Palin and Polarization

You could tell that most people were a bit embarrassed when Sarah Palin accused President Obama of being too cosy with BP last weekend. Is she crazy? Don't Democrats hate the eevil oil corporations?

But after the White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs patronizingly responded that Palin should "get slightly more informed as to what's going on in and around oil drilling in this country", the spunky Alaskan responded by Twitter.

"Obama is the top recipient of BP PAC & individual money over the past 20 years. Dispute these facts," she wrote, linking to a Politico article citing campaign finance reporting showing more than $3.5 million given to candidates by BP since 1990.

Ouch. Be careful Bob. Palin knows quite a lot about the energy issue.

Earth to Dems: Do not misunderestimate Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin might not yet be up to speed on the arcane details of foreign policy but she is a practical politician that knows how to frame an issue.

But will Palin turn out to be too polarizing to win in 2012? I listened to an east-coast gay tell how he "loathed" Sarah Palin--because of all the usual Democratic talking points, especially gay marriage.

You wonder whether the Democrats have managed to define Sarah Palin as so out of the mainstream to make it very difficult for moderate women to support her.

No doubt Palin would disagree. Her book Going Rogue went to great lengths to present her as a Common Sense Conservative. In her speeches since she has said "common-sense conservative" with practically every other sentence. She is obviously aiming for the center.

The danger for Democrats is that when the moderate women get to know Palin in the middle of 2012 they may discover that she is completely different from the image that Democrats have invented for her.

But still, Palin has a long uphill road to travel. Unlike a certain American politician who, despite a career as a left-liberal, presented himself to the American people in his immaculate conception at the Democratic Convention in 2004 as a healing moderate.

Who knows what will transpire? But we do know this. Sarah Palin sure has a way of putting herself in the middle of everything. She did it with her "death panels" remark on ObamaCare and now she is doing it with the gulf oil spill.

What issue will come next? Taxes? Supreme Court? Public Pensions?

Whatever it is, it will be timed to have the maximum impact.

One minute Nancy Pelosi is trumpeting jobs, jobs, jobs.

The next minute she is telling the Democratic Party's creative artists that "you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care."

Huh? How do those go together?

It all goes back to Marx, writes Bill Kristol. The young Marx wrote that people wouldn't be stuck in a single occupation in the socialist society. Instead they would be able to follow their bliss. The older Marx worked on the excruciating policy analysis economic necessities in Das Kapital.

Then later, along came John Maynard Keynes, who promised a life free from economic necessity and the hag-ridden "pseudo-moral principles" of the last 200 years, but not yet.

This promise of two incompatible things before breakfast reflects the over-under nature of the Democratic Party. On the one hand it is the party of creative elitists who want a life of ease so they can follow their bliss into arcane academic research and the creative arts. But it also represents the ordinary worker who just wants a good paying job.

Conservatives, writes Kristol, want none of this dual delusion.

We conservatives, for our part, reject this as the worst of both worlds: stultifying big government statism on the one hand, and dangerously utopian liberationism on the other...

And we conservatives differ from Keynes in having regard for the bourgeois virtues. We believe those virtues (itself a conservative word, these days) do have a certain worth and dignity—that bourgeois life does not make fair foul and foul fair.

So for conservatives, it’s jobs in the day and tea parties after dinner, with hunting and church and patriotic parades on the weekends. Not to mention a flourishing private sector to provide jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs to all the Pelosi Democrats voted out of office this November.

Amen to that, brother.

It's Really the Liberal Trilemma

Yesterday we introduced the Rodrik Trilemma: How to reconcile democracy, national sovereignty, and global economic cooperation.

But it's not really Rodrik's problem. It's the Liberal Trilemma. We wouldn't have this problem if liberals didn't insist on running everything.

Democracy? Sure, the people should rule, through the rule of the politicians, as explained by Joseph Schumpeter. But the people (or rather the politicians) should not exercise the power to grab all the resources of the nation to distribute to their pals. Or more to the point, the politicians should be wise enough to insist on limited government. Because too much political power will end up destroying society.

National sovereignty? Sure, nations should be a power unto themselves. But they should be careful what they wish for. Absolute national sovereignty is national autarky, where a nation wants for nothing outside its own borders. But you can't have that in practice, nor should you want to. A nation should take its place in the family of nations, jealous of the others for sure, but anxious to lower the level of family argument.

Global economic cooperation and free trade? Sure. As much as you can stomach. It is, after all, only the desire to reward our supporters and flip off other nations that induces us to restrict the free flow of goods and services in this world.

It's not too hard is it? Everything in this world would be better if only liberals weren't messing things up with their Culture of Compulsion.

When liberals abandon their delusive dream of a world of liberals, by liberals and for liberals, then we can get on with the human project.

Right, all we seem to do is clean up liberal messes: the corrupt, cruel, unjust, and wasteful precipitate of liberal delusions.

Solving Dani Rodrik's Trilemma

Huh? Rodrik's Trilemma? What's that all about?

Sorry to be so abrupt, but I only read about it last night in this article about the Euro crisis. The idea is that you can't have democracy, national sovereignty, and global free trade all at once. Let's let Turkish-born Dani Rodrik tell the story from his own blog.

I have an "impossibility theorem" for the global economy... It says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full.

But then, why would we want to? Of course, on his blog, Dani thinks in terms of bureaucratic arrangements overseen by policy experts. But we are better than that.

So let's recast the problem. Let's call democracy the conflict of the factions. In a pure case, the current civil war in Thailand, you have two political factions, "competing patronage networks, bound together primarily by personal loyalties and emotional attachments," each with about 40 percent of the vote duking it out on the streets.

Let's call national sovereignty the conflict of the nations. In a pure case it is Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia fighting the war of the worlds--for what? Hitler wanted access to Russia's resources.

Let's call global economic integration the conflict of the corporations. In the pure case it is auto or cellphone companies competing for the custom of the global consumers.

Notice what is missing in this? Exactly. We have the political sector, the economic sector, but somehow the moral/cultural sector went missing.

And, of course, the moral/cultural sector has the answer to the problem.

The answer to the trilemma is Don't.

In democracy, don't try to establish a vast tribal patronage faction that imagines that it obtains economic security with a culture of compulsion featuring tax and spend and crony capitalism.

In national sovereignty, don't think like Hitler that you have to have military control of resources to be safe. In the modern world all resources are available on the global market. And the real resource that matters is not under the ground but between the ears.

In global economic integration, don't try to run your corporation on the assumption that it has to take over the world in order to be safe. Hey, corporations come and go. People move on. Life goes on.

Of course, the injunction "Don't" is the injunction of all the great Axial Age religions. They all recommend dialing back the conflict and surrendering to the fact that you can't force the world to guarantee your security and your safety.

"In service is perfect freedom:" that's the injunction from Christianity. Don't try to dominate the world. Try to serve the world.

Do that and you won't have a trilemma.

Young Turk Doesn't Get It

Liberal commentator Cenk Uygur doesn't want to hear messenger Lee Harris. He'd rather stick with his liberal faith system. That's my take from Cenk's interview with Harris on The Young Turks. (Cenk is a Turkish American. Get it?)

In his new book The Next Civil War: The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite, Lee Harris fleshes out the commonplace conservative meme that the tea party movement "is only the latest installment of an ongoing cultural war that began long before the current economic crisis. It is a rebellion against a self-appointed intellectual elite" that knows what is best for everyone.

Liberal Cenk wants none of it. But his arguments against Harris are instructive.

First of all, he argues that, while he accepts the Tea Party disillusionment with the bailouts, he also believes that Tea Partiers, while not actually racists, are still protesting the passing of their power. They can no longer pass the same job down to their sons, because there is a pesky Hispanic or black competing for that job.

And the Tea Party rage is misdirected. It's not the liberal elite that's the problem, it's the "establishment" in Wall Street and Washington, insurance companies that want to cut you off for a pre-existing condition, eevil corporations, etc.

Now this, to me, shows a very interesting blindness. It is addressed this very day by Victor Davis Hanson in "The Technocrats' New Clothes." Climategate, the Icelandic volcano, and the Greek meltdown tell us that the all-knowing technocratic elite don't know so much after all, writes Hanson.

So let's go back to Cenk's two arguments. First of all, the only reason that a father could pass a job down to his son was that the liberal elite insisted we had to give monopoly powers to labor unions, and institute "prevailing wage" laws that discriminated in the 1930s against unorganized Negro workers. Anyway, since labor unions in the private sector are almost defunct, except in government protected sectors like autos and government construction, what's the problem, except where powerful liberals get to put their kids into elite universities.

If there is a passing of power, it is that the once-favorite clients of the liberal elite, the white working class, are no longer favorite clients. But the white working class never had much power. The political power then and now resided with the liberal political, educational, and cultural elite.

Secondly, the power of the Wall Street and Washington "establishments" issue directly from the power and size of government. If government weren't so big and powerful, then the Washington establishment wouldn't be so powerful. And if government weren't sluicing so many bonds through Wall Street then the Wall Street establishment wouldn't be so powerful.

Why is government so big and powerful? Because liberals, through their dominance of the day-to-day public square, particularly through news media, through education, and through the TV and movies, want government to be involved in everything from health care to the environment.

When you decide that you want most things decided in the political sector then you create a huge political establishment trying to influence the way that the trillions of dollars are spent. But that establishment is an establishment that the liberal elite wished into being with their big-government political philosophy.

There have been some comments in recent days about the decline of the old WASP establishment. The elevation of Elena Kagan, Jewish American, to the Supreme Court would mean that there are almost no Protestants left on the court, according to Robert Frank. The Protestant establishment has slowly declined away from its once all-powerful domination of politics and culture.

Well yes. But the point is that the WASPs have gracefully allowed new competitors to displace them. They have not used the power of the state to keep the newcomers down. They played by the rules, and the rules moved them out of power.

But what about the liberal elite? First of all, liberals like Cenk Uygur deny that they even constitute an elite. Why would they want to do that? Secondly, when challenged, they fight dirty. You can start with the vilification of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Robert Bork, George W. Bush, Miguel Estrada, and Sarah Palin. You could continue with the bare-knuckle governing methods that rammed the unpopular health bill through Congress.

The great question facing the United States is not that there are populists that have less than pure motives for their populist rage, or that the populist activists are likely to be misled by special interests. Hey, what else is new?

The great question is whether the liberals will go quietly when they are shown the door.

Crime and Society

One thing leads to another. I was reading an article about something or other and saw the name Leon Festinger. He's the chap that developed cognitive dissonance theory.

Cognitive dissonance theory observes that people adjust their beliefs to rationalize their behavior rather than the other way around. But enough of that.

Here's what struck me. Festinger did work on social networks. Quoting Wikipedia:

Festinger explored the various forms that social groups can take and showed, together with Schachter and Back, "how norms are clearer, more firmly held and easier to enforce the more dense a social network is."

Oh really. So that would explain the explosion in crime during the 20th century. The looser that social networks are, and the more people live in the city with few social ties, the less they are likely to conform to social norms.

This is telling us, in case you wondered, that the way to break up society is to make the natural social networks less strong. Then, of course, you have to compensate by increasing the size of government and multiplying the number of laws, and increasing the span of "zero tolerance" and general frightfulness.

And you sit around and decide that, despite your immense education and compassion, there is nothing you can do about crime and social breakdown.

The whole thrust of conservatism, ever since Edmund Burke, is that the key to social tranquility is the "little platoons." People owe their greatest loyalty to the little platoons, and will contribute most to them. Little people, on the other hand, get lost in big organizations. That's why big organizations need to have bureaucracies and rules and enforcement mechanisms.

The trick, of course, in this modern, global age, is to balance the loyalty to the small and the particular with tolerance for and trust in the universal. We want people to be able to learn to trust foreigners and people of different religions and different culture.

Conservatives believe that this is best achieved in a society where government, the agency of force and division, is as small as possible and voluntary association is as large as possible. Conservatives want people to be richly connected in a dense network of social organizations from the family to the church, to the fraternal association and to their place of work.

Liberals, on the other hand, want to free themselves from the local--the family and the church. They want to live like Romantics, creating original works of art in yeasty and exciting urban bohemia. But of course, when you burst out of local community you have to replace it with something, because we all need the support of social institutions. That's why liberals support the welfare state.

And that's why the US is divided into two political camps: the married with children, religious, working population orbiting around the Republican Party and the single, childless, secular and non-working folks gravitating towards the Democratic Party.

The agenda for conservatives is clear: work on encouraging and fertilizing the non-governmental associations. That's a society that needs fewer laws, less compulsion, less conflict. No doubt it will also be less violent, more sociable, and happier.

And that's why women are the future of conservatism. Because women are best at the local and the intimate, relationship and face to face.

How Do We Get Out of This?

How much money should the government spend, asks columnist Robert Samuelson? That is the question raised by the huge Obama deficits and the sovereign debt crisis in Europe.

It's also the question raised in Britain by Janet Daley when she writes: "Labour Must Admit It -- Big Government is Dead."

Unfortunately the problem is bigger than than just arguing about how big the government should be. The problem starts with the whole question of what government is for.

Michael Barone raises the question rather neatly in an article dissecting Attorney General Eric Holder's reluctance to admit that radical Islamism is a problem. It's the belief that ordinary Americans are a Howling Mob.

The reason that President Bush rushed out on 9/11 and urged Americans to be nice to their Muslim neighbors issues from the same source as Holder's reluctance to name. Both of them fear the Howling Mob. They fear that Americans are just one knee-jerk away from descending on their Muslim neighbors and killing them--or their African American neighbors, or their gay/lesbian neighbors.

It's that patronizing elitism that drives the whole notion of big government. Ordinary people can't be trusted to be civilized; government must instruct them. Ordinary people can't be trusted to educate their children; government must teach them. Ordinary people can't be trusted to get health insurance; government must mandate it.

The attitude becomes self-validating, for when people don't have to suck it in and run their lives responsibly, many don't. If many people act irresponsibly, then elites assume that ordinary people are irresponsible. And why not? The bigger the government the more power to the governing elite.

The proper answer to the question about the size of government is this: Government should not be a jot bigger than it has to be to keep the peace and run the legal system. That's because anything is better than teenagers and twenty-somethings running around in the street with guns.

As for everything else, Americans would be a lot better off, materially and morally, if they did for themselves rather than paying big government to do it badly. They would be more involved in their children's education, more involved in granny's health care, and more involved in pitching in to contribute to civic improvements.

But what about the poor? Well, with all the money not going into taxes, then Americans would have a lot of money, and a lot of moral inducement to get out there and help. They could start by helping out a neighbor, and quietly help a parent with school fees, and go on from there.

With government a lot smaller, it would be able to expand rapidly in time of war or emergency and help get the nation out of a jam. Without breaking the bank.

As for the Howling Mob, here's a little known fact. Ordinary people very seldom turn into a mob. It usually takes a charismatic leader--i.e., a politician--to arouse their rage and get them to surrender their individuality and their timidity to the madness of a crowd.