Watching the Democrats Split

One of the disadvantages of the MSM is that they are always looking for the Republicans to split, but never notice the Democrats splitting until the chasm is right in front of them.

Thus it is left to The New York Times crypto-conservative Ross Douthat to point out that, usually, the Democrats are split into a left wing and a moderate wing.

On one side was the liberal left — populist in economics and dovish on foreign policy, in favor of lavish spending programs and suspicious of big business, and hostile to any idea that seemed to give an inch to the conservatives.

On the other were the moderates and centrists — pro-market and pro-Wall Street, inclined to tiptoe rightward on issues like crime and welfare, and hawkish about deficits and dictators alike.

In the special conditions of 2005-2008 these two factions were able to come together, mostly because they hated President Bush.

Unfortunately, President Obama has not kept the two sides together. Indeed,

Obama has managed the more difficult feat of alienating both of them at once.

The party’s centrists, from Blue Dog Democrats to Wall Street, insist that he’s turned out to be far more liberal than they expected. The health care bill was too expensive. The deficits are too big. He’s been too hard on business interests, and on Israel. And what happened to bipartisanship?

On the left, meanwhile, Obama is deemed a disappointment for all the things he hasn’t done. The stimulus should have been bigger. The financial reforms should have been tougher. He should have withdrawn from Afghanistan. He should have taken the fight to the Republicans, instead of letting them obstruct.

This leaves President Obama with a single way out of his political problem. He must "unite his party around their common fears." That is French for tearing the country apart.

You don't get your average MSMer figuring that out.

This has to mean that the current polls underestimate the defeat that the Democrats will suffer in November. The Weekly Standard's Jay Cost looks at the polls--in what we might call a "technical analysis"--and determines that whatever way you look at the numbers, the Democrats are in trouble.

But his analysis uses turnout models that don't differ very much from most recent elections. The fact is, he admits, that the closest turnout model is Virginia in 2009. It produces a ten point lead for Republicans.

The only people who can recall a result so pro-Republican are nonagenarians, as nothing like this has happened since 1928. How many seats this would produce is very hard to say, but I’ll put it this way: Republicans picked up 52 seats in 1994 with a +6.7 win; a +10 win should produce more than 52 seats, perhaps many more.

And Jay Cost is not trying to impress any "fundamental analysis" on his results. What does it mean to turnout if the Democratic Party is split and discouraged and Democrats continue sitting around and blaming each other as they have started to do?

The only thing to do is quote Ronald Reagan: "You ain't seen nothing yet." I'm still holding out for an 80 seat Republican pickup in the House.

The Three Liberal Conceits

It feels like 9/11, watching the twin towers burning, thinking about "one hour buildings" and wondering what comes next.

I'm talking, of course, about the mid-term elections on November 2. We are looking at the Democratic Party as it trails a black cloud of smoke and we are wondering: could the whole thing come down in a great crash? And if it did come down would it be in that dreadful slow motion descent of the twin towers, or the sub-second dump of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis? One moment it was there, the next moment it was in the river.

Everything is collapsing on the liberals all at once. Their multidecadal war on the private sector, where they want to boss banks and corporations around to help workers get good jobs or to help minorities buy a home, is in ruins, as their confident Keynesian stimulus has failed. Their war on want is a mess as the administrative manipulations of a thousand social programs make dependents out of proud workers. Their war on tradition is a mess as the sexual revolution turns into a re-commodification of sex.

There are, I think, Three Conceits at the heart of this liberal meltdown. Let's take them one by one.

First, there is the Economic Conceit, the idea that government can run the economy. There certainly is a need for the government to commandeer the economy in case of all-out war. But the record of the last century is that, absent war, government should keep its cotton-picking hands off. Government shouldn't muck around with monetary policy and the credit system. All it does is institutionalize inflation and play favorites with the credit system. Government shouldn't muck about with corporations vs. labor vs. the consumer. The wreck of the auto companies ought to tell us that. As George McGovern found out when he opened a resort hotel and then went bankrupt, business is incredibly difficult. Politicians shouldn't make it harder.

Secondly, there is the Social Conceit, the idea that government can spread the wealth and alleviate poverty, that government can run the education system and supervise the health care system. No it can't. The education system is dead in the water, and has been for a generation. The reason? It's been captured by the producers who don't give a damn about the consumers, children and parents. The Obamis are in the middle of bollixing up the health care system by leaning on it to serve an additional 30 million people who are reluctant to pay for their own health care. Government just can't do this efficiently and effectively.

Thirdly, there is the Moral Conceit, the idea that government can muck around legislating morality. Oh yes, liberals believe in legislating morality all right. That's what all the fuss about abortion and gay marriage is about. Liberals decided to change, by judicial fiat, the moral rules on babies and marriage. Now everyone wants to use the government to force their moral views on the rest of the nation.

What is going on here? What do liberals not understand?

I think that we need to look at society in a new way. Think of a circle, divided into three sectors. One is the political sector, with the institutions of government at all levels. This is the sector of force. Then there is the economic sector, of businesses and consumers, producing and consuming products and services. This is the sector of stuff. Then there is the moral/cultural sector, with various non-economic institutions, churches, schools, charities, foundations, and voluntary associations. The point about these insitutions is that they are not immediately economic. They have moral or social goals, not economic goals. This is the sector of faith.

The big mistake that liberals have made, as reflected in the Three Conceits, is that the political sector can supervise and co-opt the other two sectors. It can't. The political sector is the sector of force, and force is the only thing it knows. When you do force in the economic sector you get serfdom. When you do force in the moral/cultural sector you get a clash of faith, a religious war, and even a religious civil war. The three sectors need to be separate and equal in a Greater Separation of Powers. None should dominate another sector, and no two should gang up on the third.

This is all very well, but there is something missing. It is people. It one thing to understand the relationships of the institutions in society, it is another thing to figure out the people.

The people, I believe, are a circle in the middle. Call it the personal sector. The personal sector is the face-to-face sector, where people deal with each other verbally. It is the sector of trust.

The whole universe of society is a question of trust, but trust is only possible between face-to-face people. Without people in the middle you have nothing but force, the mechanical interactions between inanimate objects rather than the relationships of trust between people.

So when we say that the three sectors should be separate and coequal, and kept so by a Greater Separation of Powers, we understand also that this social compact is made possible by the folks in the middle, in the personal sector. These people in the middle act in face to face relationship with other people and it is the trust that they develop over time that creates the delicate balance between the sectors.

It is people representing institutions in the economic sector that link with people representing institutions in the moral/cultural sector that put material content into moral concern. It is people representing institutions in the moral/cultural sector linking with people representing institutions in the political sector that define the boundary where moral disapproval turns into legal restraint. It is people representing institutions in the economic sector linking with people representing institutions in the political and moral/cultural sectors that define the boundaries where a bad deal turns into a fraudulent deal.

Our liberal friends are good people. But they were tempted by vanity, and vanity turned into conceit. And now conceit is turning into humiliation.

After November 2, let's cut the political sector down to size and reanimate the spirit of trust that turns adversaries into friends.

Then we can build an America as it was meant to be.

They Just Play Politics With Our Money

Two years ago the Reid-Pelosi Congress went home without passing the appropriations bills to fund the federal government's spending programs. The reason then was that they expected Candidate Obama to win the presidential election and they wanted to pass $400 billion in spending increases without the threat of a Bush veto.

This year they failed to pass budget resolutions as required by law, and have failed to pass the appropriations bills as well.

Hey, why not? Who do you think is in charge here? The people?

This time, of course, the most ethical Congress ever has a different reason for putting off the appropriations bills. The solons know they are deeply unpopular and they don't want any unpopular votes getting into their opponents' TV commercials.

It all goes to show that Joseph Schumpeter was right. Politicians are people who are professionals at winning elections. Everything else they do is by courtesy. Maybe they'll pass a budget; maybe they'll actually record a vote or two. Maybe they'll educate a child or two, maybe they will fix up their ramshackle patronage system.

But for sure they will collect the taxes and print the money.

We know that the American people are getting ready to make the biggest change in Congress in living memory. We just don't know by how much.

And why not? Let's have some fun. Politicians are fungible. You can defeat them here, but the same kind of chaps will get elected over there.

The real problem, Medicare, will still be there after the fun and games and the accusations and the October surprises are over.

Yeah, I know, Social Security and Medicaid are important, but nothing like the problem of Medicare.

Personally, as a senior about to enroll in Medicare, I'd be willing to pay more for my health care and take less of the government's subsidy. But the deal is this: I want to control my health care arrangements. I want the government's cotton picking hands off my health insurance. I want to be able to have a big deductible and I don't want government telling me what should or should not be included in my catastrophic health insurance policy.

Surely that ain't too much?

Meanwhile back to the campaign trail, and let's see how nasty it gets in the homestretch.

Telegraphing a Wipeout

The Democrats have taken to blaming the voters in recent days. Vice-President Joe Biden has even blamed the Democratic base and told it to buck up and stop whining.

Folks like John Podhoretz are telling the Democrats that this is very bad tactics, even though Joe Biden is right.

So what if President Obama has delivered just about all that his progressive base could expect, given that there is such a thing as a moderate Democrat in the land? The base wants more.

The big problem for Democrats this year is that politics runs on rage. You get your best turnout when you are out of power and you are telling your supporters that the current incumbents are crooks, liars, and tyrants. But once you get into power, the motivation of your supporters becomes a much more difficult matter.

In 2002 and 2004 the Bush team performed miracles of voter mobilization, staying in power under difficult circumstances. But by 2006 the base was exhausted, and the Democrats motivated moderate voters to cast their votes against the tired, corrupt Republicans.

Mind you, it takes a special talent to turn your base into discouraged complainers in a mere two years.

But forget all the talk about stupid Democrats bad-mouthing their supporters. What the top Democrats are really telegraphing is that the battle is over for 2010. They have lost and they know it.

But it is kind of mean-spirited to start blaming their supporters for lack of energy. Let's face it, when you know that the battle is lost, it becomes very hard to get up the energy to keep on fighting. Nobody wants to be the last guy to die for a losing cause.

After a losing battle the generals generally get to fly away in their helicopters. The grunt on the ground may well lose his life in the agony of defeat.

Our Subversive Individualism

I'm reading Francis Fukuyama's Trust, and there's a fabulous chapter where he compares the individualism of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism with the east Asian Confucian tradition.

Confucianism puts a big weight on conforming to society, particularly to the elders in the family.

But US Protestantism is radically individualistic. It began by cutting out the mediating position of the Catholic Church; now believers could have a direct relationship with God with no human gatekeepers in between.

In the long run, the individual's ability to have a direct relationship with God had extremely subversive consequences for all social relationships, becaue it gave individuals a moral ground to rebel against even the most broadly established traditions and social conventions.

Yet, Americans, freed from conformity, actively seek out voluntary relations in our famous aptitude for voluntary associations. So, in a way, by freeing us from the age-old obligations of being born into an existing social world, our individualism frees us to be freely social.

Here's an example of this working out in practice, with the American Thinker's recovering liberal, Robin of Berkeley. She notes how she has always been a perfectionist, ever since her mother threatened to withhold her love.

This is my first childhood memory, a hazy image seared into my brain: I am in my bedroom at around age 5 with my mother, having just done something naughty. My mother explodes, "If you keep doing things like that, I won't love you anymore."

Night after night, I cried myself to sleep, overwhelmed with despair at this potential tragedy. It didn't seem humanly possible to survive without her love.

Robin solved the fear of being cast out into loveless isolation by becoming a perfectionist. "I became an anxious adult, a pleaser, someone who bent over backwards not to offend." It meant, of course, that to make a mistake was always an appalling trauma.

Until now, until the scales fell off her eyes when Obama became president.

Recently, Robin made a mistake in one of her articles. But it wasn't a matter of life and death any more. Now she could ask God for forgiveness.

I realized this: it doesn't matter ultimately what any person thinks of me. I am living my life before an audience of One. And in the end, it is only His judgment that matters.

It is a profound mystery that, in her life as a liberal, Robin of Berkeley was imprisoned in a cruel world where there was no redemption except through liberalism. But the liberal priests never quite offer their congregants absolution and redemption. Certainly not Obama.

The extraordinary power of Protestant individualism is that, by loosening the age-old bonds of social conformity, it liberates us from our personal demons and empowers us, most of all in these United States, to open our hearts and enter into voluntary friendly social association with the whole world.

What a country.

"Pledge" a Start or a Cop-out?

What are we to make of the House Republicans' "Pledge to America?"

Veteran pundit Michael Barone is mildly complimentary. He writes that the Pledge has two pretty serious proposals, to roll back discretionary spending to 2008 levels, and repeal ObamaCare.

But Andrew McCarthy thinks it's a cop-out. "It's big wind, little rain," he complains.

Listen, retorts Jonah Goldberg, it's just an opening bid.

Hey, fellahs, this is politics. You do things a step at a time. The Republicans cannot tell the American people that we'd like to rip the welfare state out by the roots, even if we do eventually want just that. It would just scare the pants off them.

Sure, we believe that the liberal culture of compulsion should be repealed, and that the natural sociability of the American people should replace the force and injustice of the liberal administrative state.

But here's the big difference between conservatives and liberals. We want to persuade the American people, step by step, that a voluntary, sociable society is better than a compulsory centralized state.

Our liberal friends, as they have just demonstrated with ObamaCare, don't believe in stuff like that. They believe that the way you get social change is to hustle the American people into a vast expansion of government and create new special interests to defend the new order so that, when the American people find out what ObamaCare will cost them, it will be too late because the special interests will take out any politician that dares to cross them.

It's important to understand the difference. Social democracy is the triumph of the compulsory and the powerful expert. Then there is middle-class democracy. For middle-class democracy, the process is the point, not the destination.

Can we reform the welfare state? Will the American people ever agree to give up their entitlement benefits in return for freedom and voluntary, shared provision of necessary social goods like education, health care, and relief of the poor? Nobody knows. But the American people certainly don't like the idea of the sudden, overwhelming increase in government power and spending under the Obama administration.

And that's a start.

They Just Don't Get It

As liberals survey the wreckage of the car they drove into the ditch, they ask themselves: how did it happen?

It feels like one moment they were accelerating rapidly into the fast lane, and the next moment they were in the ditch.

But there is a glimmer of understanding over at The Atlantic. Joshua Green rewinds to the successful effort of Sen. Schumer to elect Democrats to the Senate in 2006 and 2008.

Democrats have always claimed to be the party of ordinary working families, but Schumer thought they were deluding themselves. Most Democratic policies, such as the earned income tax credit or increasing the minimum wage, were geared not toward the middle class but the poor. When middle-class Americans heard Democrats describe their problems, it did not resonate because they were actually the problems of the working poor. Schumer believed that the true middle class comprises people in the prime working years of 25 to 60, whose median household income is around $68,000. He urged his candidates to tout aspirational policies that would appeal to them.

So Schumer concentrated like a laser on appealing to the middle class with candidates that ran on aspirational themes in their campaigns. But now it's all in the toilet. How could that be?

Democrats did health care. And they fixed the financial system, which will help middle class 401(k)s.

Pursuing a different agenda might have been more popular. But the real frustration for the White House is that each of these policies does benefit the middle class, but the benefits tend to take the form of increased security or cost savings difficult for most people to quantify. Over time, health insurance will be more comprehensive, secure, and affordable; Wall Street meltdowns won’t occur as often, and when they do occur they’ll cost taxpayers less. Clearly, these advances have not registered, or have not been sufficient.

What planet are you on chaps? The fact is that Obamacare is going to hurt most Americans, now and forever, and only help wasters that ought to have health care, but are skating, for now. The bank bailout was necessary, but the middle class rightly feels that it should never have been necessary. The bailout was government cleaning up the mess it made of the credit system, not government cleaning up after a natural disaster.

Get real Democrats, and stop deluding yourselves. You had the sense to know that you had lost your appeal to the aspirational middle class. What you didn't have the sense to do is dump your policies that screw the aspirational middle class. Obamacare, stimulus, auto bailouts, cap-and-trade: these are all policies aimed at the Democratic base, from union stalwarts to the benefit recipients, to the government employees to the gentry liberals. There is nothing in the Obama record that benefits the aspirational middle class.

If Democrats really wanted to appeal to the aspirational middle class they would have ditched the entire agenda and implemented a program of spending cuts, to release resources for new businesses that could hire the aspirational middle class.

But they didn't do that, and now they are going to pay. The only question remaining is the price: will it be a modest 40 seats in the House, or a massive 80 seats? Will it be 6 seats in the Senate or a massive 10 seats?

We will know in about a month.