Crossing a Line

Ever since ObamaCare passed last week I have had the feeling that the Democrats have crossed a line.

You can do the normal comparison: suppose a Republican president had done that?

Suppose a Republican president had pushed an unpopular bill through the Congress on a strict partisan vote with a bare majority of his own party in favor and a bipartisan minority opposing? Suppose the president had used questionable arguments in his speeches: that despite enlarging the scope of government, things would stay the same for most Americans and overall cost less per person? Suppose that angry Democrats had got up at the town halls of Republican congressmen and been summarily removed by the cops? Suppose a Democrat had been elected senator from Utah in the middle of all this on a platform to be the vote to stop it? And suppose after it passed the Republican president piled on with partisan rhetoric, such as President Obama has used, accusing Republicans of aining to oppose his plan from the beginning?

Yeah. The rage on the left would be deafening. And if that weren't enough, it would be strongly amplified by the mainstream media. After all, think of the stink the left made over the Iraq War, for which President Bush received a bi-partisan majority.

There is a feeling of impotence here, a feeling of helplessness. It's a familiar feeling. It seems that it's ok for the left to break the rules, but woe-betide the conservative who even thinks about it.

Shelby Steele has a good line on all this in his article "Obama the Good."

Of the two great societal goals—freedom and "the good"—freedom requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good, limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today's liberalism is focused on "the good" more than on freedom. And ideas of "the good" are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering. The great political advantage of modern liberalism is its offer of license on the one hand and moral innocence—if not superiority—on the other. Liberalism lets you force people to buy health insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence at the same time.

When you present the political divide this way, the necessary conservative strategy falls out naturally.

Conservatives must delegitimize the use of force to achieve "the good." It really isn't too hard to figure out. If you use force to achieve the good what you get isn't good, it's just force. That's why all the big-government programs from mandatory health care to mandatory education to government welfare always fail. Force is force. It isn't good. It isn't just. It isn't equality. The only legitimate use of force is to defeat force.

The great enlightening experience of the last 500 years is that you don't need force to keep society functioning in the day-to-day business of making a living. You can trust "the market," properly reinforced to penalize cheating, to deliver material goods in abundance. Thus you can leave moral questions to the moral/cultural sector and the social instincts of love and hate, guilt and shame, the velvet glove of moral suasion rather than the mailed fist of government power. The political sector can thus concentrate on real threats of force from enemies foreign and domestic, rather than on the chimera of the evil corporation, which threatens non-one.

Government is force. Politics is power. All the rest is "narrative." Let that be the conservative cry.

The March of the Subsidy State

Politics is a business of command and control. You spread your net of political control as far as you can; your purpose is to control an unruly world and unjust world.

Unfortunately, the world won't be controlled. So the dance of control ends in a death spiral, a frantic attempt to control everything that succeeds in commanding nothing.

That's what we see in every area of government activity. Today, President Obama is signing the health bill amendments; it includes the federalization of student loans, a long-time goal of Congressional liberals. No longer will the banks source student loans. Now the Department of Education will do it. There will be billions in "savings," we are told.

Thus does the Subsidy State march onwards, as the Wall Street Journal explains.

The story begins in another progressive heyday, 1965, when the federal government launched a program to make college "affordable" by offering a taxpayer guarantee on student loans. College has if anything become even less affordable since, as the subsidies have merely driven up the prices that colleges charge.

Now the government has taken the student loan program over completely. It won't make college any cheaper. And it will ratchet up the costs for the ordinary taxpayer.

Subsidy is a cruel policy. It takes a free and voluntary activity and subjects it to the rules and power plays of politics and special interests.

There was a time when children went to school for a couple of years while they learned their letters and their numbers. Parents paid for schooling, even poor people. Then children went to work.

Now we force children to school for twelve years, and when they are done, in many cases, they need to learn to read and write.

Yet everyone agrees that education is so expensive that we need the government to provide it.

Not so. Without the subsidies, people would sent their children to inexpensive neighborhood schools run buy the neighborhood women. Then most ordinary children would begin internships or apprenticeships, or maybe just work. They would develop a network of work and life contacts that would serve them for the rest of their lives.

Rich bitches, of course, would still go to college prep schools and go on to selective schools where they would meet the selective people with which they would network for the rest of their lives.

Some day we are going to have to unwind this cruel system of subsidy and "free" services that we call the welfare or entitlement state. Yet with every addition and accretion that our Democratic friends make to this monstrosity, the price of reform, and the size of the eventual disaster ratchets up another notch.

The tragedy is that it will be the poor that suffer most. They already do, with the annihilation of the low-income family and the utter failure of inner-city schools.

But who cares about that when there are millions of votes to win and trillions of dollars to spend?

Shoot the Messenger

The day after ObamaCare passed, big corporations started reporting the impact on their balance sheets or, if you prefer, their profits.

And day after that Democratic committee chairmen announced that the CEOs of the big corporations would be hauled up before Congress to do some 'splaining. Naturally, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) was first out of the gate.

It really does make the point better than any conservative blow-hard or politician.

Government is force. Politics is power.

How dare, how dare the big corporations have the nerve to announce that Obamacare is going to cost them, big time.

Of course there's a Catch 22 involved. The CEOs are criminally liable if they don't immediately report material information like ObamaCare. But the big bullies in Congress will still harass them for messing with their narrative.

Naturally, Congress isn't content merely to bully the CEOs in prime time. Writes Byron York:

Waxman is also demanding that the executives give lawmakers internal company documents related to health care finances -- a move one committee Republican describes as "an attempt to intimidate and silence opponents of the Democrats' flawed health care reform legislation."

And the CEOs can't fight back because Congress regulates them. A big corporation just can't afford to anger the powerful folks in Congress.

Yet there are people who worry about corporate power. We can't have corporations swinging big bucks around to influence elections, they opine.

To which I always reply: who is giving money to whom? Who is bullying whom? Who is doing the cringing? Who is collecting money to be spent by others on buying votes.

The myth of the monster corporations, endlessly retailed by our lefty friends, is the biggest crock since Marx and his labor theory of value. Corporations do not bestride the world like colossi. They are cringing babies, currying favor with political bullies, and wheedling for subsidies and handouts.

And politicians love it. They can bully the corporations when they feel like it. They can hit them up for contributions. They can ride in their executive jets. They can milk them for tax money. And they can fool the voters into believing that, all along, they are fighting for the people against the powerful.

What's not to like, if you are a politician?

What's not to like is that, every now and again, the corporations blind-side you with the facts on what the politicians are doing to the economy.

But not to worry. Just haul the corporations up to a committee meeting and tell them they are rip-off artists. The mainstream media will report your abuse of power as a noble act of political courage.

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.