Those Liberal Feelings

It's liberal feelings versus conservative values. That's the mantra you hear from a number of conservatives these days. Conservatives are steadfast and true, with their lives founded on timeless rational values. Liberals are skittering all over the lot, depending on what they feel today.

But I disagree. It is liberals that are guided by disengaged reason, proposing relentlessly rational schemes for the bureaucratizing of everything into a comprehensive universal set of rules.

It is conservatives that believe in life and love, mothers and babies, fidelity and families. What could be more emotional than that?

The truth is, of course, that humans operate at many levels; that is our magic. We are instinctive, we are emotional, we are rational.

The point of conservatism is grounding. We believe in embodied reason. We believe in the one and only fleshly life that we are given, and we experience ourselves as connected in a web of responsibility between the dead ancestors and the generations yet unborn. We feel the tug of the past and also of the future.

That is why conservatives cannot get away from the burr under the modern saddle, abortion. For abortion cuts the cord between the generations. It privileges the adolescent present, the whims of the moment against the claims of eternity.

In the modern world of disengaged reason people have come to believe in the metaphor rather than the reality. Our liberal friends believe in the generation of creativity rather than creating a new generation. They seek immortality in creative work of originality, rather than in the creation of children to carry their genes into the future.

Well, nature takes care of things like that. If you don't have children you won't have immortality, not unless you are Einstein. The way things are going, there won't be any liberals by 2100. Just as there won't be any Europeans.

Liberals may be driven by feelings, but their feelings are curiously disengaged, learned responses to the world taught to them by their government teachers and government university professors. These learned feelings teach them to honor the principle of rational government control, that whenever you have a feeling, it should lead to a government program.

As for me, I don't get it. I don't understand how anyone could live in that kind of a culture without going mad.

I say: Give me the life I am given, and the glorious divine madness that is conservatism.

And to heck with liberal rational control and its mindless rational government programs!

Rationing Smashioning

The New York Times is hauling out bioethicist Peter Singer this weekend to sing the praises of rationing, according to NRO.

Not that Obamacare has anything to do with rationing. Oh no. President Obama has specifically told the nation's governors not to talk about it.

Come on. Mr. President. We weren't born yesterday. We understand that underneath the massive pushing and shoving on your health care plan is a direct route to rationing.

If you have a government program that gives out goodies then you have to have rationing.

All resources in this world must be rationed. The most just method is to ration goods using the price system. In this system the poor get less than the rich. That's unfair, of course, so many people try to help the poor out with charity.

There are other ways of rationing. You can force everyone to stand in line for resources on a first-come first-served basis. Everyone pays for resources at work and then stands in line for them. Problem is, as the Soviet Union showed, you get less of every kind of resource. Where's the justice in that?

Of course there's a third method. The government can sequester all resources and give them out as a reward for political loyalty. That seems to be the method preferred by the Obama administration. That is, if the stimulus plan is any guide to its political philosophy.

But which is the most just? It's a good question. It depends whether you are rich or poor, or, like Peter Singer, an academic that gets paid for thinking up bioethical policies for government programs.

The War on the Poor

Radical thinker Ivan Illich called it the "war on subsistence." He looked on both liberal programs and conservative industrialization as a deliberate effort to obliterate traditional ways of living.

You can see the process working in the descriptions of Third World education in The Beautiful Tree by James Tooley. The west comes into a Third World country with money and expertise and gets the government to implement a universal, compulsory education system. But it doesn't work. The newly middle-class teachers don't give a damn about the poor, who they regard as ignorant and uninterested in education. And the government just uses the western money to build a patronage system.

But in the Third World it turns out that the poor do want education. They want it so much that they turn away from the "free" government system and spend their own money on school fees at below-the-radar private schools.

The schools that they patronize are, of course, by middle-class standards, dirty and inadequate. There are often no bathrooms for the children, and no playground. And as for computers, forget it. But the schools, operating on a shoe-string, almost equal middle-class private schools in academic performance, at least according to James Tooley's research.

This is not the first time that the poor have been shafted like this. Ever since the middle of the 19th century the middle class have been on a mission to clean up "slums." The middle class hates the ramshackle housing that the poor build in the industrial cities. The slums operate outside the rules and the proper planning and land-use laws. For one thing, there is a lack of basic sanitation, water, sewage, and garbage, darling.

But the poor build and live in the slums for a simple reason. They are cheap. An immigrant to the city can get a job in the city and live cheaply in the only way that he can afford. Unless she is to become a government benefit recipient.

The welfare state model insists that everyone live and work at a middle-class standard. Middle-class rules for houses. Middle-class rules for education. Middle-class rules for health care.

But when you insist on middle-class rules you force the poor to become dependents. Because the poor can't afford to live by middle-class rules. Not if they want to live in proud independence.

This is the great challenge for conservatives. If we want to replace the welfare state with something better we have to figure out how to let the poor live in proud independence. Can that be squared with basic decency in the life of the poor?

The way that the modern poor live is by camping out in industrial society, living in old dilapidated housing, working in the informal economy, cadging health care where it's free or nearly free. The standard response to this by progressive people has been outrage. How can we allow the poor to suffer so? But it is clear that the progressive response, to dish out benefits controlled and organized by the middle class, has turned the working poor into the underclass, has destroyed the lower-class family, and has turned the progressive class into a corrupt political elite.

There's gotta be a better way. And it's up to conservatives to find it.

Palin Puts Down a Marker

In the Wall Street Journal liberal columnist Thomas Frank is sneering at Sarah Palin's victim strategy--as if the Clintons didn't take it to the bank in the 1990s and in 2008.

But meanwhile Sarah Palin has emerged from resigning as Alaska Governor with an op-ed in the Washington Post. You could say that this action says, as clearly as possible: I'm still in the game!

Now if you were a politician aspiring to bigger things, to the leadership of your party and even the presidency, what would you do first? You don't yet have a full-strength organization staffed up with policy experts. But you are expert in certain issue areas.

It's a no-brainer. You write an op-ed attacking the president's energy policy. It allows you to play to your strength, as a practical reformer from an energy state. And it allows you to attack the president's big-tax, big-government policy.

So that's what Sarah Palin did. She wrote an article which demonstrated her competence in energy policy. And she got off a zinger to rile up the troops.

The ironic beauty in this plan? Soon, even the most ardent liberal will understand supply-side economics.

Nothing like a little red meat for the base. But it will probably be a constant theme in Palin's rhetoric. For our liberal friends running the Obama administration have shown that as far as they are concerned the supply-side notion, that marginal tax-rates are important, is nothing but "voodoo economics."

But really, Sarah Palin is right. The only way that liberals will come to believe in supply-side economics is the day that it hits them upside the head.

Palin is also right to follow the Reagan strategy. In the years after the 1976 election Reagan cranked out endless radio commentaries and traveled the nation speaking to Republicans. With her first op-ed, it is clear that she has a similar strategy in mind.

Will it do the trick? Who knows. But one thing going for her is that the relentless scorn from our liberal friends will play well with moderate women around election time.

The Great Socialism Bubble: Empty the Safe

We've been talking a lot about debt bubbles and bankers these days, so my mind naturally turned to another great bubble, the grand-daddy of them all, which right now is in its final phase. I am talking about the Great Socialism Bubble.

All bubbles begin with a plausible notion. Dozens of business startups issue wildly optimistic prospectuses. In the case of socialism, there were two major prospectuses. There was the Communist Manifesto from Marx and Engels. This advertised the brilliant vision of the revolutionary business model. Then there was the Essays in Fabian Socialism by the Fabian Society. This gave us the vision of the administrative business model, a glorious future of justice, prosperity, and happiness based on "rational, factual, socialist argument."

In due course socialism did its IPOs, the most successful ones coming in 1917 and 1949. The US had its own IPO in 1965, and the Brits had one in 1945. It looked like the future was so bright we'd have to wear shades.

But then the whole thing hit a road bump in 1989 when the US won the cold war and communism collapsed in eastern Europe in 1989. But socialism wasn't done yet. With the help of two promotional geniuses it jumped the shark.

Yes. Socialism was completely out of ideas, for the administrative state is no way to provide human society with justice, prosperity, and happiness. But with spin artists like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and easy money, it could still put on a heck of a show.

But you can only keep up an illusion for a while, and that illusion has now been shattered. Now we have entered the empty-the-safe or bankers' bonus phase. This is the moment in the caper movie when the con-men clean out the last few wads of cash in the office safe and head out of town in their fast cars or their executive jets and leave us with the mess.

This is what Barack Obama is doing with his jam-down stimulus bill, his jam-down cap-and-trade bill, and his health reform bill. The game is up at the Bank of Socialism, but there is still some money left in the safe and the Democrats are handing it out to their faithful supporters in the pre-down hours before the G-men appear and close down the bank.

But the American people sense at last that something fishy is going on and they are holding Tea Parties, knowing instinctively that a profound change in national politics is coming. They understand that it needs a new beginning at the grass roots, and so they are beginning a new politics at the grass roots.

Why not? It's the American way.

Conservative NextGen Thinkers

Writing in the Boston Globe Drake Bennett introduces four young conservative writers and thinkers.

There's Luigi Zingales, an economics professor at the University of Chicago. He's written recently about the importance of the difference between helping business and helping the market. Business, you could say, is a special interest, and conservatives should fall out of love with business and back in love with the market.

In an argument that’s begun to catch the ear of a few conservative thinkers, Zingales suggests that it’s often business itself, rather than the government, that the market needs protection from.

Actually, I thought that conservatives have been saying this for decades. But it's a theme that needs to be constantly renewed, because business, for all its reputation as a powerful force, clearly sucks up to government. Ande it has to, because government has the power to destroy it--unless we take that power away.

Then there's L Bradford Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia. He's been working to put an empirical basis under the conservative faith in family values. Recent research is pretty clear:

Children not raised by their married mother and father are more likely to drop out of high school, be depressed, and even commit suicide. Boys from broken homes are more likely to end up in jail; and girls more likely to be teen mothers.

Wilcox is working on reminding us that there are two important factors that help break up the family: divorce and single parenthood.

He argues that it is counterproductive to insist, as many liberals have, that all types of families are equally good for kids. Overwhelmingly, he points out, it is poor and working-class families who are grappling with the effects of divorce and single parenthood.

Lower class Americans struggling with fractured families deliver increased inequality, something that liberals say they care about.

Megan McArdle is an editor and blogger at The Atlantic. Her blogging provides a kind of nodal point, a conversation centered around libertarian conservative ideas, and provides a go-to place for people with like interests.

Finally, there's Reihan Salam, a fellow at New America Foundation. He wrote Grand New Party back in 2003 with Ross Douthat, and he's a big-government conservative.

In [Grand New Party, Salam and Douthat] return again and again to the issue of how a modern Republican party could strategically embrace government, allaying the economic anxieties of important white working-class voters without fostering a culture of government dependence and waste.

All this is encouraging. But let us not forget the importance of foundations. Take the powerful ideas of Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. He argues for what I call "the Greater Separation of Powers." This notion starts with the idea that just as government has its three branches, legislative, executive, and judicial; society has three sectors, political, economic, and moral/cultural.

The idea of the Greater Separation of Powers is that the three sectors of society, political, economic, and moral/cultural, should be separate and coequal. They should be independent, and each should be a strong critic of the other two sectors.

In other words, the economic sector and the moral/cultural sector should each have a lot to say about the power of the political sector and how it should be limited in the economic sphere and the moral/cultural sphere.

Meanwhile the political sector should be jealous of overweening power from business and economic interests, and also excessive militance in the moral/cultural sector.

What everyone should guard against is two sectors ganging up on the other sector--i.e., when religious leaders get too close to politics, either left-wing or right-wing.

There's nothing quite like solid first principles to help nurture good political and social thought. That goes for young conservative thinkers and older ones too.

The Banality of Meanness

In his biography of Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton remarks on the question of evil. It is not the big evil in ourselves that we must fear, he reminds us. Most of us are not tempted by that. But there is something more prosaic that we all fall into.

Meanness.

We saw that a week ago when Alaska Governor Sarah Palin resigned from her office. The mean brigade was out at once, led by the queen of sophisticated mean, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times.

Later in the week Ann Coulter made fun of the liberal pile on. She burlesqued the delight that liberals expressed in never having to watch Sarah Palin again. And if she were to get a TV show, why then they would certainly never watch her dreadful, awful show. Palin was so over.

Well, no doubt they wouldn't, except maybe to check in and assure themselves how awful the Palin show was.

But one thing we learn from the Sarah Palin phenomenon is just how mean our liberal friends have become.

There's a lesson to learn from it, of course. It is that you can't do without a sense of right and wrong, good and bad, and you can't do without a code of manners.

One of the uses of manners is that it helps you from making a fool of yourself in the presence of your political foes. Once you decide that manners are old-fashioned and stupid, why then you have set yourself up for all kinds of vices from petty to mortal.

And one of the things that you license yourself to do is to be mean.

You also license yourself to be careless. That comes from the confidence you have from not needing to watch yourself. You stop thinking about how you might appear to others; you just bore ahead with your political enthusiasm.

That's what the Obama administration is doing. It's not thinking. It's not thinking about how it appears to the American people. Some people might be offended by the huge party the Democrats gave themselves in the stimulus package. Some people might wonder about the prudence of an energy tax and expensive subsidies taking effect right in the middle of a wrenching recession. Some people might wonder about a huge upset to the US health-care system in the middle of a recession just to take care of 10 million people that have chosen not to get health insurance.

Some people might think it is mean to take such risks with the prosperity of the American people.

But the thing about being a liberal is that you don't have to look over your shoulder. You know that liberals are the most evolved and the most ethical Americans, and you know that the compulsion of government health care and high energy prices is worth it. It's about equal access to health care, after all, and about saving the planet.

Mean? Not if you are a liberal.