Look on the Bright Side

It's time to remember the advice of Marine Lt. Gen. "Chesty" Puller. At the Battle of Chosun Reservoir during the Korean War, Puller famously rallied his men with the following words:

We've been looking for the enemy for some time now. We've finally found him. We're surrounded. That simplifies things.

That's where conservatives are today. Let us count the ways.

There are no pro-life Democrats. Not when it counts. Oh there are quite a few Democrats who like to run as pro-life. But when the chips are down and Speaker Pelosi and President Obama are twisting your arm, why then you go with the program.

There are no moderate Democats. Not when it counts. Oh there are quite a few Democrats who would vote the moderate line if it didn't cost them anything. But when the chips are down and Speaker Pelosi... Well, see above.

The Upchuck Factor. I've written about this already. When Democrats are in opposition they talk a good line about transparency and bipartisanship and apple pie. They even invoke Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness when they are cramming Big Government down our throats. But when the American people see the Democrats in full big government cram-down mode, they want to hurl.

End of the "Social Liberal" Divide. All those people that declare themselves to be economically conservative and social liberal have just experienced a nasty shock. It was nice to be socially liberal when tax rates were low and the livin' was easy. But now all that snobbery about the Religious Right doesn't matter any more. We are all conservatives now.

Reckless Overreach. The Dems thought they could do a forced march to the Promised Land of total government takeover, what with a 60 Dem Senate. But it looks like the old proverb still holds, and it's not a good idea to get what you most desire. The spectacle of corruption and insider dealing uber-partisanship has revolted a whole generation of independents.

The Ryan Express. Opposition is good for a political party. It cleans out the starting line-up and creates space for new stars to emerge. I am thinking of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who has emerged as a voice of common-sense conservatism on the healthcare issue. Why, he's even got an op-ed in The New York Times today.

I could go on. But this is just a blog entry.

Give David Brooks a Break

Over the last few weeks conservatives have been taking it out on David Brooks, the quota conservative columnist at The New York Times.

People have particularly sneered at his piece, "The Wal-Mart Hippies," comparing the Tea Party movement to the New Left of the 1960s. Jonah Goldberg sneered at Brooks here and here.

But this is missing the point. David Brooks is a conservative writing for The new York Times. He's not going to talk to NYT readers the same way he would talk to conservatives.

When you have a gig like Brooks', as the sole conservative in a liberal paper, you have a choice. You can be like Al Hunt, who used to be the sole liberal writing op-eds at The Wall Street Journal. Al used to give Journal readers, week after week, the liberal line. It was useful, because it's helpful to get the liberal line laid out in a 800 word op-ed. But it didn't persuade.

Another approach is the line of Thomas Frank, the current sole liberal op-ed columnist at the Journal. Frank is the author of Whatever Happened to Kansas? in which he wonders why the working stiffs of Kansas are all voting for conservatives against their economic interest. Thomas has chosen to poke Journal readers in the eye. Almost all of his columns are insulting to conservatives, like this one.

But David Brooks has chosen a different approach to NYT readers, so much so that he infuriates conservatives who find that their liberal friends are sending them his columns in the spirit of: See? Here's what a reasonable conservative thinks! Why can't you all be like Brooks?

But I think Brooks is playing a deeper game. He wants to persuade the NYT readers that conservatives really aren't so bad after all. So he writes sympathetically. Do NYT readers sneer at the Tea Party movement? Brooks compares the movement to a movement that his readers know and love, the left-wing movements of the 1960s. Then there's his "educated class" article where he gently informed his educated class readers that they were sitting on top of a land-mine, that average Americans didn't like their rational, technocratic government, and didn't think it represented their interest.

Here's the point. Brooks may actually persuade some of his readers that they have a problem. Isn't that more effective that just parroting the party line or sticking people in the eye?

Dick Morris: In Defeat, Defiance

Old Clinton hand Dick Morris (with Eileen McGann) has exactly my approach to ObamaCare.

He proposes the Churchillian response: In Defeat, Defiance!

That's all very well, of course, but what does he actually propose?

A Four Point Plan, of course, Here it is:

1. Restore the Medicare cuts
2. Defeat the Democrats in 2010
3. Defund the appropriations
4. Repeal the plan

But we must learn the lesson of the process we have been through.

[T]here is no such thing as a conservative or moderate Democrat. Blue dogs don't exist in real life. Only yellow dogs...

The days when there were Democrats who refused to follow their radical left-wing party line are over...

There are only two kinds of congressmen or senators: Democrats and Republicans. We have had a national education, and it's time to learn from it...

The Democratic victory on Obamacare will prove the most expensive in the party's history. It will lead to the eradication of their majority, the defeat of more than 50 of their congressmen, the switch of Senate control and Republican domination for decades.

Well. That's the kind of stuff we need after a stunning defeat. Stirring words. A glorious vision. All it lacks is the logistics and the training and the marching and the decisive battles in November 2010 and 2012.

Not to mention Jesse Unruh's famous dictum: "Money is the mother's milk of politics."

Evolution and the Administrative State

Have you noticed? In the United States we have a political party that champions science, evolution, relativistic social mores, especially where sex rears its head--and it also champions the rigid one-size-fits-all administrative state.

The other party champions religion, fixed social mores, especially in sexual relations--and it also favors the flexible, evolutionary system of free enterprise and voluntary association.

Interesting, innit?

Our Democratic friends are champions of Darwinian evolution. But they draw the line strongly at Social Darwinism and Herbert Spencer, who opposed state aid to the poor and public education and extended the idea of natural selection to "social selection." Susan Jacoby, in Freethinkers, knows that respectable evolution stops precisely at Spencer, called by Richard Hofstadter, "the metaphysician of the homemade intellectual and the prophet of the cracker-barrel agnostic." Which means, presumably: Don't read him!

Republicans like to dabble in the murky waters of Intelligent Design, yet they support the ruthless evolutionary process of capitalism and the "creative destruction" of once proud industries. Yet they also believe in charity and giving.

In the months and years ahead, as the culture war expands in the aftermath of ObamaCare, it will be well to understand and map out the curious contradictions of this ideological landscape.

The postmodernists would say it is all about power, and they are probably right. But we must be alive to other possibilities.

In the great political conflict that lies before us, the most important thing to start with is a good map, to know the lay of the land and the roads upon it. The second thing is good intelligence about the enemy.

Why are Democrats so big on evolution? Is it just because it is a way to stick the dagger into organized religion? Or is there something else we need to understand?

Why are Democrats so big on the administrative welfare state? Is it just because of the power that it gives to the educated class? Or is there something else we need to know?

These are the questions we must start with as we work to mobilize the American people into a great movement of rejection.

The corrupt, cruel, unjust, wasteful and deluded administrative state shall not stand. The United States was not founded to deliver the American people into the hands of an administrative state that combines the worst features of feudalism and absolute monarchy.

On Sunday, Nancy Pelosi had to chutzpah to tie her rigid administrative health care plan to the great American vision of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We now pledge ourselves to the proposition that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is, in fact, something very different, that the American people long for something different and that, in the end, the American people will get what they want, whatever the liberal elite may think.

Think of the horrible social Darwinism of the 19th century. Despite what you have been told it experienced a dramatic turn in mortality. Before the Industrial Revolution, Gregory Clark writes in A Farewell to Alms, there was downward mobility in Britain, as fewer of the poor survived and the children of the rich slid downwards on the backs of the middle class and the children of the middle class slid downwards on the backs of the poor. But starting in about 1800, Britain experienced upward mobility, as more and more of the poor survived and moved up the social scale.

That's interesting. In the ruthless economy of the early industrial revolution the Malthusian/Darwinian system actually reversed. In the social evolutionary system of industrial creative destruction the poor thrived and prospered.

And that was way before the rosy-fingered dawn of the administrative welfare state.

As the liberal college professor said: More research is needed.

Because maybe the social Darwinism of the market economy actually favors the survival and the prosperity of the poor. Even if liberals know it isn't so.

The Myth of the Moderate Democrat

Despite the sting of defeat, we move today into a new world, for the winds of "change" have cleared away the fog of war.

We know that when you send a Democrat to Congress you are sending that Democrat to expand government.

Never mind what the Democrat says, what sweet words he utters about family and the will of the people. Never mind if he really believes that stuff.

When push comes to shove, as we certainly understand from the shenanigans of ObamaCare, Democrats will fall behind the liberal leaders and vote the party line. The fact that some of them will vote against a party line vote like the vote in the House on Sunday just goes to prove the rule.

Just from the needs of practical politics you want to minimize the damage. You want to let as many Democrats in conservative districts vote with their constituents as possible. But one way or another, the arms have to be twisted to make the result come out right. The conservative Democrat you send to Washington is still a supporter of liberal measures, is still a vote for big government.

Now the fight goes on, and if you need something to give you heart, read Newt's screed this morning: "This Will Not Stand:"

The Obama-Pelosi-Reid machine combined the radicalism of Alinsky, the corruption of Springfield and the machine power politics of Chicago.

Sunday was a pressured, bought, intimidated vote worthy of Hugo Chavez but unworthy of the United States of America...

The ruthlessness and inhumanity of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid machine was most clearly on display in their public humiliation of Stupak.

The real principles of the machine were articulated by Democratic Congressman Alcee Hastings who was impeached and removed from the bench as a federal judge, before being elected to the House when he said ""There ain't no rules here, we're trying to accomplish something. . . .All this talk about rules. . . .When the deal goes down . . . we make 'em up as we go along."

Thank you for making this so clear Mr. Hastings. For you, it's all about the power.

But, as one of the French leftist radicals in the revolutionary movement of 1968 that removed President de Gaulle from office came to realize, the great value of bourgeois democracy is the rules, the list of things that people agree not to do, the limits on the power of the powerful.

Ever since Marx in the 19th century the left has clearly flagged that it doesn't believe in no stinkin' rules. iTS philosophy has been a philosophy of power, because, it argues, the rules of the middle-class state are a fraud, an apology for middle-class power that oppress the working class and the poor.

There is at least a grain of truth in this. The poor and the working class are peculiarly vulnerable to the power of the market because they have so little to offer in the great exchange.

But the middle-class state offers the protection of its rules to everyone. It limits power so that the powerful are constrained. When the power of the powerful is limited then the poor are protected just as much as the middle class. Perhaps more.

What we have seen over the last months is the power of the powerful in league against the people. The ruling Democrats cut deals with the powerful so that they could get their legislation through. They did deals with insurance companies and drug companies to buy their support.

That is always the way of politics. It always ends up being a conspiracy of the powerful against the people. The only way to avoid it is by keeping the government small so that the people can be large.

Now we shall see if the American people will really rally to Newt's banner and insist that the Democrats' power play "shall not stand."

But that is what politics is all about.

Non-liberal Socialization

Liberals want to socialize everyone the same: boys and girls, rich and poor, educated and uneducated.

They want this because they want to rule us using the administrative method, and they want all our social institutions to be modeled after the hierarchical bureaucracy.

With the bureaucratic model every person is an interchangeable cog in the machine. You need uniform people, uniformly socialized, to live in that society.

And let it be said: liberals think that this uniform socialization is the very best thing in the world, the very acme of equality, evolution and justice.

But, as Dennis Prager writes, when the government gets bigger, the people get smaller.

Among the things left and right, religious and secular, agree on is that one of the few real needs human beings have is to be needed.

When we are not needed, life feels pointless.

The way that men feel needed is through their work. The way that women feel needed is through their love.

Many women feel particularly alive when needed by their young children; many men feel worthy when needed by their family and/or their work.

This begins in childhood.

Give a boy a special task -- just about any task -- and he blossoms. Give a girl a person -- in fact, almost any living being -- who depends on her, and she blossoms.

Notice that in the world of bureaucratic administration there is no special. And there is no person to look after. There are only the rules, and the administrator or the clerk must always act according to the rules.

There is an exception to this: the power politician, who may do as he pleases.

Prager goes on to talk about how government shreds people of their sense of importance. "The more the state does, the less its citizens are needed to do."

Everything is set up in the liberal administrative state to strip people of their importance and to create uniformity. We conservatives must understand that every uniform administrative structure is an enemy of freedom and a life of meaning. Because to a cog in the bureaucratic machine, everything is pointless.

There was a time when progressive people indicted the commercial-industrial capitalist economy for this. Mines, textile mills, and factories were accused of making people into automatons, to be thrown away when exhausted. Today these same people complain more about the sameness and uniformity of consumer goods and less about the factories. That's probably because there is less backbreaking assembly-line labor today as the manufacturing sector has automated and freed up workers for less arduous work. So the critics must find new things to criticize.

In the new world of the internet, why do we need uniform, soul-destroying schools that make children think that life is pointless? Why do we need uniform, soul-destroying government health systems? Why do we need uniform, soul-destroying government welfare systems that make lower-income men think that life is pointless?

There's an agenda here for conservatives. It is our job to resocialize America away from the uniform, administrative, bureaucratic method. And show Americans that there can be a world in which everyone is needed.

We Should Thank the Democrats

The editors at National Review put out a defiant challenge to Democrats today, telling them that passing ObamaCare is just the beginning.

Are they right? Or just blowing smoke at the Democrats?

For now, they are just blowing smoke. Just like the Democrats who are saying that it's a done deal and ObamaCare will pass and the people like it, they really like it.

I've written that ObamaCare is a shame and it will hurt the American people. So I think that the best thing is for ObamaCare to lose and never get into the statute books.

But the partisan in me thanks the Democrats every day for provoking what may the the Clausewitzian "decisive battle" on the welfare state.

Although we have seen major advances in the power of the welfare state in the 1930s and the 1960s when Democrats had big majorities in Congress, the fact is that it has also advanced year by year with micro-advances that have been difficult to oppose. One more government program for education, or for child health care or for green jobs doesn't seem like much, and it is hard to say: No.

It's like seducing a woman. If you gently, kindly work on her, a baby step at a time, you will eventually succeed. Because almost all women believe in love, and cannot resist the idea that someone loves them. The only happiness in life, wrote Georges Sand the French woman writer, is to love and be loved.

But the Obama Democrats have rejected the arts of seduction for the peremptory command to lie back and think of England. And that sort of treatment women resent.

So there's a good chance that the ObamaCare campaign could result in a great reverse for the welfare state, as the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk marked the turn of the tide for Nazi expansion.

It could prove a high-water mark for the administrative Bismarkian state.

We conservatives believe that social programs should be truly social. They should not be bureaucratic programs backed up by government force. They should be part of a great organic whole of give and take, sharing and caring, giving and receiving, of humans as social animals. The US was well on the way to implementing such a system in the late 19th century. But then came the Progressives (grandfathers of our liberals) and their faith in the administrative state. They smashed the growing array of sociable associations in which people obtained safety, security, and fellow feeling, and replaced them with uncaring government programs.

So a monumental failure by ObamaCare, either by withdrawal of the current package or by repeal in a year or two, would open the public square to alternatives.

And then we could all start over, and get to work on a system of social arrangements that was truly social, truly just, and truly worthy of the United States of America.