The Content of His Character

The story of each great ethnic group in America has been remarkably similar. It starts with oblivion, continues to alarm and discrimination, then to ethnic power politics and pride, then arrival, and finally assimilation.

African Americans have traveled this road in full Technicolor, for they arrived in North America not as indentured servants but as slaves. There were not mere scuffles about them, but an outright civil war. Like the Irish, blacks have chosen the path of ethnic pride, expressed in monolithing voting and corrupt political machines. Like the Irish, blacks have finally elected one of their own as president.

Martin Luther King famously looked forward to the day when Americans would be judged on the content of their character, not on the color of their skin. Everybody interpreted that as an appeal to whites to judge blacks by their behavior not their race.

But there is another side to this, the question of how blacks judge their own kind by the content of their character.

In the climb from egregious discrimination ethnic groups tend to exhibit a strong sense of solidarity. They support their own kind, no matter what, in the battle for survival. But there comes a time when they obtain real power and are no longer the weaker group in the battle of political power. There comes a point where the group gets to go through the equivalent of the Temptation of Christ. They have the power to rule the world, but will they have the character to say: get thee behind me, Satan.

In the famous trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his dead wife's lover, a black-majority jury in Los Angeles County in 1995 voted to acquit the famous football player. But in a black majority congressional district in New Orleans in 2008 the voters threw out their Representative accused of corruption, William J. Jefferson (D), the first black to represent the district since Reconstruction.

Now we have the case of Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY), convicted by the House ethics panel of corruption on November 16, 2010. Will the House vote to expel Charlie, as they would a white congressman? Will the black voters of Harlem vote Charlie out of office as the voters of any white suburban district would already have done?

Because when the day comes that blacks routinely judge their own leaders on the content of their character then blacks will truly have arrived as One Hundred Percent Americans.

Compared to that, the election of a black president is mere bagatelle.

The New Republican Majority

Reviewing the 2010 battlefield, RealClearPolitics' Sean Trende notes two significant facts:

1. Dems have lost rural and "Jacksonian" voters. A hundred years ago, the core of the Democratic vote was rural voters, farmers that hated capitalism and finance, particularly the finance capitalists that held their mortgages. These folks, along with the rough-and-ready Scotch-Irish from Appalachia, are gone for the Dems.
2. Dems are losing suburban and white working class voters. These folks have been the real pivot point in the electorate in the last generation, leaning towards Reagan, then Clinton, then Bush, then Obama. Now they are clearly moving away from Obama and the Democrats.

Isn't it convenient, then, for Republicans that suburban voters and the white working class are being absolutely hammered by the Great Recession? And isn't it convenient that Obamanomics really has nothing to say to these hard-hit folks?

Then there are the young voters. You have to feel sorry for the young voters. There they are, having voted just like the trusties in their government educational custodial facilities told them, and now they are utterly screwed. Do you think that maybe in two years they might be ready to vote for real Hope and Change in freedom instead of Hope and Change in big government?

Yeah. How dumb can you be, imagining that big government is going to create Hope and Change? Government is force, baby. And government is the cockpit of the special interests, all of them opposed to Change.

Think, think, think. That's the order of the day. The door is open to create a big new majority coalition. So let's all think about how to appeal to suburban voters, white working class voters, and young voters.

Job One is jobs, jobs, jobs. And we know how to do that. Cut government spending and cut income tax rates.

Then there is education. We have to help the majority of Americans escape from the liberal model of education that prepares people for jobs in the Peace Corps and a career in environmental regulation. We need to reorient education towards the dominant learning method among humans and especially among average people: learning by doing.

I say "we" but I mean "they". The conservative policy on education is that it should be driven not by educrats and edu-theorists but by education consumers: students and parents. Let us empower ordinary people to supervise their ordinary education and empower them to decide when it is time to get out of school and into the "real world" of work and training. For many people, I suspect, the moment to leave full-time education is about age 13.

Crisis is opportunity. The Obama meltdown creates the political opportunity of the century. We conservatives care about the suburban voters and the white working class. We care because we understand what a century of liberal government has done to the ordinary person, and we want ordinary people to have a free and prosperous life liberated from the dead hand of government.

Let's listen to the surburbanites. Let's listen to the white working class. Let's work with them to build an America we can all share and be proud of.

Populist Darling or Embarrassment?

You tell me. Is Sarah Palin's reality show on TLC a brilliant effort to reel in the white working class? Or is it jumping the shark, as former supporter Jennifer Braceras believes?

It's the old, old question in politics. How folksy can you get without becoming a caricature of folksiness? Democratic politicians are required to show that they are just like you and me. That goes back to Thomas Jefferson who went to his inauguration in plain clothes. Writes Ron Chernow in Alexander Hamilton:

Jefferson eliminated the regal trappings of the Washington and Adams administrations and brilliantly crafted an image of himself as a plain, unadorned American... For two weeks after his inauguration, Jefferson stayed at his boardinghouse near the Capitol and supped at the common table.

So what are we to make of Sarah Palin's folksiness? Put it this way. Suppose you were Sarah Palin and you were planning a presidential campaign. You know that a campaign is all about image dusted with a little fairy dust of issues. You know that voters really aren't interested in wonky discussions of the details of health care. You have succeeded in numerous public debates and candidate forums down the years by avoiding the policy details and appealing directly to the emotions of the voters. You've been a successful elected politician since 1992, rising from city councilmember to mayor to governor. You've been savaged by liberals for being a hick and an embarrassment. What would you do?

I'd say that the thing to do is to play up your folksiness. Talk non-stop about "common-sense conservatism." Appeal to the great unwashed middle with down-to-earth media events. And hope that it all comes together.

I keep thinking about the white working class, and in particular the white working class woman. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the white working class. It's had a pretty hard go because the Democrats have forsaken it for liberal women and minorities. And the Republicans just don't seem to get the white working class. Now here is Sarah Palin doing reality shows, hauling nets, piloting fishing skiffs, in the middle of her family. Yes, it's all rather récherché and hard to take for the educated classes. But what does it say to the working classes?

The question the pollsters always ask the voters is: Does the candidate care about people like me? What do you think?

It Can Only Get Worse

There are two practical political reasons for the Obama administration's QE2 policy. Reason one is to re-float the underwater debtors, the folks with underwater home mortgages. Until they are breathing again, the economy is going to be in trouble. The other reason is to gun the economy for the 2012 elections.

Why not? That's what Richard Nixon did in August 1971 when he took the US off the gold standard. The result was that the M2 money supply that had risen 6.5 percent in 1970 went up at the rate of 13.3 percent in 1971 and 13.0 percent 1972. In 1973, after the elections, M2 was ratcheted back to a 6.6 percent increase and we got the 1973-74 recession.

Here's what I wonder. Are the Obamis cranking the printing presses too early? Back in the 1970s the Nixon administration imposed wage and price controls in 1971. That kept the inflation under control for a while with consumer prices increasing by 4.4 percent in 1971, 3.2 percent in 1972. Then prices exploded by 6.2 percent in 1973 and 11.0 percent in 1974.

The thing to remember is that we don't have wage and price controls to make things look good in the runup to the election. Nor do we have the financial repression of the post-war years in which investors could not escape from dollar investments, and were screwed with interest-rate ceilings on bank deposits. And by going for broke a full two years before the election, the Obamis are risking big-time inflation well before the voters go to the polls.

Here's my judgment. The Democrats have lost the Mandate of Heaven; they have lost the luck o' the Irish that always made things work out for them. President Obama is a Mrs. Gummidge of a president, and everything goes contrairy with him. Things are going to get so screwed up that the 2012 election will make the 2010 election look like a cake-walk.

And here is the worst of it, if you are a Democrat. Democrats are going to be disproportionately hurt in the next few years. Whether it's social spending, green subsidies, public pension defaults, government employee layoffs, it's going to hurt Democrats more. But that strikes at the very heart of the Democratic project, which is patronage, pensions, jobs, and street money for the Democratic supporters. The very best that can happen is that Democratic supporters will lose heart and stay home. More likely is a massive Democratic split, a fight over the remaining spoils.

The worst of the worst, from the Democratic perspective, is Gov. Chris Christie. He is showing that a big fat roly-poly Republican governor can make hay over dissing government employees. He is publicizing the union official that wished for his death. He is publicizing the schools superintendent who is getting his contract renewed before state salary caps kick in. Nobody has ever succeeded in doing this successfully before. And if you can do it in New Jersey you can do it anywhere.

Things are going to get worse, and it's going to be the worst for the little people. Remember? Democrats fight for the people against the powerful.

When the Patronage Has to Stop

Why is it that the old industrial mid-west, from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, was the center of the lurch to the Republican Party in the recent mid-term elections? I have a theory on that.

Politics is the process of bribing the electorate. You offer them goodies in return for votes. In the old agricultural era, the only voters were the landlords, the descendants of the warrior class that conquered and occupied the land. Kings and princes had to keep the support of the landed aristocracy with privilege and gifts. The result was that the rich paid almost no taxes and the poor paid a lot.

In our modern era the opposite is true. Now we have the mass of the people voting and they demand patronage from the politicians in return for their vote. The social-democratic parties are the masters at this game.

But there is a problem. Patronage politics is not a stable self-correcting system. That's because the supporters are ravenous for rewards. So the politicians have to keep offering new bribes at every election, for the old bribes are not counted as bribes by their recipients but as their "rights."

What happens when the money runs out and the politicians can no longer keep the payments coming? You get the industrial mid-west.

The industrial mid-west was center of post-WWII unionized manufacturing. The idea was that prosperity was a combination of big manufacturing corporations, big labor unions, and government adjudicating between the two. The reality was that the big corporations promised enormous benefits to their employees through defined benefit pension plans and retiree health benefits that would be paid out of profits ten, twenty, thirty years in the future. Unfortunately when the future arrived there weren't any profits, or at least, not enough to provide the promised benefits. So now the big corporation, big union model lies in ruins. The patronage promised by the politicians, the lifetime employment, the fat pensions, all is vanished into air.

If you are a sensible, practical person, and all the promises of the politicians turn out to be so much hot air, then there is only one thing to do. You must move on, admit that your investment in the political patronage system was a failure, and start over. That is what the folks in the industrial mid-west have decided to do.

But that raises a question. Why haven't the voters of California and New York joined in? The answer is that the big-government patronage model is still working for them--just. But in ten years or so some presidential candidate will be talking to his rich supporters about the bitter clingers. Only this time they won't be the bitter clingers of western Pennsylvania, devastated by the hollowing out of unionized manufacturing. They will be the bitter clingers of the huge government sector that collapsed in the budget cuts of the 2010s.

The GOP and Minorities Canard

They'll have to come up with another one pretty soon. Just when the cognoscenti wrote off the Republican Party as a hopeless collection of angry white guys, it was 2010 and Republicans started electing black, brown and female candidates to office up and down the ballot.

It's not just that Republicans are electing young, interesting candidates, writes Michael Medved, although they are.

The Democrats, in other words, have become a party of shop-worn retreads while the GOP bench is full of next-generation leaders of potential national stature, including Governors Chris Christie of New Jersey, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Rick Perry of Texas, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Senators John Thune of South Dakota, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and many more.

First of all, Republicans are electing Hispanics.

After the recent elections, skeptics can no longer deride the GOP as an all-white party of grumpy old men. Marco Rubio, 39, became the new Senator from Florida while fellow Latino Republicans Bryan Sandoval in Nevada and Susana Martinez in New Mexico became the nation’s only two Hispanic Governors. Jaime Herrera, age 31, captured a Democratic Congressional seat in Washington State, while Raul Labrador did the same in Idaho. Two more Hispanic Republicans-- Bill Flores and Quico Canseco—knocked out incumbent Democrats in Texas.

Then you have South Asian Americans and African Americans.

In South Carolina, Indian-American Nikki Haley won for Governor while black conservative Tim Scott beat Strom Thurmond’s son (among others) for a Congressional seat. Alan West, an African-American Iraq War hero, trounced an incumbent white Florida Democrat.

Charles Krauthammer has described the 2010 election as a "reset," that gets the party strength back to 2004 before GOP fatigue set in. But the 2010 result seems to go further than that. It seems to be knocking the predictions of an enduring Democratic majority out of the ballpark. Especially when you add into the mix the entry of conservative women into the mix. Yeah, it's true that conservative women like Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, and Christine O'Donnell don't get no respect. But here's a prediction. You ain't seen the last of conservative women in the political arena. The déclassée ladies from State U ain't gonna take the derision of the liberals lying down.

Women have spent the last century getting into the public square. The first thing they experienced was politicians offering the services of big government to liberate them from the hardships and the drudgery of the ages. With that liberation women could have careers just like men!

Well, it didn't turn out quite as promised, because most women aren't particularly interested in the greasy pole of careerism, and they aren't that excited about trashing their families and short-changing their children. So now women, led by conservative women, are trying to work out a culture that honors women as women rather than trying to turn them into men but without all the aggression.

It's a new era. You could call it post-racist, post-sexist, and definitely post-liberal.

And in this new era, big-government liberalism is turning out to be on the wrong side of history.

Bernanke Tries to Float Homeowners

If you want to boil national economics down to one issue, it would be this: When debtors get underwater, it messes up the economy.

The reason for this is simple. Modern capitalism runs on credit (means faith). The faith that runs the credit system is that the other guy can make his responsibilities.

A bubble is a situation where a lot of people borrow money to buy assets which subsequently plunge in value. So these plungers end up underwater. If they were to sell their now-depreciated asset they would still have to find extra money to pay off their debt. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the economy is going to be in real trouble when millions of people are in this position, and are frozen in place hoping that, if they keep servicing their debt, things will turn out OK. The capitalist economy needs to have people freely trading and producing, not cowering in fright.

In other words, for capitalism to work, people must be able to cover their losses.

So now you can see what Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, is doing with his "QE2" money printing. He is trying to float the boats of the millions of people with upside-down mortgages. Once those boats are floating again then the millions of folks can sell their houses, they can move to new jobs. They can start to live again.

The cost of all this of course is enormous losses for the widows and orphans that own dollar-denominated assets. Because the whole idea is to devalue the dollar. You devalue the dollar and home prices rise. Home prices rise and underwater homeowners get to breathe again. Homeowners get to breathe and the economy recovers.

We've done this several times since the government asserted complete control of the credit system in 1913 with the establishment of the Federal Reserve. We did it in the 1930s. We did it during and after World War II. We did it in the 1970s when the US went off the Bretton Woods system. We did it after the Plaza Accord in 1985. We did it after the Mexican meltdown in 1994, the Long-Term Capital Management failure in 1998, the tech bubble in 2000, and the real-estate bubble in 2007-08.

Some day soon, it's going to be time for sensible, practical Americans to admit that the government has made a right mess of its constitutional right and duty to "coin money, [and] regulate the value thereof".

Once we've admitted that, then it will be time to do something about it.