Back of the Bus No More

It’s always good to hear the sensible words of the adults after a week or so of ranting and raging by the kids.

So today Charles Krauthammer opines on the LBJ-MLK flap. 

You remember.  Hillary Clinton said that it is presidents that get things done.  It took Lyndon Johnson to pass the civil rights acts of the 1960s. 

That is true, and it is true for a shameful reason.  Back in the 1960s blacks were disfranchised.  They had to get in the back of the bus and let the liberals lead on Capitol Hill.  Liberals have preened themselves on their nobility ever since.

Today, that arrangement — white liberals acting as tribune for blacks in return for their political loyalty — is a demeaning anachronism.

And that is why blacks have reacted with offense and outrage over the patronizing remarks of the Clintons on race.

For conservatives there is a real frisson of Schadenfreude over white liberal Democrats getting the Treatment over race.  We risk the Treatment any time we open our mouths.  And couldn’t happen to more deserving people.  Krauthammer

But where, I ask you, do such studied and/or sincere expressions of racial offense come from? From a decades-long campaign of enforced political correctness by an alliance of white liberals and the black civil rights establishment intended to delegitimize and marginalize as racist any criticism of their post-civil rights-era agenda.

Today there is a black man running a mainstream campaign for a major party presidential nomination.

What Barack Obama is saying by his presence as a major contender with a real chance at winning the nomination is that it is time for blacks to get out of the back of the political bus.  They don’t need liberals to front for them any more.

And liberals are shocked.  How could blacks forget all that we have done for them, they whimper.

But this is an old story.  The history of the United States is full of hyphenated Americans that grew up in the motherly embrace of the Democratic Party.  And then the day came when it was time to grow up.  It became time to throw off the hyphen and become an American.

African-Americans have had as rough a time getting to that moment as any group in US history.  But now it looks like they are getting there.  And one of the rites of passage is to throw off your allegiance to the Democratic Party, to leave the liberal plantation.

We conservatives say: Welcome!  There is nothing in the world like being an American.

Freakologic: Making Life Logical

After a stunning success with The Undercover Economist, British economist Tim Harford is out with a new book, The Logic of Life. It’s all about the logical choices that people make in their lives.  For instance, how would you think that women react when a lot of men are in prison?

The more men are in prison, the more likely women are to get themselves a job, and the more likely they are to go to college.

In New Mexico, according to Harford, 30 percent of young black men are in jail.  So that means that young black women are very unlikely to marry. 

Of course, it works both ways.  The men that don’t go to jail find that there are lots of women available, so they are less inclined to get married.  Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

And so it goes, according to Harford.  What about the rise in divorce?  Can you explain that logically? 

Well, a century ago, looking after a family was so time consuming that a radical division of labor in the home was essential.  But once modern labor-saving devices came along, the importance of the domestic division of labor declined.  The cost of divorce went down.  So more people got divorced.  And when the supply of divorced people increased the cost of finding a suitable new mate went down too.

When the cost of divorce went down, more women could afford to pay the cost of getting out of an abusive relationship.  That had an effect on men.

The result? Domestic violence fell by almost a third, and the number of women murdered by their partners fell by ten percent. Female suicide also fell.

Obviously, that’s not the whole story.  And maybe the decline of divorce in recent years is a sign that people are learning to be more careful about getting married and better behaved once they commit.

But it’s interesting to think that the left-wing agenda of destroying the family was actually helped by the conservative reaction to high crime rates.  With lots of men in jail, lower-class women responded by avoiding marriage completely.

And the ready availability of government assistance made the choice less expensive.

It’s something to think about in the years ahead as conservatives journey in the wilderness of the Clinton-Obama administration.

The Reagan-Bush Era Is Over

Last Sunday Newt Gingrich went on George Stefanopoulos’ ABC Sunday show and said that the Reagan era was over.  Said Newt:

We are at the end of the George W. Bush era.  We are at the end of the Reagan era. We’re at a point in time when we’re about to start redefining — as a number of people started talking about, starting to redefine — the nature of the Republican Party, in response to what the country needs.

Rush Limbaugh was not amused.  To him the Reagan era is not just an era. Said he: “I don’t think the Reagan era is anything other than conservatism.  And I don’t think conservatism is over.”

Yesterday Newt came on Rush’s show to ’splain himself.  And really, it turned out that Newt and Rush were saying the same thing, only on different pages.  Said Newt:

Reagan gave a speech on the creative society.  He said, "Public officials are elected primarily for one purpose, to solve public problems."  Now, that’s what I was trying to get at.  We need a 2008 agenda that is as bold for us as Reagan was in 1975[.]

My view, opposed to both Rush and Newt is that there’s a problem with the Reagan vision.  It is excessively masculine. 

It misses the point to say, as Newt says:

I think the challenge is for our generation to come up with a platform that is as bold, a set of solutions that are as bold, as Reagan was in 1979-1980.

That’s how you speak to men and rally them for battle.  But what about women?  Republicans already have nearly all the men who don’t live on Social Security or who work for the government.  But what about women?

Women are risk averse.  They don’t want bold solutions.  They just want things to work.  They want schools that meet the special needs of their children and they want health care that meets the health needs of their family. They just want the resources to care for the people they love.

In the last century it has been Democrats that have communicated best with women by promising to deliver resources.  Yes, said Democrats, we care about the kids.  We care about health care.  We care about senior citizens.

But what Democrats delivered were cruel bureaucracies.  They delivered school bureaucracies that delivered paychecks and pensions to teachers, but didn’t deliver much education to children.  They delivered an incredibly expensive government-dominated system of health care.  And they encouraged people to warehouse their parents in “assisted living.”

And that is to say nothing about the destruction of the family by big government programs.

In my view there is an opening to start communicating with women about a better way to care for children, to provide health care and to care for seniors.  One that puts women at the center of the care network, not bureaucracies and government programs.

But it will not be about anything that Rush or Newt understands.

Dem Political Poker

In the last generation our Democratic card sharps have had a grand old time playing the race card, or the gender card, or the class card in the nation’s political card rooms. Time after time they cleaned the clocks of poor unsuspecting Republican fish. What great fun it all was!

Until now.

There was always the danger, of course, that one day some ruthless Democrat would decide to play the card on a fellow Democrat for crude political gain. But generations of Republicans have gone to their Maker without it happening.

Until now.

This morning, Rush Limbaugh was in full chortle, playing “Johnny Comes Marching Home” from the soundtrack of Dr Strangelove while he intoned about the Democrats’ Uncivil War.

We’ve got Hillary! playing the gender card, Obama playing the race card, and Edwards playing the class card.

The only thing missing is that nobody has played the gay card. Not yet.

The question is: Which one of them is bluffing?

Primaries Expose Party Splits

In a useful review of the campaign season thus far, Michael Barone finds that the candidates are exposing the fault lines in the two major parties.  First the Democrats:

One faction of the Democratic Party is relatively upscale, well-educated, young. This faction is supporting Barack Obama. The other faction is relatively downscale, less-educated, old. This faction is supporting Hillary Clinton.

The mainstream media loves to play the game of split-the-Republicans, but you have to wonder if the split between secular liberal university professors and single mothers isn’t a political tsunami waiting to happen.  Looking back to the days of FDR and JFK:

The Democratic primary electorate was heavily downscale, ethnic and religious. But now the two factions are roughly equal in size. The downscale constituency has tended to prevail, but not always and not inevitably.

Of course, these two factions are joined at the hip, because it is the hip professors and MPA graduates that administer and dispense the benefits of the welfare state to the downscale victims while reserving a reasonable and customary slice for themselves.  But sometimes people forget who their friends are.

The Republicans have more factions:

• Huckabee is the candidate of the “religious conservatives and no-one else.”
• Fred Thompson competes for the same plus the southern-accented.
• John McCain appeals to “the remnants and descendants of the historic Protestant Yankee base of the party.”
• “Rudy Giuliani, with his liberal positions on cultural issues... [appeals to the] ethnic and metropolitan.”
• “Mitt Romney’s appeal seems to be strongest among economic conservatives, impressed perhaps by his business record and untroubled by his switches on cultural issues.”

That’s the way it should be, of course.  Each of the factions puts up their own candidate.  But what does it all mean?

Barone thinks that the Democratic race could be decided by February 5.  But the Republicans are likely to take longer.

The problem is that the longer the party factions are fighting, the harder it will be to bring them together for the general election battle.

The primary battle is important.  The conflict is a test of strength and will, and it allows the factions to decide if they really want to belong to the party any more.

Usually they do want to stay.  But sometimes they don’t, and that is when the fun really begins.

The Bonfire of the Multicultural Vanities

Does New York Times columnist David Brooks nail it, or does he nail it?  This contest for the nomination of the Democratic Party between a white woman and a black man is turning into a bonfire of the multicultural vanities, he advises. 

Both Clinton and Obama have eagerly donned the mantle of identity politics. A Clinton victory wouldn’t just be a victory for one woman, it would be a victory for little girls everywhere. An Obama victory would be about completing the dream, keeping the dream alive, and so on.

As we wrote here yesterday.  It was grand fun to play the race card when a black man was running against an eevil racist Republican, or play the gender card when a white woman was running against an eevil sexist conservative.  Serve those dead white males right.  But now the game of identity politics is turning into a civil war in the Democratic Party

The problem is that both the feminist movement Clinton rides and the civil rights rhetoric Obama uses were constructed at a time when the enemy was the reactionary white male establishment. Today, they are not facing the white male establishment. They are facing each other.

I know what you are saying.  It couldn’t happen to more deserving people.  Let the feminist sexists and the black racists slug it out.  They deserve each other.  That’s what Brooks says, more politely.  And then he delivers the payoff:

The interesting split is not between the feminist and civil rights Old Bulls, it’s between the establishments of both movements, who emphasize top-down change, and the younger dissenters, who don’t. Second, this dispute is going to be settled by the rising, and so far ignored, minority group. For all the current fighting, it’ll be Latinos who end up determining who gets the nomination.

That’s a good point.  We haven’t heard from Latinos yet.  In fact, I should think it is insensitive of the two racist sexist combatants not to have considered the feelings of Latinos.   It is demeaning to conduct the contest for the Democratic nomination purely in terms of sexism and black/white racism.

What about La Raza?  What about La Reconquista?  What about the identity of the folks cruelly conquered and enslaved by dead white Spanish conquerors?

Liberal Fascism Over the Rainbow

Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high
There’s a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby

Somewhere over the rainbow
States aren’t blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true

Some day I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the libs are far behind me
Where programs melt like lemondrops
And shrink below the budget tops
That’s where you’ll find me

Daily when the netrooter
Lib’rals cry
“Fascist Neanderthaler”
Why then, oh why can’t I?

Some day I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the libs are far behind me
Where programs melt like lemondrops
And shrink below the budget tops
That’s where you’ll find me

In the faculty lounge when
Lib’rals cry
“Fascist bigot are you,” then
Why then, oh why can’t I?

If happy little lib’rals cry
“You know you’re fascists”
Why, oh why can’t I?