Our Liberal Dominator Hierarchy

Is the bad old days of the feudal era and the patriarchy, if you can remember back that far, the world was ruled by Dominator Hierarchies.

But the progressive educated elite offered itself in the nineteenth century to end all that. No, in the future we would all be gently led into a new era of equality and end the marginalization of groups oppressed by the dominators and the marginalizers.

That’s what they told us. Now let’s think reality.

Was there ever a Dominator Hierarchy like our modern progressive educated elite that rules today? It occupies the commanding heights of the culture. Its ideas dominate the activities of government. And the mighty barons of the corporate world are summoned to bend the knee at its congressional levees (the Louis XIV kind, not the Louisiana kind). We are even seeing a return to sumptuary laws, as the lower orders are learning that they should not travel around in big, wasteful SUVs but in modest transportation more appropriate to their station.

usgovernmentspending.com, of course, is an eternal witness to the liberal Dominator Hierarchy’s implacable power. Just take a look when you have a moment.

Want to opt out of the centrally administered program of government pensions at $900 billion per year? Good luck chum.

Want to opt out of the centrally administered program of government health care at $950 billion per year? Out of luck, chum. The Dominator Hierarch plans to increase the level of compulsion.

Want to opt out of the centrally administered program of government education at $875 billion per year? You can, of course, but you still have to pay your share anyway. And the Dominator Hierarch is planning to extend its power and control to pre-kindergarten.

Want to opt out of the centrally administered program of government welfare at $465 billion per year? Good luck, chum.

Notice the level of compulsion and domination here? We have just reeled off 20 percent of GDP in force and compulsion, and we haven’t even got to defense and policing yet.

Funny thing, isn’t it? All this noble largesse isn’t free, and it isn’t voluntary. The Dominator Hierarchy has decided what is good for you and your job is to say how much you like it.

The charming thing about this implacable liberal Dominator Hierarchy, the most complete and powerful, perhaps, in all history, is that it experiences itself as an enlightened successor to a Dark Age of Domination, called to witness to the evils of domination and to gently minister to a grateful people its new order of diversity and inclusion.

But then, what is new about that? Every tyrant thinks himself a savior. The only fiend in all history that revelled in his evil was Othello’s tormentor, Iago. But he wasn’t real, just a fiction.

Wal-Mart's FEMA Actually Delivers

Liberals hate Wal-Mart. Well, they do. They hate Wal-Mart because it puts Main Street businesses out of business. They hate Wal-Mart because it’s non-union and it doesn’t offer first-dollar health insurance.

But Wal-Mart delivers Always Low Prices, Always. And that helps all people on low incomes. Funnily enough, Wal-Mart is doing fine in the current recession while Whole Foods is tanking.

And Wal-Mart is a good corporate citizen where it counts. Like in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as the Suburban Emergency Management Project reports.

You see Wal-Mart has an Emergency Operations Center at its Bentonville, AR headquarters. Whenever there’s a natural disaster Wal-Mart mobilizes to deliver. Part of Wal-Mart’s planning involves replenishing stores when there is a disaster alert. Wal-Mart has over eight Disaster Distribution Centers in its complement of over 100 distribution centers nationwide.

So when Hurricane Katrina struck, Wal-Mart was ready, even including an inspirational message from CEO Lee Scott to Wal-Mart associates.

This company will respond to the level of this disaster. A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level. Make the best decision that you can with the information that̢۪s available to you at the time, and, above all, do the right thing.

As soon as possible Wal-Mart was trucking in supplies into the devastated area. Of course it wasn’t easy. The public sector, at all levels of government, was slow getting moving. Also, governments had contracts with private-sector companies other than Wal-Mart who weren’t able to mobilize as efficiently. Pretty soon Wal-Mart found itself supplying government agencies with which it didn’t have a contract. But Wal-Mart delivered.

â€Å“Phillip Capitano, mayor of the New Orleans suburb of Kenner, reported, â€Å“The only lifeline in Kenner was the Wal-Mart stores. We didn’t have looting on a mass scale because Wal-Mart showed up with food and water so our people could survive.” Similar reports of Wal-Mart’s prompt and effective involvement came from community leaders across the Gulf Coast.

There’s no doubt that Wal-Mart has an interest in good PR, in building public support for its brand. So Wal-Mart is only helping Wal-Mart when it helps out in a disaster.

But let nobody forget that CEO Scott set the tone from the top: “Above all, do the right thing.”

Rebuilding the Conservative Story Part III: Elevator Story

We’ve spent the last couple of days talking about the conservative story. What is our Vision? What is our Mission? Now it’s time to define our elevator story.

Every enterprise needs an Elevator Story. It’s the spiel you give to someone in 30 seconds or less when they say: What do you do? Now that conservatives in their political instantiation in the Republican Party have been roundly defeated, we have to ask ourselves: What is our story? What’s the point of being a conservative?

If you’re going to tell a story then you should tell a story. You should start by setting the stage, define the essential conflict, point towards a resolution, and describe the happy outcome. So here goes.

Setting the Stage:
In America today, government is cruel, corrupt, unjust; and it just costs too much.

Isn’t this just about how conservatives feel? The current welfare state, in which the American people cough up for $900 billion of government pensions, $950 billion in government health care, $875 billion in government education, and $470 billion in government welfare, every year, is an abomination. Never mind the corrupt patronage system. There is the cruelty of a system that has destroyed the family in the underclass, the injustice of a system that screws the working poor and rewards the non-working poor. It. Is. Wrong.

The Conflict:
Liberals created this monster. Liberals believe that compulsory government programs are the way to help the poor and comfort the afflicted.
But they are wrong. Government is not compassion. Government is force. You cannot solve social problems by force.

This is the basic touch point between liberals and conservatives. Liberals believe you can solve social problems with government programs. Conservatives believe that you must solve them person-to-person, face-to-face. That issues out of the meaning of the word compassion, literally, “suffering with.” Running a government program with tax dollars to help the poor isn’t “suffering with.”

The Resolution:
Society is not social force; it is social cooperation. That’s why we must reform the welfare state into the welfare society.
In the welfare society the American people, not liberal experts, will be in charge of their own health care, their children’s education, the comfort of the afflicted, and the decent provision of pensions.

Liberals believe in the welfare state; conservatives believe in the welfare society. That issues out of the basic conservative belief, initially voiced by Edmund Burke, that “To love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of publick affections.”

When you are thinking about politics it is best to take advantage of our better angels than to work against them. And we humans are, first of all, social animals that must live together rather than apart. So conservatives believe that “social problems” must be solved by people in their little platoons--family, neighbors, friends, associations, and charities--and not by bureaucrats. That's not easy, of course. It means that we can't just pay our taxes and complain about the government. We have to get involved and help people.

The Outcome:
With conservative reforms America will truly become that shining city on a hill, “still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom.”

So there is our Elevator Story. The current situation is intolerable. Liberals are to blame. The solution is to get government out of the way and put people back in. And the future is glorious, just as Ronald Reagan promised.

Rebuilding the Conservative Story Part II: Mission Statement

Yesterday we triumphantly designed a Vision Statement to guide conservatives during our rebuilding process. Today, as promised, we are releasing a Mission Statement to the world.

As everyone knows, in the subculture of off-site team-building meetings, the Vision Statement is a gauzy, uplifting, inspirational definition of the goal of an organization. The Mission Statement is more down to earth. It answers the question: What are we trying to do today?

How hard can this be? The conservative Mission Statement is short and concise:

We fight to reform a cruel and unjust welfare state.

Yes, I know that there is the War on Terror, and in the week after the brutal massacre of the innocents in Mumbai, who can forget it for a moment? But actually, I don’t think that the War on Terror is the front-and-center thing that conservatives must do.

I believe that we can count on our liberal friends to do the right thing by the War on Terror. They just have one little problem. They don’t want Republicans to get all the glory. They want to fight the war in their own sophisticated, nuanced way. Republicans just don’t know how to do nuanced, they know.

But conservatives are called to reform the dreadful, cruel, corrupt, and unjust welfare state, or we are called for nothing at all.

Let us repeat the words of David Cameron, leader of the British Conservative Party:

There is such a thing as society. It’s just not the same thing as the state.

In that statement, Cameraon (the lightweight?) encapsulates the whole thrust of conservative thinking. We all want to help the least amongst us. We want to comfort the afflicted. The question is: How? Shall we do it will rational, expert-driven bureaucratic programs from the cental government? Or shall we do it as individual people, joined into voluntary assocations, working together to help our fellow Americans?

Conservatives say that the rigid, compulsory, expert-led, bureaucratic way is not the way to help people. In fact, if you try to help people with government programs and bureaucracy, you get this:

Do you see the same thing that I am seeing? A little over one generation ago, about one in eight of the children of the uneducated were denied the basic human right to live with mother and father. But thirty years later four out of ten children of the uneducated were denied this right, and lived in a single-mother home.

Want to know how this happened? The welfare state did it. Liberals who drive the intellectual foundations of the welfare state and who manage the great bureaucracies of the welfare state did this.

And it is wrong.

That is why I say that the mission of the conservative movement is short and sweet:

We fight to reform a cruel and unjust welfare state.

Tomorrow: the Conservative Elev    ator Story.

Rebuilding the Conservative Story Part I: Vision Statement

Before we get to the specifics and the personalities of the glorious conservative future—will it be Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal—let’s do the due diligence. Let’s start with a Vision Statement.

Yes, I know, all that off-site team-building stuff is awfully trite, but it has a point. It forces you to think about: Who we are, and what do we want, and why?

So let’s start with a Vision Statement. Here it is:

We believe in an America that lives and works together, with limited government, under God.

Alert readers will notice that we are covering the three sectors of Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Well of course we are. What did you expect? We are talking about the Greater Separation of Powers between the economic sector, the political sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

So when we talk about an America where we “live and work together” we are evoking the system of voluntary cooperation under law that we call capitalism. But we are trying to evoke a little more than that, because the notion of free enterprise is too guy-like. We must include the girl side of voluntary cooperation, and that means the community of women working together, sharing and caring. In the guy side, we are battling all the other guys for market share. Competition instead of cooperation. But for the girls we want to think of cooperation before competition. So we fudge it.

When we talk about an America with “limited government” we are talking about an America where the government doesn’t get its fingers into every pie as it does today. It would be an America where four of the five biggest government programs would not be: government pensions, government healthcare, government education, and government welfare. Instead the two biggest programs would be defense against enemies foreign, and defense against enemies domestic. Look at usgovernmentspending.com to get a feel for what that might look like.

When we talk about an America “under God” we are talking about an America where the dominant belief system is transcendent. We mean that the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not solvable by a secular religion of heaven on earth. Life is a mystery, and the meaning of life is not given to us. So we develop a faith in the value of life and the meaning of life, typically symbolized by the notion of God. “God” in this sense is a declaration of humility. We will not solve the meaning of life by reason, or experimentation. Of course that will not stop us from reasoning, or from experimenting to get a better understanding of life, the universe, and everything. But we understand that every time we advance human knowledge a step, the ultimate answer recedes a step. All we do is raise the stakes.

So there it is. Step One in rebuilding the conservative story.

We believe in an America that lives and works together, with limited government, under God.

Next up: A new conservative Mission Statement.

Anthro Knickers in a Twist

I’d never heard of Montogmery McFate. Well I do now. She’s the social scientist that inspired the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System in Iraq. Says Wired:

Today she is the senior social science adviser for the Human Terrain System, a $130 million Army program that embeds political science, anthropology and economics specialists with combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Oh no! Social scientists assisting Pentagon combat units! Isn’t that unethical?

Because you are a sensitive conservative you know that proper social scientists don’t ever touch the Pentagon. Not if they want a career in the university. How could Mitzi McFate do this? And bring American anthropologists into disrepute all over the world.

Actually, no problem for McFate. When she started injecting herself into the Iraq War she was an army wife and didn’t have a job.

But here’s the problem, according to Inside Education:

The president of the Southwestern Anthropological Association invited Montgomery McFate to give the keynote address at the association̢۪s spring conference in Las Vegas.

But McFate’s work is “hitched to an initiative that has been formally opposed by the AAA’s executive board.”

Well, I hope so. I couldn’t imagine that the American Anthropological Association would do anything other than try the stop the Pentagon from doing anything.

Few anthropologists would question the value of inviting McFate to speak — or the importance of having free speech and scholarly engagement on such controversial topics.

Oh, no. Of course not. But the problem is that some people think that inviting McFate to make a keynote address “implies an honor.” And we wouldn’t want that.

And anyway, McFate failed “to appear at a scheduled speaking engagement Saturday at the AAA conference.” She was supposed to appear at an event where her critics would have an opportunity to respond.

So now the scholars are all arguing about whether a keynote speech amounts to an honor. (And also whether McFate should ever be allowed to speak without an opportunity for her critics to respond.)

Yep. Our unserious Academy. You couldn’t make it up.

After Mumbai

The big question about “islamic extremism” is whether to consider it a global mass movement of militant conquest or whether to think of it as a Ghost Shirt movement.

We’ve seen a number of global mass movements over the past century or so: commmunism, socialism, fascism. There were certainly moments when it looked like those movements, at once modern and reactionary, looked like they might take over the world. Does islamic terrorism fit into that template?

Or is it like the late 19th century Ghost Shirt movement, the last desperate convulsion of the Plains Indians to halt the annihilation of their culture by the western European capitalist democratic moloch? Or another late 19th century eruption, the Boxers, the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, young Han Chinese trying to push back the advance of the western European capitalist democratic moloch?

My guess, even after the bloodbath of Mumbai last week, is that the Islamic terrorists are more properly understood as violent young rich kids, young men desperately trying to push back the advance of the western European capitalist democratic moloch into the islamic heartland.

There’s an argument to be made that Islam might one day take over Europe, and it is made well by Mark Steyn in America Alone. But could they take over the Hindu heartlands of India. I’ll bet that if you ask a Hindu he will say: Over my dead body. He’ll say: We didn’t spend a century of effort getting the Brits out of India and taking India back from the muslim Mughals in order to give it away to a bunch of Pakistani Kashmiri killers.

Or China. Ask a Han Chinese, and I’ll bet he’ll say that after the humiliation of the last two hundred years in which China, the Middle Kingdom, was humiliated by the west, invaded by the Japanese, and nearly wrecked by Mao ZeDong twice, China is not going to allow a bunch of muslim rich kids to stop the return of China to its rightful place at the head of the world’s nations.

And here is another reason, if you have the stomach for it. One of the central facts of the modern era is the emergence of women into the public square. Christianity is the woman’s religion par excellence. For instance, two-thirds of adherents in the Pentecostal movement are women. In the next few years you are going to see the Chinese house church movement going public. And we may even see Christianity making big inroads into the Dalits in India.

So I make the strategic judgment that the future does not belong to Islam.

It certainly doesn’t have a hope if we make a sensible transition to a nuclear-powered future and back out a lot of fossil fuel consumption with nuclear emergy production. If that happens there won’t be too much Saudi wealth available to fund the terrorists any more.

But then we’ll find something else to worry about.