Learning Lessons Good and Hard

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. That was H.L.Mencken's clever quote.

Let's combine his line with a related quote from Benjamin Franklin: "Experience keeps a dear school, yet Fools will learn in no other."

The welfare state is the theory that the people should pay for the folly of the liberal elite good and hard.

The great question in democracy is how to get it through the thick heads of the liberal ruling class that its ideas and policies stink. Like right now.

The liberal elite has given us trillions in stimulus and bailouts but the economy is barely making headway. Obviously the elite has made a mistake. You do not revive the economy with handouts to the darlings of the politicians. Those darlings are already wasting money big time. You want to give them more money to waste?

We have known that this policy, Keynesianism, doesn't work. We have known it at least since the days of Reaganomics when the economy shot up like a rocket about three months before the Reagan tax cuts kicked in in 1983. And then continued to rocket.

There are lots of articles out today about the folly of Keynesianism, and the common sense of Reaganomics. Liberals should read them here and here. They might learn something.

But liberals never learn. So now they are going to get their heads handed to them in the mid-term elections. I am going for the long bomb on this: 80 seats in the House of Representatives, biggest since 1938. The experience of electoral defeat is a hard school. But politicians will learn in no other.

The Culture of Compulsion

What is the center of the conservative critique of liberalism? It is, I believe, that liberalism has replaced the community of social relationship with a rigid mechanism of administrative bureaucracy.

Of course, the old ways of traditional face-to-face community had its problems. It was often unreflectingly conservative and often hardened hierarchy into oppression. The question at the beginning of the modern era was how to replace the often oppressive hierarchy of the old regime with a new web of freedom.

In the adventure of freedom the Anglo-Saxons attempted a balance of powers that tried to compromise between national power and local loyalty, and set the different branches against each other in a separation of government powers. The French attempted to erect an empire of Reason, and it led directly to the guillotine and the Terror. The Germans erected an empire of rational hierarchy from schools to state bureaucracies to the armed forces. They turned a nation of poets and thinkers into an army. It was an army that could conquer the French any time it wanted to, but it led to the ruin of 1945.

You'd think that everyone would get the message but they didn't. In all the great areas of political life we moderns have marginalized instinctive, cooperative voluntarism and built up huge structures of rational administration.

We have built up huge government pension programs wonderful in their mechanical completeness but utterly unconnected to underlying economic reality. That is to say, we have decreed what is to be paid to older people in benefits and what is to be paid by younger workers in taxes and contributions, but we have no way of balancing the two. In all western nations, the government pension program is breaking down.

We have built up huge government health care programs. The British National Health Service is the largest administrative organization in the world after the Indian Railways. Each administrative system reflects the latest ideas from the politicians, from the health producer interests, and political interest groups. But it cannot respond to the day-by-day needs of ordinary people and adjust itself to their priorities. It is subsidized at the point of delivery but ruinously expensive overall.

We have built up huge government education systems. These systems require that children be sent upon compulsion for most of their childhood and youth to government custodial facilities to learn--not very much. The education system is designed around the needs and notions of the educated professional class. Thus it assumes that every child should prepare for a college education, ignoring the fact that most people learn by doing. The system responds, as any government program, to political winds and desperate attempts by politicians to respond to the latest disaster. But it cannot respond to the individual needs of parents and children. It pits parents against each other as its centralized administrative structure forces it towards one-size-fits-all.

We have built up huge government welfare systems. These systems treat the poor as passive objects of compassion that either qualify or do not qualify for benefits. But humans are not passive objects. They are resourceful creatures, descendants of a species that has hacked a habitat out of a nature that only rains down its blessings upon the adaptable. Thus the poor and the not-so-poor develop a cunning knowledge of the system and learn how to adjust their lives to qualify for benefits. They become world experts in qualifying for government pensions when youthful twenty-somethings; they expose the lie of an intelligent elite assisting helpless victims proving themselves intelligent exploiters of a mechanical monster.

These vast administrative structures marginalize ordinary people. They make them into cogs in a vast machinery. The administrative state turns people from free citizens responsibly serving their fellows in voluntary cooperation into dependent drones anxiously searching for the right shaped benefit outlet in which to plug in for a battery charge.

There must be a better way. There must be a way of building a society in which the ordinary person has a social and responsible role, something with more dignity than an insecure dependence on a government program.

Call it Perry v. Eastwood

This week Judge Walker found for gay marriage in his decision against California's Proposition 8. His decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger centers on numerous findings of fact in favor of gay marriage.

Conservatives are united in regarding these findings of fact as irretrievably biased in favor of the plaintiffs.

James Taranto thinks that appellate judges will find it hard to argue against findings of fact, however risible. And then the case comes to a Supreme Court split 4-4 with Justice Kennedy in the middle. Taranto predicts that Kennedy will vote in favor of gay marriage.

If that occurs, I realized yesterday, Perry v. Schwarzenegger will probably turn out to be Roe v. Wade II. Only this time the Supreme Court will know what it is doing.

Back in 1973 the US Supreme Court, in finding a right to privacy and a right to abortion in the US Constitution, did not expect to stir up a hornet's nest. It assumed, along with all right-minded people, that legal, accessible, value-free abortion was a sensible and practical individual right. The Court did not understand that, for millions of ordinary Americans, babies are sacred.

There's a reason for the disconnect between ordinary Americans and elite Americans on the social issues. For elite Americans the hope of immortality rests in the hope of becoming a footnote to history with a great creative achievement: a law, a work of art, a scientific discovery. But for ordinary Americans the only hope of immortality outside religious faith is their children. For such people, children and babies and marriage become a transcendent issue.

Gay marriage is the abortion issue all over again. In elite America, gay marriage is no big deal. It's a lifestyle choice. But for ordinary Americans it threatens the hope for immortality in children.

Gay marriage advocates are clear that the basis of gay marriage is the universal right to marry the one you love. For ordinary Americans marriage is rather different. It is the framework within which you can lay down your hope for immortality, your children.

Conservative partisans should wish that the tough guy defendant in Perry v. Schwarzenegger were not Conan the Barbarian but Dirty Harry. For if Justice Kennedy doubles down on Roe v. Wade we might as well call the gay marriage case Perry v. Eastwood.

Politically, a pro gay marriage decision will likely create a new movement of rejection against liberalism as persistent and as fervent as the pro-choice movement. It might be enough to create a conservative political majority in the United States for the next generation. So conservatives might well say, with Dirty Harry, Go ahead, make my day.

But that would be a shame. For the sake of social peace it would be better for the Supreme Court to fudge the issue, as it did in the famous Bakke decision on racial preferences.

On the other hand, we must recognize that the social issues cannot be kicked down the road forever. The US tried that with slavery. In retrospect, it would have been better to tackle slavery sooner rather than later.

You'll remember that it was the South's intransigence that prevented a peaceful solution, or even a fudge, on slavery. Kinda reminds me of the intransigence of today's liberal judges and their liberal activist cheerleaders.

Imperial Judiciary

The great liberal innovation is using the courts to force the pace of "social change."

Traditionally, judges were small "c" conservative. You had to drag them kicking and screaming into the modern world. In this way, of course, they provided a kind of social "ballast," curbing the enthusiasms of power politicians and wild-eyed activists.

But liberals have changed all that. Ever since Brown v. Board of Education they have used the courts to do what they couldn't get done in the legislatures.

The purpose of the Brown decision was to force the pace on the civil rights of Negroes, as they were then called. In rejecting the "principle" of "separate but equal" in education the US Supreme Court set in motion decades of school busing to achieve racial balance in the classroom. The price of this win was the ritual humiliation of the South and the unintended consequence of enraging white ethnic enclaves like South Boston.

Let's stipulate that Brown was the right decision, particularly as it dealt with America's original sin, African slavery.

But Brown was followed by the Miranda decision on the right of an accused suspect to remain silent. OK, maybe, although the job of the police is to whack young lower-class males upside the head.

Then Goldberg v. Kelly conferred property rights on entitlement benefits like welfare. Was that really a good idea? At some point shouldn't we tell benefit recipients to go get a job.

There were the decisions giving public school students due-process rights, Tinker v. Des Moines School District and Goss v. Lopez. Really? End summary discipline in the schools?

Then there was Roe v. Wade on abortion, and various decisions limiting religious expression in government schools. That is what created the Reagan Revolution, sending millions of Roosevelt Democrats into the Republican camp.

In these cases, the US Supreme Court was not mopping up a confusion in the law, or correcting a flagrant injustice that had festered for decades. It was forcing the pace, implementing the moral/cultural agenda of the liberal ruling class by judicial ukase.

Now we have the gay marriage issue, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, in which a federal judge just overturned a California state constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between and man and a woman. Again, the courts are clearly forcing the pace.

Maybe all these decisions are for the best. But the problem is that they haven't been decided by persuasion. They have been declared from the bench and imposed on society from above without the consent of the governed.

That's not how America is supposed to work.

It's Conservative Nostalgia Time Again

A recurring theme in conservatism is a nostalgia for the good old days. What happened to the good old days when conservatives were high-toned philosophers like Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol?

David Klinghoffer's piece in the Los Angeles Times is just the latest in the genre. He deplores the new generation of conservatives like the "potty-mouthed Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart".

Liberals have an identical nostalgia. Not for the good old days when The New Republic and Herbert Croly bestrode the world like a colossus, but when conservatives were gentlemanly and consensual--like Bill Buckley.

Iowahawk David Burge delightfully burlesques the high-toned conservative brigade in the persona of T. Coddington Van Vorhees VII. who is always getting together with his pals "Dame Peggy Noonan" and the two Davids, Brooks and Frum, to grumble snobbishly about the rubes taking over the movement.

I never seem to hear of liberals deploring their potty-mouthed publicists. They seem to be quite happy letting the philosophers get on with philosophizing and the street fighters get on with their hand-to-hand verbal combat.

Why don't the liberals tut-tut about the low-rent liberals, from the MSNBC ranters like Keith Olbermann to the racist Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton?

There was a time when liberals were exclusively high-toned. That was in the days of the Progressive Era, that flourished presidentially from Theodore Roosevelt (R) to Woodrow Wilson (D). But in the 1920s the Progressives went out of favor with the American voters. It was the genius of Franklin Roosevelt to create a coalition of the high-minded Progressives and the street-fighting big city machines in the Democratic Party and call it liberalism.

However they were presented to the American people, all Democratic presidents since FDR except Jimmy Carter have been frank products of political machines. Truman came from the Prendergast machine, Kennedy from the Boston Irish Mafia, Johnson from the solid Democratic South, Clinton from an Arkansas machine that he turned into a personal political machine, and Obama, the perfumed product of the Chicago machine.

These machine politicians have understand that there are always plenty of high-toned publicists ready to perfume the air around them with high-toned words. Behind the propaganda, they get on with the job of wheeling and dealing, holding their friends close and their enemies closer, and looting the public fisc.

In my view, the last few years have seen a breakout in the power of the low-rent conservatives. The unexpected eruption of the Tea Party movement is canonical. It's the power of the Internet synergizing with genuine political bottom-up rebellion.

It is telling that the Democrats all thought the Tea Parties were a put-up job, "astroturf" organized by Republican political operatives. In fact, the Republican establishment was just as surprised by the Tea Parties as anyone else, and not a little afraid of the movement.

Conservatism will never be exclusively high toned again, so the Van Vorhees chaps had better get out the air freshener.

Beyond Corruption and Injustice

It goes without saying that the modern liberal administrative state is unjust. It's corrupt, cruel, and wasteful as well. And its deluded practitioners continue to sing its praises in the face of all its failures.

Liberalism is, after all, not just a political philosophy, but a secular religion.

The larger failure, I believe, is liberalism's culture of compulsion. Modern society under liberalism is a society of a million laws, and ten thousand regulations.

It wasn't supposed to be that way. Supposedly, the bright light of reason and justice would chase away the inequality, the indignities, the superstitions of the old regime. Then everyone would live in freedom and community.

In fact, the liberal regime requires tight regulation and widespread compulsion throughout society. Instead of the glorious future of cooperation, it turns out that in the liberal state vast structures of supervision and mandate are required. Rather than a liberal society, we now have a liberal administrative state in which everyone is forced to do the right thing.

What went wrong, and what can we do about it?

That is the core of this American Manifesto. What went wrong with the liberal dream? What turned it into a nightmare, where limited government turned into big government? What turned the poor into the underclass? What turned respectable citizens into adult adolescents? And what do we do now?

"You must suggest an alternative," said Margaret Thatcher.

It is time to toss liberalism onto the dust heap of history, and start to imagine an alternative. I call it "life after liberalism." What will it be like?

First of all, it cannot be a society where all decisions are made by a political elite. Government is force. Politics is power. Politicians only know about playing power games and dividing people so that they can win elections. The more we empower politicians, the more they will divide us. The reason we call it "society" is because it is more than a top-down administration. All must participate according to their abilities, and all must take responsibility.

It cannot be a society where all decisions are made by reason and by rule. Rules and reason are wonderful things, but they are mechanical and clumsy. "The heart has its reasons that reason knows not." Humans are social animals and the social virtues are not mechanical and rational, but instinctive and emotional. Human society must be a blend of instinct, emotion, and reason.

It cannot be a society of "one size fits all." The difference between humans and machines is that you can write manuals to maintain machines and leave a mechanic in charge. The maintenance of humans in good running order we call a "relationship." No one rule or caned procedure will suffice. Yet, of course, our ruling class attempts to rule us exactly according to the orthodox principle of "one size fits all." We have one compulsory government pension scheme, one compulsory health care program, one compulsory education system. They cannot imagine a society where people take care of their own needs in voluntary cooperation, without the supervision of the politicians and experts.

You'll find, as An American Manifesto takes shape, that there is another way. In the life after liberalism, we will demote politics to a coequal between the economic and the moral/cultural. We will re-strand the withered chords of face-to-face society and responsibility. We will discover how we already have the means for each of us to escape the compulsory "one size fits all" prison of the liberal administrative state.

As Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain puts it: "There is such a thing as society. It's just not the same thing as the state."

In other words, to call a thing "social" or "public" does not mean that the government must do it. It only means that people do it, and that they do it in the community that we create beyond the old boundaries of family and kindred. It might be government, but it is more likely to be a church, a fraternal group, a business, a charity, a sports association.

Yes, Virginia. There is life after liberalism.

Stop Gunning the Economy

Over the years one thing is sure. Government has interfered too much with the economy.

In the old days it was an just absolute monarch debasing the coinage to pay for his wars. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was proto-democratic governments learning how to leverage the magic of central banking and the national debt into paying for empire or for civil war.

Now we have massive fiscal distortions to shore up the mirage of the unfundable welfare state, its pensions and health care.

Always, of course, there have been inflationists urging governments to make credit cheap--for small business, for farmers, for crony capitalists.

It's time to rise up and say: Stop "helping" the economy, government. Your helping mostly destabilizes the economy. And problems in the economy mostly hurt the poor.

If the economy is in the depths of a depression then the cry goes out to stimulate the economy with cheap credit backed by big new spending projects. Or alternatively, tax cuts and spending cuts.

If the economy is emerging from a recession then the cry goes out to keep the economy growing with cheap credit and tax cuts, thus avoiding a "double-dip" recession.

If the economy is going gangbusters then politicians and special interests propose ambitious projects funded by debt backed by the ample revenues flowing into government coffers.

Of course, all this stimulus creates an inflationary boom and, eventually, the government's central bank starts fighting inflation instead of fighting recession. That leads to a credit crisis and bank failures and bailouts.

Then the cycle begins again with the demand for cheap credit to stimulate the economy.

We need a practical political agenda to get us out of this vicious circle.

In my view, we have to get government out of the credit business, except when spending money to get out of a crisis. This might be war, or it could be national disaster.

Heck, why stop there? Let's get the government out of education. Parents will naturally seek out education for their children.

Let's get the government out of health care. Women are obsessed with health care and will find a way to get it.

Let's get the government out of pensions. Middle-aged people naturally start saving so that they can stop working. Why interfere?

The great need in this generation is to develop a practical political philosophy, supported by the broad middle class, that would keep the government out of the economy.