- the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ’we should!’.

What is not to like?  I’m even inspired to put all this in a table. 

System	Phil.	Ethic	Character	Exhort	Relation
Liberalism	Individual	Liberty	Autonomy	"I shall"	Contract
Socialism	State	Equality	Coercion	"You must"	Program
Conserva-tism	Society	Fraternity	Authority	"We should"	Covenant

The column on the right is my idea. It identifies the way that people relate to each other under each system. In liberalism it’s the contract. In socialism it’s the government program. In conservatism it’s the covenant.

Each is perfectly proper in its own area of human interaction.  The problems begin when one system starts to overwhelm the others.

Your School Kid is "Invisible"

Senator Hillary Clinton has recently been reported asserting that ordinary people are “invisible” to President Bush.

She would know, of course.  At the recent convention of the National Education Assocation, writes Phyllis Schlafly,

U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., told delegates that she will fight school vouchers "with every breath in my body."

In other words, when it’s a question of your kid or the teachers, your kid is “invisible.”  The only thing that matters is keeping your tax money in the government monopoly schools and spending it on union teachers. 

God forbid that you should get the money to spend on the school of your choice.  God forbid that you could take the money from a failing government school and spend it on a little start-up neighborhood school run by one of your neighbors where the people actually know your kid and treat your kid like one of the family.

“Invisible” is a word like “Choice.” It all depends on the context. 

Bernanke's "Rookie Mistake?"

For the last two weeks the Federal Reserve Board and the European Central Bank have been adding massive liquidity to the financial markets.  Yet the Fed declared that “declared that inflation was their paramount challenge just two weeks ago,” as Bloomberg’s Craig Torres writes.

"It was a rookie mistake,’’ said Kenneth Thomas, a lecturer in finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in Philadelphia. The Fed "underestimated liquidity needs" of investors and the fallout from the housing recession, he said, adding, "This demonstrates the difference between book-smart and street-smart."

Well, that’s one man’s opinion.  But the Fed’s job is to fight inflation while making sure that there isn’t a market meltdown.  Based on results so far, it seems to have achieved this.

The big deal right now is that the Treasury yield curve has gone positive, whereas the Libor yield curve is still inverted.  That means that the Fed Funds rate at 5.25 percent is nearly 400 basis points above today’s 1 month Treasury bill rate of 1.5 percent.  A week ago, the T-bill rate was at 5.0 percent.

The thing to remember about the Fed is that it is playing with your money.  Back in 1907 during the crash J. Pierpont Morgan forced his banker buddies into a room and they did triage on the corporations that were caught in the liquidity squeeze. They lent money to the businesses that were solvent and refused to bail out the ones that were insolvent.  And they did it with their own money.

Imagine that happening today!

Climate Change Deniers

It’s turning out to be a rough year for the Climate Change Deniers, you know, the chaps who deny that the main driver of the Earth’s climate is the Sun.  And it’s a bit embarrassing when a blogger, albeit an older, well-qualified blogger shows up NASA and its claim that 1998 was the warmest year in US history.  Roy Spencer explains:

First, NASA’s James Hansen and his group had to fix a Y2K bug that a Canadian statistician found in their processing of the thermometer data. As a result, 1998 is no longer the warmest year on record in the United States - 1934 is.

Amanda Carpenter got to interview Steven McIntyre, who runs climateaudit.org, and to lead him through his interactions with NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies.

What comes out clearly is that NASA doesn’t really want anyone looking at how they came up with the numbers.  McIntyre knew about the difficulties of normalizing temperature data, given the vagaries of weather stations and their locations, and he was interesting in finding out how NASA adjusted their data.

So, that type of adjustment is a statistical issue that interests me. And, so I wrote to NASA in May and asked them for the source code for the adjustment software that they used to fix these stations and they refused to provide it.

Why on earth, you wonder?  Well, it’s not really remarkable. Data adjustments are fiendishly difficult to do well, and the chances are that NASA’s adjustment is a fudge.  Naturally, they are reluctant to give anyone the chance to look through their data and find problems with it.  Bureaucrats are self-selected for the quiet life.  They don’t want to have to spend all their time explaining their mistakes.

And they were right.  They should never have let that chap Steven McIntyre near their data or anything else.

The bigger problem is that the whole temperature series that is used to validate the global warming hypothesis is probably a gigantic fudge, guided by the knowledge that “of course” the planet is getting warmer, and of course a comprehensive and mandatory global government program is needed to save the planet.

Maybe, of course, the planet is getting warmer, and maybe man is responsible for a good deal of it.  And maybe the Greenland icecap will melt and maybe we will all have to run for higher ground.

That’s an awful lot of maybes when you are proposing to compel people to change their way of life at a cost of trillions of dollars

Dem Dodges on School Choice

Presidential candidate and United States Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) sent his children to private schools.  Why not to government schools, Joe, like the government schools you force everyone else’s kids to go to?  Kathryn Jean Lopez has the answer.

Well, you see, Biden’s wife and daughter were killed in a car accident and so his two children were living with his sister.  His sister worked at a private school and so it was just the right thing to do to send them to a private school.  Said Biden at a Democratic debate:

My kids would not have gone to that school were it not for the fact that my wife and daughter were killed and my two children were under the care of my sister who drove them to school every morning.

When his children were older Biden sent them on to Catholic high school.

“I’m a practicing Catholic — it was very important to me they go to a Catholic school, and they went to Catholic school.”

Yeah.  Well, Senator, I’m a practicing libertarian conservative and it goes against the grain for me to see little children forced to go to crumbling, incompetent, dangerous government schools.

In Britain things have got so bad that parents are having their children’s school uniforms lined with Kevlar to guard against knife attacks.

Children are now going to school with body armor.

You see, Senator, those parents are practicing parents.  It is very important to them that their children not be attacked and harmed at school.  But of course most parents aren’t as rich as United States Senators and they can’t afford to send their kids to safe private schools.

And after all, the votes and the contributions of union teachers are really much more important than the education of “invisible” poor kids.