Suppose Alinsky Has It Wrong?

In the last three years of Obama, conservatives writers have loved to terrify the conservative base with Saul Alinsky and his Rules For Radicals. The Alinsky tactics, particularly in Rule #13--"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it"--are held up as a sinister force against which honest conservatives are helpless. Now we see President Obama using Organizing for America in the battle of Wisconsin, the effort by Governor Scott Walker (R) to roll back organizing rights for public-sector unions.

But Alinsky's rules are nothing more than common sense. Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) uses them in his battle with the education blob in New Jersey. In fact he is very good at it. Some clueless state worker will complain about having to pay for health care premiums out of a 2 percent raise, and Christie talks about the 9 percent of workers in New Jersey that don't have jobs. He makes the state worker look like a complete fool.

In other words, Alinsky's tactics are the tactics that anyone uses in a political fight, whether an election or a battle in a state legislature. You want to make your opposition look like fools.

But in my view the bigger issue is that the idea of organizing the poor and the oppressed, as a political principle, is a loser. Let's take a look, starting at ground level and then taking a bigger and bigger perspective.

Suppose you lose? The point of political organizing is to mobilize your supporters for a fight. That is what politicians do routinely at election time. The idea is to divide the electorate so that you get at least 51 percent and the other chaps get the rest. We have elections scheduled regularly, so that we can divide, determine the winner, and get back to business. But the problem with provoking a fight is that you might lose. And I would argue that the history of most left-wing organizing is that the radical suits provoke the workers into outrages, which don't really help. Then after the protests, the radical suits head off to their next gig and the workers are left just as badly off as before. In the Battle of Wisconsin, the danger for President Obama and his union base is that they might actually provoke a counter movement that overpowers their movement. Remember? That's what happened after the Sixties. The American people hated the hippies and the lefty agitators, and voted for Richard Nixon.

Suppose you're wrong? The universal presumption on the left is that political power is the only way that the poor and the marginalized can get justice. The system is rigged against them by the corporations or the money power or discrimination, and the only way to end it is by political action followed by legislation to give the workers the social gains they are being denied by the injustice of the system. This goes back, of course, to Marx's immiseration theory and beyond. Obviously, from this point of view, if the bosses are making lots of money they are doing it on the backs of the workers. Thus the only way for the workers to get their fair share is by force. This theory dies a hard death; Deirdre McCloskey in her Bourgeois cycle has a good recent rebuttal. How can you get from $3 per day to $120 per day in two centuries by docking the workers of, say, $1 per day in wages? You can't make the arithmetic add up. That's because the prosperity of the modern era comes from innovation that benefits everyone.

Is politics the answer? The really big question overhanging everything is the modern faith in politics. And make no mistake, a faith in politics is a faith in force. It says that the way to get ahead in the world is by force, because government is force. Leaving aside the Biblical warnings about force, that he who lives by the sword will die by the sword, and Christ's final Temptation for power over all the nations of the earth, the record of political power is not that good, particularly if you look at recent American groups that have sought political power. There is the educated class, that now is the ruling class in America. It has brought us big government and now presides over us all with a disgusting corruption that it represents as high-mindedness. There is the working class, that spent the 19th century building authentic social institutions, and then wrecked itself when tempted by the educated class. There are African Americans, that were tempted by liberals right after the civil rights era and now are trapped in the liberal plantation. There are the feminists foolishly pursuing the chimera of comparable worth and proportionate representation in government and now the sciences. And now we have gays chasing the chimera of gay marriage. All these groups are in various stages of finding out that in pursuing political power they are drinking from a poisoned chalice. The point of human society is not to grab your pound of flesh, or hunker down like a dog in a manger, but to openly and generously contribute to the greater good.

President Obama doesn't know it yet, but the chances are that his Alinsky tactics will unite the majority of Americans against him. Chances are that he will go down as the president that led the Democratic Party and the progressive movement into the political wilderness for a generation.

I just hope that when the liberals and the Democrats finally reach the Promised Land they will have learned something from their years in the wilderness.

Between Freedom and Administration

When a corporation declares bankruptcy, it is common to say that it is operating "under administration." It is a polite way of saying that the corporation is no longer free to direct its own affairs. It operates only at the pleasure of its creditors acting through the courts. Administration means subjection.

In a similar way, Jean-Francois Revel, writing The Totalitarian Temptation in the bleak years before Ronald Reagan when it seemed that democratic capitalism was dying and that communism would take over the world, or at least participate as full partner in the future, wrote of the essential fragility of the totalitarian state. It must act with force and severity because it does not serve the hopes of its citizens, he wrote. Totalitarian states are fragile and brittle; their administrative structure makes them rigid and slow to adapt to changing conditions and needs.

The democratic state, on the contrary, ever since its birth in the three branch theory of Montesquieu in the 18th century, is a system that disperses and devolves power into separate and flexible institutions. From the three-branch state of executive, legislative, and judicial powers, Revel suggests six new powers that have arisen since the 18th century: business power, union power, media power, police power, military power, and diplomatic power.

Now I like to work from Michael Novak's three-sector model: political, economic, and moral/cultural, so it immediately appears to me that his nine-power model is clearly deficient in the moral/cultural realm. He leaves out, as a Frenchman well may, churches, fraternal associations, charitable groups, cultural associations, organizations that are not formed either for economic enterprise nor for political purposes.

But his differentiation of the executive power is interesting and useful. The chief executive is commander-in-chief, but under democratic capitalism there is a clear separation between the civilian leadership of the armed forces and the uniformed armed services themselves. This separation is intended as a separation of powers to prevent military dictatorship; it keeps the army out of politics and hopefully keeps the armed services from too much meddling by the politicians. The police power is also a deliberate separation from the unified executive. The idea is to limit the power of the executive to use the police power for political purposes, to criminalize and weaken the opposition. Notice that the separation of military and police power from the executive is a big deal to our liberal friends, and a credit to them.

Yes, but what about separating the administrative power from the executive, so that the operation of government departments is kept at a distance from elected politicians and their desire for the power to reward their friends and punish their enemies with government largesse.

This, perhaps, is the next stage in political evolution. It is easy to see why our present ruling class, the educated elite, has little interest in curbing the executive's influence over administration. Administrative centralism is the very life blood of the modern state. Our modern educated youths organize their lives to succeed in the system of administrative centralism, with its credentialism, its ticket punching, and its social power. A vast media empire is devoted to the boosting of the cultural and political power of the high fliers that go to selective colleges, establish reputations as political or foundation staffers or young academics, and then become honored experts, mandarins in the administrative welfare state, and the authors of the complex administrative initiatives that are offered in season to mitigate the administrative failures of a previous round of administrative innovation--the consequences of the law of unintended consequences.

The effect of the system of administrative centralism is similar to its extreme version, the totalitarian state. It solves every political problem with compulsion, with a new schedule of administrative regulations, and new subsidies and penalties. Each new ratchet of compulsion rigidifies and fragilizes. It sets society up for a fall, for the whole point of practical politics is to stop people going off and doing things without permission.

But the lesson of the modern era is that humans are social animals that can achieve amazing things when you give them the dignity and the freedom to innovate and serve their fellow humans without the club of administrative centralism. The whole apparatus of prices and ownership and credit and profit is a spontaneous human social organism that strongly encourages people to serve the needs of their fellow humans. The differentiated universe of social cooperation is a vibrant organism of life; the centralized administrative pyramid of the unified state is a mechanism of lifeless automation and compulsion.

The great challenge of the next generation is a moral/cultural one. It is to proselytize a new faith in freedom and dignity, and to marginalize the false faith in unity and compulsion. For the lesson of the 20th century is that centralization and compulsion through political power is a temptation of Satan himself. That was what Satan famously offered Jesus Christ: power over all the world.

But Christ said No; get thee behind me, old chum. And you can see why, not just from a moral point of view, but a practical point of view. Everything that political power touches turns to stone. Olease, for God's sake, keep politics and compulsion out of it; we humans are social animals, not regimented ants.

Just look at the commanding heights of the poltical sector. Government pensions are a mess, and about to bankrupt the states. Government health care is a mess as people massively overuse health care that is "free at the point of delivery." Government education has been on a decline for a century, as nobody values education that is free, and the failures lead to more and more regimentation and compulsion and the universal incarceration of children in government educational facilities. Government welfare is a joke, a program that could not have been better formulated if its intention had been to destroy the culture and the families and the work skills of the poor.

So what do we do? What is the first step back to freedom and dignity and away from administration and compulsion? Stay tuned; the best is yet to come.

From Goldwater to Reagan Redux?

It's pretty obvious what President Obama is doing in his budget. He is running for reelection and he is challenging those mean-spirited Republicans to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. So he is doing nothing about entitlements, hoping to set up the Republicans for a fall as soon as they touch the third rail of American politics.

And maybe it will all work out for him, as Republicans appear willing to accept the challenge he has flung down. As Robert Costa and Andrew Stiles report:

As of Monday early afternoon, House Republicans were officially undecided as to whether they’d take on entitlements when they write the budget this year. Fiscal-hawk extraordinaire Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, danced around the issue in a meeting with reporters... [J]ust as he was reluctantly deflecting the question, House majority leader Eric Cantor was dropping a bombshell in a pen-and-pad briefing with reporters elsewhere in the Capitol: Republicans, Cantor said, are all-in on entitlement reform.

Let's be candid about this. Democrats are going to demagogue this. They are going to try and do a rerun on the 1964 Presidential election when they successfully framed Barry Goldwater as a mad bomber that would get us into nuclear war. The result was the Vietnam War and the liberal belch of 1965 with Medicare and Medicaid and the War on Poverty.

The liberal belch of 1965 is what set the stage for the current entitlement crisis, because Medicare and Medicaid are now set to eat the budget.

As we know, President Obama and the Democrats have doubled down on the current system of administrative centralism with ObamaCare--which they claim, and presumably believe, will bend the cost curve down even as it ups the bureaucratizing and regulating of the health care field, and increases the number of people with subsidized access to health care.

Frankly, I suspect that President Obama and the Democrats are going to win this one, this time. They will demagogue the proposed Republican fixes to health care entitlements and President Obama will win election. But then the long-term will start to bite and by 2016 the American people will be in full revolt against everything Obamian and Democratic. We will see nasty inflation, we will see sky-high interest rates; we will see pervasive cronyism and out-front liberal corruption; we will see escalating problems with health care.

Then in 2016 the Goldwater moment of 2012 in which the liberals win by pure demagoguery will turn into the neo-Reagan era of 2016 and the sunny uplands of 20 years of growth and prosperity. We don't know who the Reagan will be, but this is America, the exceptional nation, and this is a nation that finds its Washington, its Hamilton, its Lincoln, and its Reagan in its hour of need.

So I say to the House Republicans: go ahead. Put your proposals on the table. Realize that many of you in the front ranks will fall the to musket balls of the Obamis and their willing accomplices in the media. Understand that in the strategic picture your sacrifices will lay the groundwork for the victory of 2016.

And if, despite the best efforts of the Obamis and the Democrats, Republican reforms go through in the next two years, well, sometimes virtue is rewarded in this life rather than in the next.

Can Obama Do a Clinton?

The conservative reaction to President Obama's budget is fear. Fear that Obama will do a Clinton on the Republicans and set up a government shutdown that the voters will blame on mean-spirited conservatives.

What we need, says Thomas Sowell, is a Rocky Marciano, who knows how to take the punches but has the patience to wait for the opportunity to land the big one.

On the other hand, Daniel Foster has House Majority Leader Cantor stepping up to the plate with this comment:

Your question about the budget itself and the entitlement inclusion, yes, we will include entitlement reform provisions in our budget, again, unlike the President, and unlike Harry Reid who doesn’t even admit there needs to be any reform of Social Security.

We have to look at the bigger strategic picture. And that includes preparing the battlefield. Republicans and conservatives need to get the line out that the sooner we do entitlement reform, the less it will hurt, and the less it will hurt the poor and the elderly. The battlefield preparation may involve tactical defeats, which is a polite way of saying that there will be casualties. Bright, promising politicians will be defeated before they have a chance to realize their potential.

The outline of the future is clear; it has been worked out by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-IL). He proposes to convert Medicare from a defined benefit to a fixed subsidy. Senior citizens will get an annual amount to apply to the health insurance of their choice. Left unsaid, I suspect, is the obvious follow-on, that Congress will eventually demand that richer Americans will get less of a subsidy that poor Americans.

Yes, but what about the poor and Medicaid. My solution is Wal-Mart-care. Think of health care today as a world of corner stores and department stores. Very nice, and all that. But most people don't shop at corner stores and department stores any more. They go to the big-box stores.

Wal-Mart is already putting in-store clinics into its stores. It already has a fixed monthly fee for all-you-can-eat generic drugs. Expect that the genius of American innovation will find new ways to deliver health care on the big-box model.

Meanwhile, what are we talking about when we say that Republicans just don't know how to play the sound-bite wars? Who was it who came up with "death panels," who talks about "common-sense conservatism" and even "common-sense constitutional conservatism?" And now Sarah Palin has described President Obama's policy as "a bullet train to bankruptcy."

I tell you. The future is so bright, I gotta wear shades.

President Obama Behind the 8-Ball

With the release of the his FY12 federal budget President Obama is reaching a do-or-die moment.

The key to the budget is the new estimate of the deficit for FY11, the current fiscal year, from $1.2 trillion to $1.6 trillion. You can see the problem here, using usgovernmentspending.com's Federal Budget Analyst.

Budget	FY 2012 Deficit $ billion
FY2007	204.9
FY2008	53.8
FY2009	94.8
FY2010	929.4
FY2011	1,266.7
FY2012	1,645.1

No, it ain't pretty. And it's all the consequence of the two strategic errors made by the Obama administration in 2009. Let's list them:

1. Orthodox Keynesian Stimulus. Stimulus has a point when you are trying to rescue the banking system from a meltdown. But the idea that you can stimulate the economy with government spending is laughable. Liberals just can't wean themselves away from the notion, and this time, it is going to cost them big time.
2. Full-on liberal agenda. Obama and his chaps just put the pedal to the metal in 2009 with gigantic expansions of traditional liberal special-interest spending plus ObamaCare, a huge weight on the economy, and all the educated class agenda on high-speed rail, clean energy and taxing and regulating conventional fossil fuels. It was a gigantic mistake, and liberals will be paying for it out to the horizon.

The basic problem for President Obama is that Americans are frightened. They are frightened that the big spending and the big deficits are going to hurt the economy and take away their jobs and their retirement.

In that, the American people are right.

Maybe the economy, with the inflationary QE2 and the Fed printing money like mad, will improve enough by 2012 to get President Obama home for reelection. But maybe not.

In any case, the Liberal Hour is over. Whether President Obama gets reelected or not, the American people are souring on big government programs, especially as they feel, rightly, that they don't benefit them. That means that a second-term Obama would be in office, but not in power. And that would mean a mid-term election which could reduce Democrats to numbers not seen for over a century.

Beyond Blame

If we want to understand who to blame for the current cock-up in government, it is easy: our liberal friends.

It is liberals that have championed the neo-feudal welfare state and its politicization of everything.

Yes, of course, years ago liberals had noble thoughts about helping the helpless. But because their social vision did not extend beyond the administrative model of the absolute monarchs, their noble initiatives have inevitably descended into simple patronage politics. Politicians bid for the votes of the voters by dangling benefits before them. Inevitably, they offer more than the economy can deliver, and so, at some point, the government runs out of money to tax, borrow, or print.

So far so good. But there is a question ultimately more interesting and more uplifting than the tawdry question of blame. After all, all governments are a mess, stumbling from one disaster to another. All governments. Even in its heyday in the 19th century, the British Empire was a succession of disasters. First there was the mess of the Crimean War. Then there was the Indian Mutiny, called, in India, the Uprising. Then there was Gordon in Khartoum, followed by the Boer War. What a mess!

No, my question is: what is it about the belief system of our liberal friends that led them into the blind alley of the administrative welfare state? What was it that allowed them to imagine that their big government would be any different from the big governments of history? What made them believe that the vast expansion of government would be anything other than a moral and cultural disaster? What made them think that you could have liberation, dignity, and justice with a big overweening government? After all, the whole point of a good belief system and its moral universe is to help its believers and practitioners avoid the common pitfalls of self-delusion and hypocrisy. A good religion should be a prop, and help you live a worthy and a meaningful life. It should not lead you into a reactionary political system and a swamp of hypocrisy.

In my view the big problem is that our liberal friends cannot see that their moral and political enthusiasms are, in the strict sense, religions. They think that they have grown beyond the superstitions and the narrowness of religious belief. In fact they think that religion is on its way out as people come to rely on science and reason instead of fanciful belief in gods and spirits.

In fact, of course, the history of the modern era is the story of one secular religious movement after another. You can start with the French Revolution and its cult of Reason. Then there is Romanticism, a belief that there is something deeper than reason that explains the nature of life. There is socialism in all its variants, the nostalgic idea that we can return to the Garden of Eden of perfect, eternal community. There is Comte and his Religion of Humanity. There is fascism, the nostaglia for the tribe and the kindred. There is Nietzsche and the Ubermensch, the extraordinary individual. There is the cult of creativity, the transformation of the natural generative urge into a metaphor of non-physical creation. There is the puritanical environmentalist movement that seeks to purify and save a polluted and corrupted world. It goes on and on.

Our liberal friends fail to understand that the meaning of life, its telos, is always a mystery. We do not know our human purpose, if we have a purpose. We do not know how we should act in order to survive and flourish. We do not even know if human survival is warranted. What we have is faith. We believe that certain ways are the best way to survive, to flourish, and to create a moral society. In the day-to-day social life we try to work out what is best for us, best for our families, best for our larger social groupings, and best for the world. In the arena of national politics, liberals believe in certain liberal folkways and conservatives believe in certain conservative folkways. It seems pretty certain that the other guys have got the wrong end of the stick and are likely to bring the nation to disaster. And because government is almost always a train wreck in progress, the governing class must bear the weight of the blame.

In the United States, over the last century, the educated class of liberals, progressives, creatives, secularists--whatever you want to call them--have dominated politics and culture. It is their ideas that drive the government, with its trillion dollars a year in government pensions, its trillion dollars a year in government health care, its trillion dollars a year in government education, and its three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year in government welfare. It is liberals that dominate the universities, liberals that dominate the entertainment media. They have caused the current crisis because they lacked the self-consciousness to realize that they, just like everyone before them, have a religion. It's a secular religion, for sure, but religion all the same. When you take your religion and you breathe it into all the organs of government, legislating morality with that secular religion, then you break down the separation between church and state, between the political sector and the moral/cultural sector. Of course, you don't believe that. You think that only right-wing preachers and right-wing politicians can create a theocracy.

But it takes a remarkably narrow and pinched understanding of the modern age not to understand that, in socialism and communism, and now in environmentalism and the climate change movement, we have what we have often had in the past, militant religions enthusiastically pursuing a vision to save the world from sin.

"Turmoil in their Ranks"

The chaps at The New York Times are eager to report that all is not well with the House Republicans. In "House Republicans Battle Turmoil in Their Ranks" Tom Hulse reports that:

Under pressure to make deeper spending cuts and blindsided by embarrassing floor defeats, House Republican leaders are quickly discovering the limits of control over their ideologically driven and independent-minded new majority.

For the second consecutive day, House Republicans on Wednesday lost a floor vote due to a mini-revolt, this time over a plan to demand a repayment from the United Nations. Earlier in the day, members of the party’s conservative bloc used a closed-door party meeting to push the leadership to go well beyond its plans to trim about $40 billion from domestic spending and foreign aid this year, demanding $100 billion or more.

So? What's not to like? There is a word to describe this situation. It is "democracy."

The elections of 2010 sent 63 new Republicans to the House of Representatives. It's the biggest turnover in a couple of generations. Obviously, it will change the game in Washington. But how? That is what Republicans are discovering as they stumble into the future.

A couple of years ago, after Democrats had won 55 seats in the House over two election cycles, they reckoned it gave them a mandate to crank federal spending up to 24 or 25 percent of GDP. On reflection, it is probably fair to say that they were mistaken. On balance. That's because the vast majority of Americans are worried about jobs and worried about deficits. They see big government as a threat to their livelihood.

Now the Republicans have swept to control of the House. These Republicans represent people who think that "something must be done" about wasteful spending and big deficits. So they are starting on that project. The GOP leaders, not surprisingly, are rather less gung-ho than the freshman class. They remember the Gingrich years and the firestorm they went through when they tried to cut spending with President Clinton in the White House. What we are seeing is the Republicans come to a consensus about just how tough they are going to get on spending.

In any case, all this is penny-ante stuff. The real story is the long-term budget outlook. As this chart from usgovernmentspending.com shows, the real question is health care: Medicare and Medicaid.

Obviously, the growth of Medicare and Medicaid cannot go on like this forever. They run into Herbert Stein's law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Somehow, in some way, the growth in government health care spending will stop.

Years from now we may look back on the budget battle of 2011 and see the seeds of the Great Repudiation--of big government.

Or maybe not.