Three Liberal Delusions

Liberals have erected an elaborate apology to justify the centralized administrative state run by liberals. They need this apology because at the heart of liberalism is a profound contradiction, writes Peter Berkowitz.

The paradox of American progressivism, old and new, is rooted in the gap between its professed devotion to democracy, or the idea that the people legitimately rule, and its belief that democracy consists in a set of policies independent of what the people want.

In order to deal with this contradiction, believing in democracy in the abstract, but determined to impose their agenda anyway, liberals have come up with three ideologies, says Berkowitz.

The first is John Rawls and Deliberative Democracy. John Rawls is famous for his Theory of Justice in which he sets up a contract theory of politics that justifies liberal politics.

According to Rawls, justice concerns the principles that free and equal citizens would adopt to govern themselves if they thought impartially, objectively, and rationally about their condition as human beings. It has two basic parts: fundamental and inviolable liberties, and an obligation on the part of the state to adopt "measures ensuring for all citizens adequate all-purpose means to make effective use of their freedoms" [emphasis added]...

But unofficially and in practice, Rawls's theory of justice, certainly as adopted by professors of practical ethics and applied to public affairs, is distinguished by more. It also purports to derive from "public reason," or the abstract principles and rules that structure public debate, substantive public policies and disqualify others. It's as if the rules of baseball told you not only how to play the game, but also who ought to win and who ought to lose.

Very convenient. It lets liberals decide what is legitimate and what is not. They know what the people would choose, "were it not for their poor education, combined with passions and prejudices corrupted by the imperfections of social life and the inequities of the market economy."

Then there is Richard Rorty and Pragmatism. This notion seeks to equate liberal progressive reform with justice itself. It is not so much pragmatic as picking up where the pragmatists like John Dewey left off, proposing democracy as a kind of civic faith: "democracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency, but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience in nature." Rorty argues that:

the proper aim of American politics is nothing less than to embody in social and political life "a new conception of what it is to be human." And the utopian overtones are no accident. This new conception, Rorty reveals, rejects all claims to "knowledge of God's will, Moral Law, the laws of History or the Facts of Science." All the better, exhorts Rorty, to make "shared utopian dreams" the guide to pragmatic and progressive politics.

As with Rawls's ideas, Rorty is just providing a crude apology for the liberal faith. Liberalism is democratic because liberals call their program and their faith "Democracy."

Finally, Berkowitz calls up the "empathy" brigade, that we last saw justifying the liberal jurisprudence of Sonya Sotomayor. This Empathy, according to President Obama, is "a call to stand in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes." The problem is that we are only called to empathize with the eyes of a "wise Latina." White middle class men need not apply.

The problem with these three liberal delusions is not that it deludes liberals into thinking that theirs is the only true democratic thought. The problem is that it does not engage with the real problem, the daily clash with reality: what do you do when things do wrong?

Government is force, politics is power. It is OK to use government for things that require force, like wars and policing. But what about things that don't require force? How do you fix a Social Security system that is going bankrupt? How do you balance the need of senior citizens for health care with the need of young parents for education for their children? How do you balance the desire of some parents for a creative education for their children and other parents for a Three Rs education? Centralized administrative government by an educated elite wants to set up a permanent, one size fits all answer to any political problem, and thus has no answer for these questions. For the truth is that all economic activity is characterized by ceaseless change and adaptation to new and unexpected conditions.

That is why liberals today are flummoxed and in denial. There is no allowance in their system for the reality that, as soon as their comprehensive mandatory program for health care, or education, or welfare is in place, it is immediately overtaken by events. From that moment on, the program finds itself trying to catch up with events and never succeeding.

Now you know why liberals are forced into demonizing their political opponents as racists and haters. For it cannot be, it must not be that the failures of all those government programs mean that a whole century of centralized liberal government has been one long disastrous error for which ordinary Americans are about to pay the terrible price.

"Class Warfare in Moral Terms"

Why not tax the rich until the pips squeak? After all, there are desperately poor people that need the money. You need to "spread the wealth" as then Candidate Obama told Joe the Plumber in 2008.

Well, now President Obama has bowed to political necessity and urged Congress to continue the Bush federal income tax rates, including the 35 percent top rate that Bush passed, reducing the Clinton 39.4 percent rate, but not yet getting back to the 28 percent top rate in the Reagan 1986 tax bill.

President Obama apparently accepts the notion that, in practical terms, now is not the time to raise tax rates, not while the nation is struggling out of a severe recession. But once the economy is out of danger, why not cream the rich and make them pay?

First, the facts. At the American Thinker today, my "Incomes Taxes, Millionaires and Billionaires" makes the point that the richest one percent, at current rates, already pay about 40 percent of federal income taxes while the bottom 50 percent pay about three percent. How much is enough?

But that is just a practical argument. Let us argue the point in moral terms as William McGurn argues in "Billionaires on the Warpath." And what better way to do it than with the seven virtues, starting with prudence?

Prudence is the practical virtue, and prudence argues that we don't want to distort the economy with high rates targeted at the rich. You end up with the monstrous tax code we have now, because people keep coming to Congress to get special exceptions. I've been looking through the Revenue Acts of the 1930s and 1940s as the tax rates were soaring during the New Deal and World War II. It is staggering so see the dozens of exceptions and special cases starting to appear in the code. Because, of course, when Congress enacts high tax rates then economic interests of all kinds find themselves harmed and go to Congress for relief.

Temperance. We shouldn't have swingeing anything. Especially in today's economy, the rich are not aristocratic families with vast land-holdings that exist upon the sweat of serfs. The rich hold their wealth and make their incomes from building economic wealth in startups and the great corporations that shower products and services on the American people. Moderation in all things, even for the taxation of the rich.

Courage. We should be courageous in opposing the hateful class warriors that gin up envy against the rich. Envy, remember, is one of the seven deadly sins.

Justice. If justice means anything, it means one set of rules for all leavened with the yeast of equity, the understanding that inflexible rules can sometimes result in the most awful injustice.

Faith. If we have faith in our fellow humans we must believe that there is good in the rich, good in the middle class, and good in the poor. To tax anyone with penal rates is to lack faith in the human project. It is to say that we are monsters, and monsters must be eliminated.

Hope. High tax rates and big government are not the policies of hope. They are the policies of despair, that the poor can never thrive on their own energy and labor. Instead the rich must be bled so that the poor can receive a transfusion. Without the transfusion, all hope for the poor is gone.

Love. How can you love anyone when you sicc the tax collectors on them? Love means wishing the best for other people in their terms, not yours. Socialists think they know what is best for everyone according to a universal rule of equality of results, but never ask what other people might want for themselves.

What we want from the rich is not a pound of flesh, cut from them by penal taxation. We want them to contribute openly and voluntarily in a million acts of kindness and generosity to the general welfare of the American people. As well as create jobs, products, and services with their businesses and their economic ideas.

Oh, and one other thing. The problem with high tax rates is that they protect the today's rich from competition from tomorrow's rich. High tax rates make it very hard to get rich.

Liberals Please Step Aside

Everything is set for a new century of growth, writes Walter Russell Mead, except for America's political class.

America has everything it needs for success in the twenty-first century with one exception: a critical mass of thinkers, analysts and policy entrepreneurs who can help unleash the creative potential of the American people and build the new government and policy structures that will facilitate a new wave of private-sector led growth.

It's the intellectual class that's the problem. It is backward looking and reactionary. In several ways.

• Support for statism. "Since the late nineteenth century most intellectuals have identified progress with the advance of the bureaucratic, redistributionist and administrative state. The government, guided by credentialed intellectuals with scientific training and values, would lead society through the economic and political perils of the day. " Yeah. I'll say.
• Interest and class. "Most intellectuals today still live in a guild economy. The learned professions – lawyers, doctors, university professors, the clergy of most mainline denominations, and (aspirationally anyway) school teachers and journalists – are organized in modern day versions of the medieval guilds. " Actually, I would say that the liberal guilds are caricatures of the old medieval guilds, which were, at bottom, self-governing social organizations perched perilously under the warrior aristocrats that ruled the age. The liberal guilds are little more than political pressure groups. They are not true "mediating structures."
• Training gap. "We are much less effective at teaching and supporting people who are able to master the essentials of many complex subjects, integrate the insights from this kind of study into a coherent social or political vision, and communicate what they have learned to a broad general lay audience. " Hmm. The trouble with this sort of thinking is that it assumes the continuation of the current bureaucratic administrative elite. Suppose that the new elite to come doesn't operate that way. Suppose it operates more by spontaneous association and the promotion of ideas and leaders from below instead of the top-down processes of today. Suppose that the future is Tea Party, not Anointed Ones?

Actually, all this is beside the point. The big question, in my mind, is whether our current liberal elite--the "clerisy," the Class of 1848, the New Class, the educated elite, whatever you want to call them--will have the decency to leave the stage without pulling the scenery down around them, and the rest of us as well.

The foundational assumptions of American intellectuals as a group are firmly based on the assumptions of the progressive state and the Blue Social Model. Those who run our government agencies, our universities, our foundations, our mainstream media outlets and other key institutions cannot at this point look the future in the face.

Who cares? Don't look the future in the face, liberals, if you don't want to. The trouble is that liberals don't want to let the rest of us, who do want to look the future in the face, take power and get on with America's future. Because the whole point of modern liberalism since its invention in the culture of the revolutions of 1848 is political power. It wasn't ever really about the working class, or women, or minorities, or gays, or whatever. It was always and only about the power of the intellectual class.

What these chaps cannot face is that the ordinary chaps who really made a difference in the industrial age, men like the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Edisons, were not men from the intellectual class, nor did they have pretensions about themselves. Nor were they interested in political power. They just wanted to build their businesses in the intoxicating days of the 19th century. When they had strutted their hour upon the stage they were quite happy to go home and let someone else take over.

Unlike today's intellectual class.

The Liberal Syllabus of Errors

Whether or not President Obama has done a number on Republicans (by increasing spending in the tax-cut compromise) or betrayed his Democratic base (by abandoning his promise to raise taxes on the rich) the fact is that the Bush tax rates continue. And the battle for the mind of America continues.

Absolutely critical is what the professionals call "messaging." We conservatives need to hammer away at the fundamental things that liberals have got wrong and persuade the American people, the moderates in the middle, that the liberals have got it wrong. As in:

• Corporations are evil. Corporations are big institutions that make products and deliver services to people. Since the limited liability corporation emerged in the mid 19th century the prosperity of the ordinary person that works for or buys from big corporations has sky-rocketed at a rate unprecedented in human history. Ordinary people that have been protected from big corporations in socialist countries and in the Third World have not done so well. This is evil?
• The rich should pay their fair share. The rich already pay more in tax as a percent of reported income than the middle class. How much more do you want? The record is that as you lower tax rates on the rich they mysteriously report more income. So, it seems from a practical point of view that if you want to tax the rich you should find a sweet spot that encourages them to fire the lawyers and tax accountants and just pay up.
• Inequality is the problem. Hey, it's morally tricky that some people make more money than others. Some people make obscenely more. But all we know is that, in the last two hundred years, the societies that didn't worry too much about inequality experienced the most increase in general prosperity while the societies that worried most about inequality experienced the least increase in prosperity. Anyway, once you let the government start messing with equality it merely starts to shovel money at the government supporters, irrespective of need. Government supporters just come to get defined as deserving and government opponents defined as undeserving. How unequal is that?
• The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The majority of the poor in the United States cool their houses with air conditioning and own automobiles, and live in houses that, on average, are the same size as the the average house in Europe. And, of course, the poor benefit from the startling increase in life expectancy of the last two centuries. The poor are immeasurably richer than they were two hundred years ago. But then so are the rich.
• Americans are racists. Let us put it this way. In the last two hundred years there has been a sea change in the way that humans think about people who look different from them. Call it the influence of the Enlightenment or global commerce. In this move liberals were often a couple of inches in front of the rest of us. But often liberals have exploited race for political power, as in Affirmative Action, diversity, and racial quotas. In general, ordinary Americans have shut up and kept their heads down in the race wars while liberals have pontificated and shamed and blamed. Except for one shining moment in the 1960s liberals have plenty to be ashamed about when it comes to race.

Well, that will do for today. But it is an important subject. If we are to curb liberal political power we have to persuade the American people of the utter folly and utter delusion of liberal ideas and liberal talking points. And the next two years, as liberals try to squirm out of the mess they have got into, will be crucial.

Olby's Indictment, Clause by Clause

MSNBC host Keith Olbermann has done us all a favor. In his rant last Tuesday, after President Obama's own presser rant, he has delivered a bill of indictment against President Obama. He--or his writing team--has detailed the specific ways in which the liberal base feels betrayed. For that, we owe him a huge debt of gratitude. It takes a true believer to locate the emotional pulse of the liberal base and report on its flutterings.

So here is Olbermann's bill of particulars:

• Rendition and domestic spying. Olby hits the "refusal of even the most perfunctory of investigations of rendition or domestic spying or the other crimes of the Bush Administration". Nothing has been achieved: any future administration can do the same.
• Afghanistan. Liberals don't understand why we are there.
• Continuation of Gitmo. Liberals don't get that either.
• Single payer and public option. Olby faults the president's "preemptive abandonment."
• Don't Ask Don't Tell. Olby faults "foot-dragging."
• Getting less than he could have. Olby feels that the president expects liberals to be happy that the president isn't John McCain and that he saved us from another Great Depression. Given those amazing achievements, the president expects liberals to forgive him for settling for less than he could have on health reform and taxes.

In Olbermann's rage we see the elected Democrats starting to pay the price of riding the Angry Left bronco through the mid 2000s. By fanning the left's rage about President Bush and his forward strategy against radical Islam the Democrats set themselves up for an expectations crisis once they got back to power. The beltway Democrats knew that Bush wasn't a rogue president. Almost certainly they were consulted as Bush developed the nuts and bolts of his response to 9/11, including Gitmo and rendition. But they acted as if they were "shocked, shocked" that these decisions had been taken, and showed up in force at Michael Moore's agit-prop Fahrenheit 911 mockumentary.

Now they are paying the price. You'd have to search pretty hard to find any of Bush's strategy that hasn't been reluctantly confirmed by the Obamis. And the clearly different directions they took, most obviously the "reset" strategy of open arms to thug dictators, has been a disaster.

For chaps like me that voted for Obama precisely because we wanted the Democrats to be confronted with reality on the War on Terror, all this is good news. The reluctant embrace of the Bush strategy was always likely. But the rage in the Democratic base is a bonus.

The idea that Obama could have got a better deal from the Republicans on taxes does have merit. Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics thinks that Obama could have got a better deal. He could have dared Republicans to walk into the coffin corner of voting for a cold Xmas for the unemployed while sticking up for millionaires and billionaires.

Either way, the Democratic base is livid. And that can only for good for a center-right nation that wants to curb the excesses of big government.

It Ain't WikiLeaks' Fault

It's great fun to run around accusing Julian Assange of espionage or, better still, of failing to use condoms. After all, that's what politicians do when they are not actually running for election. They run around accusing other people of the most frightful crimes and misdemeanors even as the government totally screws up everything it does.

Now, admittedly, failing to use a condom is one of the worst crimes in the liberal calendar.

But hey fellas, if you chaps in the State Department don't want everyone reading your cables for breakfast then you need to apply proper security precautions.

State Department cables are exchanged on SIPRNet, apparently. And about 3 million people have access. No problem, chaps. But clearly, it should be impossible for anyone to get their hands on 150,000 cables as WikiLeaks has done. How hard is this?

Now, admittedly, it was great fun to leak everything in sight when the media were busy embarrassing the hated Bush administration back in the 2000s. And it was only right to hit Vice-President Cheney in the keister. The liberal renegades in the State Department and their bribed apologists in the media were delighted to see the Bushies embarrassed. But didn't they think about the moment when some chap like Julian Assange would take advantage of the opportunity to embarrass a Democratic administration. For chaps like that, noble Democrats aren't much different from eevil Republicans. It's not unprecedented. Back in the 1940s we had Commie physicists getting their hands on US nuclear secrets and handing them over to Uncle Joe Stalin. Hello? Was anyone home back then?

What we don't want to do is make Julian Assange into a martyr like the sainted Rosenbergs. Prosecuting the Rosenbergs turned into a political bonanza for liberals and lefties, and they postured and pretended for years that the Rosenbergs were as innocent as fresh-laid snow and victims of eevil McCarthyism.

No. What we need is for a few heads to roll at the State Department and a few dozen inter-agency committees devising new methods of limiting access to State Department cables. Also, I dare say it wouldn't hurt to trigger an alarm when anyone starts trying to assemble a whole bunch of cables all at once. After all, who needs to set up their own private vault of State Department cables?

Market Says Ho Hum on Tax Package

The "framework" for a tax deal struck between President Obama and Republican leaders yesterday seems to satisfy neither the Democratic base nor the Republican base. So it probably represents the best deal that either side can hope for on December 6, 2010 in a lame-duck Congress.

The most telling reaction, of course, is from the stock market. On the buy-on-rumor, sell-on-news theory, we can assume that the market, that rose strongly last week and today is flat, thinks the package is so-so.

That is not good news for President Obama, who needs a pretty strong economy starting early in 2011 to get a decent economy in 2012 for reelection.

Of course, the tax package, which more or less extends the Bush tax cuts, doesn't do anything about the real big drag on the economy, which is ObamaCare.

The stage is now set for the political argument of the next two years. Should the economy be based on the privilege-and-subsidy state of the liberals, on the belief that ordinary people cannot get a fair shake without a heavy government leaning on the exchange relationships of employer and employee, producer and consumer? Or should it be based on a level playing field of low tax rates and low spending, on the assumption that capitalism is basically a win-win proposition where service and trustworthiness is repaid in a decent return on labor, on capital, on the consumer dollar, and on the investment of trust in the system?

This is the Great War that has raged since 1848, when the educated youth upped and declared that the whole thing stank. They declared that the bourgeois were exploiters and that students and workers were victims. Special interventions were needed to save the workers from a fate worse than death, and the educated youth were the only chaps with the moral standing to do it.

Now, more than ever, it is time to really evaluate what the century and a half of economic interventions has really delivered and what it can hope to deliver in the future. Or is big government just big government whether it is run by absolute monarchs or absolute politicians?

Now more than ever, it is time for the lovers of liberty to strain every brain cell and every sinew to persuade the American people first, that the liberal world view is wrong and second, that its politicization of everything is cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful, and deluded.