Liberal Fascism and Civilization

Today Jonah Goldberg is celebrating the paperback edition of his bestseller Liberal Fascism with Kathryn Jean Lopez.  Of course, he'd like to be getting the sales that Mark Levin is getting with Liberty and Tyranny, but who's complaining?

Of course, fascism celebrates violence, and the liberal fascism a kind of violence-lite as it trashes the rule of law in favor of elite paternalism, and political payoffs to powerful supporters.

In the same issue John Derbyshire delights in a recent dinner with Steven Pinker, of The Blank Slate.  And that leads to the decline of violence.

This wasn’t an intimate one-on-one dinner, but the monthly meeting of my gents’ dinner club, at which Professor Pinker was guest of honor. He talked about the historical decline of violence, the subject of his next book, then a general discussion took off in several different directions.

I've been reading about this recently in Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn and in Charles Taylor's Secular Age. Taylor discusses how the West "civilized" the elite and the poor over the past 500 years, by reducing instinctive violence and sexual license.

This can go overboard, he explains, as in the sexual renunciation ethic of Augustinian Christianity.  But clearly the modern era is built upon a repression of the base instincts.

Naturally there are revolts against this, led in our time by the elite.  Fascism and the Sexual Revolution did not come from the gutter; they came from Romanticism, Nietzsche, and Freud, and well-born chaps like the Bloomsbury set.

Even in our smooth well-ordered world--especially in our well-ordered world--people hanker after the rush of violence and sexual release.  And it's hard to tell who is the good guy.

Christianity has championed sexual repression and also tamed the princes.  But it has also sanctioned religious wars and a celebration of ordinary life and sexuality.

The secularist opponents of Christianity have made much of its sexual repression and its religious wars.  But now they are regulating sexual behavior on campus and establishing speech codes so that people can be free, not of rowdy thugs, but of rowdy opinions.  Or alternatively they celebrate Peace on the one hand and sexual liberation on the other.

You can see that the question of the "civilizing" of the human race is complex, more complex than we allow in our routine partisan exchanges.

And the question lurking over it all is: how far can we go with our civilizing before we turn into vegetables?

Auto Bankruptcy Morning

It's telling, isn't it, that the New York Times had on its website the day of General Motors' bankruptcy a photo of a Chevrolet Corvair. You know, Unsafe at Any Speed, Ralph Nader, and all.

Because the Corvair is a symbol of the liberals' 70 year relationship with General Motors. They just couldn't keep their hands off.

You could say that it all started in the 1930s with the Wagner Act that allowed the auto unions to organize the automobile industry and first raise wages above the market rate (and plunge the economy into the 1937 recession).

After World War II liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote American Capitalism. It was an apology for the economic arrangements brought in by the New Deal and the Wagner Act. In Galbraith's view it was a good and beneficial thing for Big Business to be balanced by the countervailing power of Big Labor with Big Government as a arbitrator between labor and business. That is what Galbraith said. Now we can see how completely wrong he was.

Instead of countervailing power there arose a narrative of countervailing power. Underneath the narrative and the rhetoric, the auto companies capitulated to the union, choosing a cosy life of appeasement rather than a principled stand against government-sponsored monopoly. But then, what else could they do?

Under this cosy arrangement Big Labor and Big Business racked up wages and car prices in a kind of hands-off collusion. Profits were good and it looked like they would go on forever. So the United Auto Workers bargained for and the auto companies agreed to wages and benefits that assumed continued prosperity and robust earnings far into the future, with expensive pensions and retiree health benefits that would have to be paid not from savings in the present but auto company earnings in the future.

Then there was Ralph Nader in the mid 1960s and the auto safety movement. Then there was the 1970s energy crisis and laws to regulate automobile mileage.

Now, of course, we have the green energy movement that wants to regulate Detroit into building green cars that are fuel-efficient and have a small carbon footprint.

What's surprising is that it has taken this long to completely destroy the domestic auto industry. Now, of course, the US government owns a majority interest in both GM and Chrysler. The stockholders and bondholders have been more or less completely stiffed and the United Auto Workers union gets a big minority interest. That, my friend, is what piracy and plunder looks like.

Now that the government owns GM and Chrysler will it help them get on their feet and get out of the way? Or will it meddle even more in the auto business?

What do you think?

But there is one comfort. The auto companies failed on the Democrats' watch, and now they own the problem.

Why Be Scandalized When Politicians Act Like Voters?

Everyone in Britain is agreed that their MPs are outrageous, claiming for expenses on all kinds of questionable things, like moats and duck islands.

But let's be fair. All they are doing is signing up for benefits, just like everyone else, from welfare recipients to corporate welfare recipients. Everyone thinks they should get stuff for free from the government. So why be surprised if the legislature acts just like the people?

Anyway, this is nothing remarkable. Most all insurgencies, formed to protest the injustices of the present, eventually slip into comfortable incumbency, rewarding their loyal servitors with patronage and with loot, just like the ancien regime.

Modern conservatism is built upon another idea. Conservatives believe that you don't need to get your daily bread by force, by conquering the powerful, taking away the surplus they have squirreled away and giving it to your followers. Conservatives believe that the way to thrive is to become useful to other people and to offer your services to them. It believes in the unlikely notion that you can prosper by serving other people better than by dominating them.

The astonishing thing is that anyone, let alone conservatives, believes such a ridiculous notion. Of course you have to fight. Of course you have to protect yourself by attaching yourself to a powerful patron. What other way is there?

Yet people do believe this impossible notion. We believe it because it works. The story of the rise of the bourgeoisie in the last 500 years is the story of the middle class and its culture of trust and service.

In the last 150 years the middle-class culture has ben sorely tried by a new class, the education progressive class. This new class does not believe in trust. It does not believe in service. And it does not believe in limited government.

Conservatives say that if you want to understand the last century then the best way to understand it is as a succession of disasters brought on by the progressive educated class. Boom and bust? The progressive educated class developed the notion that they and their experts could manipulate the business cycle and smooth it out. Health care? The progressive educated class believed that only centralized compulsion could deliver decent health care to the workers and their families. Education? The progressive educated class decided that only a universal compulsory system could deliver literacy and competence to the masses. And so on.

Actually, this system has worked, in its way. It has delivered power and influence to the progressive educated class. All the great heads of government expenditure are programs devised, advocated, and administered by the progressive educated class.

The great mission for conservatives in the coming generation is to bear witness to the monstrous suffering and injustice brought about by the pride and the follies of the progressive educated class.

Conservatives maintain that society would do much better if the progressive educated class would just butt out.

As we struggle out of the Crash of 2008, caused by multiple political interventions to manipulate the business cycle, it is time to stop the conceit of politicians and their experts that they know better than businessmen and financiers how to run the economy.

As we contemplate another huge government intervention in the health care system, it is time to stop the conceit of politicians and activists that they can do a better job of running the health care system that patients and their doctors and nurses.

As we contemplate a century and a half of educational folly, it is time to stop the conceit of politicians and activists that they can do a better job of running the education system than teachers, parents, and students.

When we have done that, then we conservatives can go out into the good night. For our job will be done, and the world will move on.

But until then there is work to be done.

Liberals and Empathy

We know conservatives are outraged by the question of Empathy vs. Justice. But what about liberals? After all, it was Candidate Obama who brought "empathy" onto the national radar when he talked about the importance of empathy in a Supreme Court Justice.

Feminist Wendy Kaminer wrestles with the question over at The Atlantic.

Sonia Sotomayor is either an injudicious advocate of identity politics or candidly realistic about the possibility of entirely objective decision-making.

You are not really supposed to admit that you have biases. But then we all have them.

Admitting such a bias goes against the life-work of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you see.

In the early 1970s, as founding director of the ACLU Women's Rights Project, Ginsburg led a groundbreaking battle against discriminatory laws that meted out rights or entitlements on the basis of sex and assumptions about characterological, temperamental, and intellectual differences between men and women.

But, as we conservatives have complained, the problem that feminists immediately ran into is that women really are different and really do have special needs in law. So they smuggled discrimination back into the law through the back door. Only now, of course, the new discriminations would have a liberal secular cast rather than the cultural assumptions of a the white patriarchal culture that produced Anglo-Saxon law.

But Kaminer sees a problem in the excitement of the sisterhood over a second woman on the court.

Does the chauvinistic reaction to Sotomayor's nomination represent a repudiation of Ginsburg's fight for equality?

But it's ok. She notes that even Ginsburg has often railed against the insensitivity of the males on the court to feminine sensibilities.

[It took a] Ginsburg to decry the evident inability of her male colleagues to recognize the shame a junior high school girl feels when strip-searched by school administrators who suspect her of hiding advil in her underwear.

The problem is, though, that conservatives don't trust liberals when it comes to "empathy," the special shame that teenage girls may have over strip searching. In our hearts we agree with Ann Coulter when she says:

But all liberals only have empathy for the exact same victims -- always the ones that are represented by powerful liberal interest groups. As Joe Sobran says, it takes a lot of clout to be a victim.

And that means, writes Coulter, that for liberals, "'Empathy'... is nothing but raw political power."

That's because the further you travel from the notion of blindfolded Justice balancing the scales with no thumbs in sight, the closer you inevitably come to simple patronage politics and raw power. Because that's the natural political instinct: to take care of your own.

Empathy and Justice

President Obama spent paragraphs in his introduction of appeals court Judge Sonia Sotomayor telling the Teleprompter how judges should follow the law and not their personal preferences. David Limbaugh was not impressed.

True to form, President Barack Obama... said he was doing one thing while doing the exact opposite. He articulated his criteria for the optimal nominee yet chose someone who falls squarely outside those criteria -- as best we can tell.

That's because, in her speeches and her actions as a judge, Sonia Sotomayor has demonstrated pretty clearly that she belongs to the "empathy" school of jurisprudence. Never mind the law, vote your heart.

Of course, the law has always recognized, in the words of a famous fictional woman lawyer, that the "pound of flesh" in a contract must always be leavened with the quality of mercy. That's because if you bite too hard on the letter of the contract, it will end up biting you back.

But we know what liberals mean by "empathy." They mean that they will put a thumb on the scales of justice to make sure that the result is correct. Sonia Sotomayor understands what it means. That's what the mandatory quote about a "wise Latina woman" is all about. It's OK to upend centuries of white male jurisprudence if it helps the poor and the weak in their struggle with an oppressive world.

If that were all, it wouldn't be so bad. But empathy leads quickly to injustice, as the New Haven firefighters case so conveniently demonstrates. After all, who deserves empathy there? The black firefighters that didn't come close in the promotion exam, or the dyslexic Italian American who studied night and day to pass the exam? Does race trump disability? No doubt the lawyers that prepared the case for the firefighters knew exactly what they were doing in setting up two liberal enthusiasms to fight each other.

I keep coming back to the same point. The progressive educated class has dominated the culture and the public square for the last century. In or out of office they have had the power to enforce their view of government and society upon America. After a while, however idealistic the revolution that brought it to power, a new elite becomes just another ruling class. It is not that they are bad people, although there are always bad applies in the barrel. It is just that an established ruling class becomes insensitive and unable to understand the injustices that they inflict upon the people they rule.

In a way, our liberal masters understand this. That is why President Obama is always saying one thing and doing another. As Rush Limbaugh puts it: liberals can't admit who they are. On this view the Obama campaign and presidency thus far have been masterpieces of misdirection. Yes, he's all for Hope and Change, but his policies mean more of the same Big Government.

In the Wall Street Journal today Bret Stephens invokes the South Park "Gnomes" to explain this. These gnomes are running around South Park episode in 1998 collecting underpants.

What's the big idea? The gnomes explain:

"Phase One: Collect underpants.

"Phase Two: ?

"Phase Three: Profit."

That seems to be the way that the Obama administration works. The all important Phase Two always gets elided. How do we get to actually close Gitmo while keeping those high-value terrorists in custody? How do we lower costs in health care while providing universal coverage. And how do you do "empathy" on the Supreme Court without sacrificing justice?

Go ahead, Mr. President. This is your moment. What is your plan? You do have a plan, don't you?

The trouble is that President Obama really does have a plan. It is bigger government. It is more of the cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful, and deluded liberal administrative state.

Understandably, he can't tell us that because if he did, the American people would upchuck him immediately.

Sotomayor: A Liberal Bully?

This morning President Obama nominated appeals court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to a seat on the United States Supreme Court. She is, according to first reports, about as liberal as you can be and still get confirmed by the Senate.

So this is what conservatives warned about. Elect Obama and you'll get a radical left-winger on the Court.

Of course, the only thing worse is to nominate a moderate and get a solid liberal vote on the court--someone like retiring Justice Souter.

Actually, I'm encouraged. Here's a look at Sotomayor from New Republic's Jeffrey Rosen.

The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was "not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench," as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it...



Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees.

We should take this kind of talk with a grain of salt. There's a tendency for highly educated law clerks to value intellectual gifts over more mundane gifts of energy and persistence. Intellectual gifts have their place. But so do other gifts.

Still, if you asked me what I would want in a liberal Obama appointee it would be that they didn't quite get it. That they didn't know where the skeletons were buried and why.

In my view, whether the future is conservative or liberal, the past century of liberal jurisprudence is going to start getting unpacked and reversed. That's because, liberal or conservative, a lot of it is just bad law. If you were a liberal, you'd want a first-class mind to conduct the strategic retreat and save the really important legal assets in the march.

The New Haven firefighters case shows how this might play out. Judge Sotomayor was part of a panel on the case that tried to bury the case without really examining it on its merits. In other words, she and the other liberal judges on the court were engaging in a bit of liberal skulduggery to prevent the white firefighters (and one Hispanic) from getting their day in court.

Is it just to bury a case in which a municipality junked the results of a firefighters' promotion exam because it didn't promote enough blacks (even though the exam had been carefully designed to be non-discriminatory)?

When liberals long for a liberal turn for the Supreme Court, you wonder what they really want. More race and gender obsessed jurisprudence? I say: Bring It On.

Because political change comes out of rage and injustice, and the more injustice that liberals cook up the better the chance conservatives will get to build a "broad coalition" to change America for the better.

Should GOP "Reach Out?"

After two successive defeats at the polls, what should the Republican Party do to "reach out?"

There are two approaches. One is to get back to basics, and emphasize the conservative roots of the Republican Party. You could say that Rush Limbaugh represents that approach.

The other approach is the "reach out" strategy. The Republican Party is excessively male and white, on this view, and can only expect to get back into power if it reaches out to minorities and women. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell seems to be eager to own this approach.

Conservatives like Limbaugh have been less than polite to Powell for his "reach out" views, especially since Powell publicly backed Barack Obama for president in the fall of 2008. Rush has said that Powell had essentially left the party by backing Obama. Former Vice-President Cheney has publicly agreed with Rush.

Now Colin Powell has used the Sunday talk show Face The Nation to reply to Limbaugh and Cheney. And he's gathered support from former Governor Tom Ridge (R-PA).

“I think Rush articulates his point of view in ways that offend very many,” Ridge said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Even Newt Gingrich got in on the action:

"I don't want to pick a fight with Dick Cheney, but the fact is, the Republican party has to be a broad party that appeals across the country,"

All this is good clean fun, but it rather misses the point. If the American people really want a social democratic state like Europe, then there is no need for the Republican Party. The US has a welfare-state party and that party is the Democratic Party. They do welfare-state politics much better than the Republicans Party.

In 2008 Candidate Obama ran on the ancient platform of "Time for a Change" and he won. He talked optimistically about healing the sick and lowering the oceans, but didn't talk too much about the costs of his change.

If, after four or eight years, President Obama's health care reform and his cap-and-trade plans are a roaring success, then it will truly be time for the Republican Party to reinvent itself.

But if American women revolt against massive changes in their health care, and if President Obama's policies create an energy shortage, and if taxes go up all round, then Republicans might suddenly find themselves the majority party again without lifting a finger.

A look at the experience of the Conservative Party in Britain is helpful. In 1997, Tony Blair was elected in a massive landslide and promised to make over the British National Health Service and the state education system. The British people were entranced, and for three successive elections wouldn't pay any attention to the Tories.

Finally, after the third election loss, David Cameron moved to the center to show that the Tories weren't the nasty party and that they were ready to be modern and green. Real conservatives hated his tactic and the media loved it.

But now people are moving to the Conservative Party not because it is modern and green, but because the Labour Government under Blair and Brown has wrecked the economy. They've pumped hundreds of billions into health care and education, and nothing much has changed.

There's a simple lesson here. The center-left parties tend to overspend and run out of money. They do this because they see the economy as a source of funds for their government programs. Center-right parties tend to see the government sector as a place to spend money if the economy is in good shape.

When the center-left party runs out of money, then the center-right party gets a chance to come in and fix the mess.

The moral of the story? Don't Panic.

Sure, there's a place in the Republican Party for moderates, especially in the North East. But if the Republican Party stands for anything it must stand for reform of the welfare state. The question is: how to reform and how to present the reform to the American people.

Anyone who can figure that out is a genius and should go immediately to the head of the class.