Palin Trumps Race Card

Ever since the dawn of time--well the 1960s, anyway--Democrats have been playing race cards from the bottom of the deck in the national game of bridge. And they have won rubber after rubber with their cheating.

Yesterday, July 13, for instance, the NAACP played the race card on the Tea Party, passing a resolution accusing it of tolerating bigotry. No doubt they expected Tea Parties to scurry and hide under rocks, as people usually do when accused of racism.

But today, July 14, 2010, is a day that will live... Well, it will mark the turning point on race.

Today Sarah Palin used her Facebook page to blast the NAACP and its resolution.

I am saddened by the NAACP’s claim that patriotic Americans who stand up for the United States of America’s Constitutional rights are somehow “racists.”

Then off she goes, talking about a nuisance suit she just won over a "spurious charge of racism," Tim Scott, "poised to become the first African-American Republican Congressman from the former Confederacy since Reconstruction", and Todd's Yupak Eskimo family. Wow. Seems to me that Palin had a few shells in the ready-use locker and was just waiting for this opportunity.

Now, I'd say, the boot is on the other foot and a shocked NAACP is finding itself on the defensive.

It has taken a while, but liberal commentators like Michelle Cottle of The New Republic are beginning to acknowledge that Sarah Palin is an extraordinary political talent. There's a reason for this, of course. Palin has come up the hard way in politics, starting out as a city councilwoman in 1992. If she weren't good we wouldn't know about her.

Who could blame the white Tea Partiers if the race-card argument were true? Ordinary middle-class whites, as I blogged yesterday, are the chaps that the political elite has forced to pay for its race-based affirmative action programs. If lower-income whites (who have nine-to-one odds against admission to selective colleges compared to lower-income blacks) were the darlings of the liberals, as they were in the 1930s, they would be in the streets, led by the liberals, demanding justice.

Instead lower-income whites have borne the insults of an overweening elite for nearly two generations. Finally they have taken to the streets. It is not over race, but over the simple idea of freedom and out-of-control government debt. As Sarah Palin writes, Tea Partiers are people

who simply want government to abide by our Constitution, live within its means, and not borrow and spend away our children’s futures.

Yeah. That just proves they are racists.

Meanwhile Sarah Palin has scored a hit, a palpable hit.

Screwing Lower-class Whites with Diversity

We've known for decades that the folks really getting screwed by affirmative action are "poor whites." Not professional-class whites. Not liberal whites. Just the God-and-guns whites.

But nobody does anything about it.

There's a recent update on "diversity," the name given to affirmative action after the Supreme Court decided the Bakke case. It's a study on admissions at eight selective colleges by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford of Princeton, reported by Russell K. Nieli. Yep, poor whites get royally screwed as we knew. But here's another category that get pushed to the back of the line: students with extracurriculars in JROTC, 4-H, and Future Farmers of America.

Here's what liberal admissions officers do to get their numbers right, with 5-7 percent black and appropriate Hispanic admissions (By the way, you can count Afro-Caribbean and African immigrants as "black").

Black: "Enormous advantage over whites given to blacks": +310 SAT pts advantage over whites.

Hispanic: "substantial admissions boost... which Hispanic students get over whites": +140 SAT pts advantage over whites.

Asians: "must do substantially better than whites": -140 SAT pts disadvantage vs. whites

If you start counting by class, then poor whites get clobbered in their chances for admission:

Lower-class blacks: "ten times as likely" to get admission as lower-class whites.

Lower-class Hispanics: "eight times as likely" to get admission as lower-class whites.

Lower-class Asians: "seven times as likely" to get admission as lower-class whites.

Then there's the penalty for conservative extracurriculars:

"Being an officer or winning awards" for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, "has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions." Excelling in these activities "is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.

Maybe these liberal college admissions administrators need to study up the law of the land, as promulgated recently by the US Supreme Court.

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

Justice is justice, but injustice cries up to the heavens for redress. One day, the heavens will call down the most frightful retribution on the monstrous injustice of liberal "diversity," the injustice that poor whites have borne for so long with such patience.

When They Start to Laugh At You

When they took Robespierre, the Terror of France, to the guillotine, the crowd is said to have mocked: "La bas à le Maximum!"

That was a taunt at the Law of the General Maximum, a program of wage and price controls passed by Robespierre and the Jacobins.

Robespierre had implemented the General Maximum because inflation from fiat paper money had increased prices and people wanted the government to "do something." You can imagine that the General Maximum had exactly the effect that all wage and price controls have had throughout history. It led to more inflation and general hoarding as people refused to bring price-controlled goods to market.

In the end, the Stalinist Robespierre was sent to his death with the name of his failed economic policy ringing in his ears.

President Obama, though a constitutional president, will also learn to fear the taunts of the people as his economic policy fails to produce a vigorous recovery.

The worst thing is that people are laughing at him. They are laughing at the stumbling mistakes of his administration. They are laughing at the over-the-top black racists calling for a race war on the "crackers." They are laughing at his hesitant response to the Gulf oil crisis. They are laughing at the transparent folly of his administration's suit against Arizona.

Of course, things are going to get much worse for the president. His ill-starred health reform will create conflict and rage when peoples' health insurance starts getting wigged around by incompetent regulators.

Think what else the president has to look forward to.

A new Republican House of Representatives will renew the budget battles of the 1990s. Only this time the American people will probably side with the House against the president. That's because Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton when it comes to political agility and talent.

In 2011 Sarah Palin will start dancing around the President like Squirrel Nutkin. Liberals will keep expecting her to self destruct, but she won't because Sarah Palin is a seasoned politician who knows how to play the game of politics. She worked her way up the hard way.

Will we have a double-dip recession, as everyone is predicting? Probably not, but the economy ain't gonna be pretty.

The tragedy is, of course, that the people who will suffer most are the young and the minority and the ill-educated. Exactly the people that Democrats profess to care about.

Why won't Democrats learn that the only way to help the helpless is to provide a solid productive economy without gimmicks? Ever since the 1930s Democrats have believed in economic gimmicks and subsidies as the way to help the helpless. The flaw in their program is that smart operators and crony capitalists always manage to crowd in before the helpless. It is the "little people" that get stuck with the underwater mortgages and the bankers that trouser the bonuses. That's how government always works. Goodies from the government spread outward from the connected to the less-connected and end up screwing the common people.

The end of a political dynasty is always an ugly thing. When people cease to fear the power of the elite they start to get rambunctious. But to the Old Regime the unkindest cut of all is the ungratefulness and the scorn.

Now liberals are going to get a taste of what it's like to be on the wrong side of history. You have to feel sorry for them.

Political Center: Open for Lease or Buy

This week marks the point at which everyone woke up in their canoes and heard the sound of the waterfall up ahead waiting for President Obama and the Democrats this Fall.

Where did it all go wrong? After all he was supposed to inaugurate The Emerging Democratic Majority, as John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira prophesied back in 2002.

Democrats were "progressive centrists," wrote Judis and Teixeira. Democrats wanted to "supplement the market's invisible hand... to ensure that the public interest is served... government regulation of business... strengthen social insurance programs... shield workers from... insecurities... stronger social safety net." But they were centrists that wanted government "to steer, not to row" with "incremental, careful reforms" that would improve health coverage without a takeover of the private health-care market.

Democrats were the party of the transition "from urban industrialism to a new post-industrial metropolitan order" in three main areas. In work, Democrats represented the new professionals, "crafts workers... frustrated by the imposition of market imperatives". In values Democrats represented "a libertarian ethic of personal life." In geography Democrats represent the new "postindustrial metropolises... peopled by the new professionals who live according to the ethics of postindustrial society."

The happy prophesy of Judis and Teixeira shows how easy it is to write an optimistic scenario and how hard it is to put it into practice.

Obama & Co talked a good line about a centrist America, but when it came to governing, they said "we won" and rammed old style patronage "stimulus" and radical health care takeover through Congress. They talked about the postindustrial future but in practice have demonstrated just how important the industrial-era labor unions are to their political makeup with huge payoffs to government employee unions, auto unions, and now maritime unions. They have written a financial reform bill that puts the government's visible hand in complete control of the financial system.

And at the back of it all is the delusion that government is a beneficial force, a "visible hand" that can serve the public interest. No it can't, at least not most of the time. Government is force. Politics is power. That is why the founders created a limited government.

Democrats in January 2009 were like Hitler's army in June 1941 with nothing but the open country of suffering Russia before them. They could have nailed down a huge new majority coalition if they had pursued consensus politics and befriended the moderates.

They could have had a bipartisan stimulus, but scorned to throw a few crumbs to the Republicans to get a bipartisan majority. They could have crafted "incremental, careful reforms" to health care and got big bipartisan majorities for their pains. But they didn't, and now, out of the long grass has suddenly emerged a vast counterattacking army that nobody even knew existed in November 2008. Just as Stalin got the Russian people in their tens of millions to fight against the Nazis.

Now the Democrats are staring into the face of the biggest political disaster of our times.

The consequences of the great Democratic Failure of 2009-2010 are incalculable. But one thing is certain. The center ground of US politics is vacant. For Lease or Buy. Any offers?

The Heir to Hayek?

What with Glenn Beck popularizing F.A. Hayek and The Road to Serfdom, not to mention Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, any sensible conservative would be looking around for more red meat to throw on the barbie.

Look no further. I think I just found the heir to Hayek. His name is Alasdair MacIntyre.

The common theme with Beck and with Goldberg is that the root of all evil is the Progressive movement that flourished at the turn of the 20th Century, especially in the decade just before World War I. And as many writers remind us, for instance Tiffany Jones Miller today on NRO, the Progressives all went to school in Germany in the half century before 1900. They came back with a Prussian faith in bureaucracy, in Hegelian progressive evolution, and government social insurance programs just like Bismarck's.

The trouble with Hayek is that he is not so good with the sound bites, meaty phrases that encapsulate his ideas for a popular audience.

But now I am reading Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue and many parts of it read like Hayek, only better. Chapter 8 is entitled "The Character of Generalizations in Social Science and their Lack of Predictive Power."

OK, the title is not too pungent. But MacIntyre tackles the Hayekian theme that social scientists do not possess the predictive knowledge of natural science.

The fact is that social scientists long for the predictive power of natural science and they often act as if they have, or are about to, realize that goal. In fact they cannot, because of the peculiar relationship between the individual and society. We individuals want to to be "in some degree opaque and unpredictable." This is necessary, for

each of us... aspires to preserve his independence, his freedom, his creativity, and that inner reflection which plays so great a part in freedom and creativity, from invasion by others.

But if we are to execute long-term projects of creativity we need to operate in a social environment that provides predictability.

We are thus involved in a world in which we are simultaneously trying to render the rest of society predictable and ourselves unpredictable.

In this environment it is likely that knowledge about the social realm will be "characteristically, and for the most part" rather than universal law-like predictions. This means that organizational success and predictability are mutually exclusive. If I want to execute on a creative project I would have to create a predictable organization. But a predictable organization is not good at executing on a constantly changing creative goal.

Since organizational success and organizational predictability exclude one another, the project of creating a wholly or largely predictable organization committed to creating a wholly or largely predictable society is doomed and doomed by the facts about social life.

Now comes the clincher.

The effects of eighteenth-century prophecy have been to product not scientifically managed social control, but a skillful dramatic imitation of such control. It is histrionic success which gives power and authority in our culture. The most effective bureaucrat is the best actor.

Now, is not MacIntyre making exactly the conservative case against Obamism? Do not liberals always and everywhere create a skillful dramatic imitation of social control. Except when something real happens, like an oil spill, and it turns out that dramatic imitation is not quite the same thing as effective action?

We know already that the welfare state is bound to fail in a vast burial mound of unfunded liabilities, about $100 trillion at the last count. It is based on confident predictions that you can predict the shape of rational bureaucratic programs decades of into the future, completely disregarding the fact that people will start to use their unpredictable cunning to game the system, to use its predictability and its bureaucratic rules against it.

But you knew that.

Double Dip and Hayek vs. Keynes

It all comes down to "swimming baths" versus productive investment. That's my take from the latest round in the Hayek vs. Keynes wars. In dueling letters to The Times of London in 1932, teams of battling economists proposed solutions to the Great Depression. Wrote Keynes and his pals:

If the citizens of a town wish to build a swimming-bath, or a library, or a museum, they will not, by refraining from doing this, promote a wider national interest.

Hayek & Co. countered with this:

We are of the opinion that many of the troubles of the world at the present time are due to imprudent borrowing and spending on the part of the public authorities.

But the key to ending depressions, it seems to me, is to fix the balance sheets of underwater market participants. The reason you get panics is that, when asset prices decline, parties with highly leveraged balance sheets find themselves underwater. Counterparties sensibly lack confidence in these compromised actors and avoid transactions with them. That's why the infamous TARP was implemented: to fix the balance sheets of the banks so that they would have positive equity and other people would trust them. Once it was clear that TARP had succeeded the markets turned and confidence was restored.

Now, of course, we have a different problem. The huge fortune thrown at "stimulus" by the Obamis has brought into question the balance sheet of the United States itself. Has the enormous increase in the National Debt put the governments of the United States underwater?

And that returns us to the Hayek vs. Keynes argument. Does spending on municipal luxuries and "shovel-ready" projects really help? Capitalism teaches us that prosperity issues out of profitable enterprise, work that produces more value than it consumes. The record of municipal enterprise is that local politicians spend money on things the voters and the special interests want, not on things that makes the city more prosperous. Most government projects are money-losing white elephants.

The Hayek method, practiced by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, is that sound money and a good investment climate with low tax rates sets the stage for rapid recovery. But our liberal friends just don't want to believe that.

They may have to learn the hard way. As Poor Richard put it in 1743:

Experience keeps a dear school, yet Fools will learn in no other.

That's Benjamin Franklin for you.

The Liberal End Game

Ever get that fin de siècle feeling? I do. I feel that the liberal era is thundering to a close. In all kinds of ways. Like the following:

• Elect a president on the basis of symbolism not on proven leadership ability.
• Pass Doofus health-care reform that destroys the medical industry.
• The over-the-top advocacy for Keynesian "stimulus" by tame economist Paul Krugman. When you have a really good idea, it doesn't need that Big Push to keep it going.
• Liberals wondering about free will. Dr. Helen wryly observes that the liberal elite suddenly have their doubts about the existence of free will. My my, how convenient when a Democratic administration wants to make all our decisions for us.
• Liberals clueless about conservatives. In liberal media these days they seem to need a reporter to cover the "conservative beat." Jonah Goldberg passes on a suggestion from Byron York. "Have the conservatives cover the liberal beat and the liberals cover the conservatives." My! What a concept.
• Financial reform authored by the political firm, Dodd & Frank, that helped create the problem.

This end-of-an-era stuff gets me all tingly. It's the same excitement I get watching the YouTube video of the SS Liberal riding up the beach at Alang, India, headquarters of the global ship-breaking industry.