The Political Philosophy of Late Liberalism

How convenient that I should be discursing on the justification of political power one day and the political nostalgia of uber-liberal E.J. Dionne the next. Let us mix them together and see what happens.

I first argued that, because government is force and politics is power, then you can only justify the resort to government (force) in exceptional circumstances, which I argued were invasion and injustice.

Then I laughed at E.J. Dionne's sudden nostalgia for President George W. Bush. All Democrats are nostalgic for the previous generation of Republicans.

But it was the offhand statement of liberal principle that resonated with me. Dear old President Bush actually wanted to do more with government, huffed E.J.; not for him mere "cutting taxes, slashing regulation or eliminating large swaths of government" like today's lot.

Unlike this crowd of Republicans, Bush acknowledged that the federal government can ease injustices and get useful things done.

Notice how this jars with my examination of the necessary springs of political action. In my view, government is force and it is illegitimate to do anything unless it requires force. But E.J. Dionne takes a more avuncular approach. He writes like a member of the Ruling Class. Of course he would. Yes, he intones, we compassionate elitists want to ease the injustices of life. We want to do useful things.

But the problem is that he leaves out the element of force. Government does not trot up one day and put a shoulder to the wheel of justice. It writes laws and raises taxes and spends money taken from taxpayers by force. Reasonable people might conclude that the injustice in question had better be a pretty serious injustice to justify all that force. Nor does government turn up one day and say that we're here to help on a useful project. It takes money from taxpayers by force and bond-holders and spends the money on some useful thing. But the money spent on that useful thing cannot be spent on some other useful thing. Maybe today that useful thing is the most useful thing that anyone could imagine. But what about tomorrow? For sure, the folks hired to do that useful thing will scream and yell that to abandon that useful thing will result in food being removed from the mouths of children. But producer interests always say that.

What we have here is the situation of every ancien regime, which came to power in some former time and now casually justifies its power not with the burning flame of rage and subordination, but with the avuncular self-inflation of the aristocratic scion: Yes, darling, just leave the injustice and all the complicated stuff to me. You wouldn't really be interested.

The great challenge of our era is the problem of every comfortable age. When people can afford to pay someone else to do the dirty work, they start the descent into decadence. You hire out the cleaning of their house, the raising of the kids, the driving of the car, the investment of the capital, the tallying of everyday expenses, eventually even the "work". And step by step, faster than you think, you become decadent and soft--not necessarily badly behaved, but soft in the sense of "use it or lose it."

The problem of the liberal welfare state is that we leave the organization of all public and communal affairs to liberals and bureaucrats. But the health of American life depends on the involvement of everyone in the day-to-day activities of social life, from high politics to neighborly cooperation and to family life. When government does all these useful things it means that necessarily ordinary people get excluded from participation. In other words humans as social animals are excluded from social life.

The whole point of modern American conservatism is to think and act upon this great truth. Everyone has a contribution to make, and it is a great injustice to exclude the great mass of ordinary people, as E.J. Dionne does with such cavalier presumption, in favor of liberal scions and their bribed supporters in government and on the entitlement rolls.

E.J. Nostalgic for Bush

Our liberal friends are always nostalgic for the previous generation of Republicans. They were so moderate! Not like the current crop of extremists. Now E.J. Dionne has got all nostalgic about President George W. Bush.

The 2012 GOP presidential field on display Monday offered not one idea about how to solve the problems facing our country that didn’t boil down to cutting taxes, slashing regulation or eliminating large swaths of government.

What troubles E.J. is that Rep. Michele Bachmann, the extremist, no longer looks that extremist in the middle of the current crop of GOP presidential candidates.

That’s why I felt nostalgia for Bush, especially the guy who was a candidate for president in 2000. Unlike this crowd of Republicans, Bush acknowledged that the federal government can ease injustices and get useful things done.

Of course, Dionne continues, he has no nostalgia for the later, war-mongering Bush. Oh no.

But I appreciate what E.J. said, partly because he indicates that liberals are getting nervous. You see, they don't get nostalgic when extremist Republicans are running around getting nowhere. They only get nostalgic when the new breed of extremists looks like they might actually win. When Nixon looked like winning, they got all nostalgic about Ike. When Reagan looked like winning they got all nostalgic about Tricky Dick. When George W. Bush looked like winning they got all nostalgic about Poppy Bush.

What these liberals don't do is figure that it might be something liberals are doing that is helping elect these Republicans that seem, in each generation, more extremist than the last one. Let us answer the unposed question. What is it that liberals are doing that makes the Republican Party more and more extremist, and reduces it to a party of cuts: "cutting taxes, slashing regulation or eliminating large swaths of government"?

Here is the telling phrase: "the federal government can ease injustices and get useful things done." Here is the line between liberals and conservatives, between Democrats and Republicans.

Sure the federal government can "ease injustices" but Republicans believe that government can only do something about the really big injustices: e.g., slavery and legally enforced segregation. But when it comes to regulating the details of the workplace, when it comes to gigantic entitlement programs that hugely increase the cost of hiring workers, then Republicans say Enough Already!

It comes down to this. When we suggest "the federal government can... get useful things done", the answer that Republicans make is: "not much." Why? Because most useful work in this world is about making products and services that people want and are willing to pay for. Government at all levels is really bad at doing these useful things that require flexible and adaptive response to changing needs, tastes, and market conditions. That is why all government programs end up as subsidies for powerful producer interests. Nobody goes to government to start up a useful program that people are willing to pay for. They go to government to start up a program that they and their friends believe is useful, but that, for some reason, business has failed to produce at the price that the advocates want to pay. Then, when the program doesn't deliver much of anything, the advocates sneer that program opponents are "mean spirited" or don't care about kids.

Of course, this is a charitable analysis of E.J. Dionne's nostalgia. When we talk about "injustices" and "useful things" the fact is that people disagree profoundly about what counts as an injustice and what counts as a useful thing. The great political conflicts are precisely about deciding what injustices are serious enough for the government to ease, and what useful thing the government ought to get into. But E.J. Dionne will need to get nostalgic about another couple of GOP political generations before he gets to realize that.

The Grounds of Political Action

Government is force. Politics is power. So every political initiative is a program of force. Ever government program is an exercise of power.

But humans are social animals; we understand that only in exceptional circumstances is there a warrant for force. Thus political actors feel the need to justify their campaigns of force and power.

Every justification of force, it seems to me, comes down to two scenarios. Either the community is threatened by an invader--the Russians are coming--or the community is ruled by a tyrant--off with his head! These two springs of government action are so obvious as to be truisms, yet we often forget first principles. The two principles are also intimate. It is the need to repel the invader that invests the executive with the mandate of force, and it is the continuance of this power after the victory over the invader that creates the occasion for the abuse of power and the occasion of injustice.

But let us look at this from the position of the political activist. If someone wants power he has two roads to power. He can energize the community against the frightful danger--of Russians, Germans, Islamists. Or he must rile up the people against the monstrous injustices perpetrated by the current ruling clique. Again, this is almost a truism. If the nation isn't threatened by an invader, then why should the nation submit to the extraordinary subventions required in a national emergency? If there isn't a gross injustice then where is the justification for mounting a head of rebellion with all the risks of failure?

Our liberal friends have developed a curious version of all this. In the first place, they want to believe that there really isn't a threat from the invader. That is all just nationalism, and patriotism, we all know, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. But our liberal friends don't want to throw away the opportunity to wage war, so they came up with the moral equivalent of war: wars on want, on poverty, on global warming, on pollution.

But it is the liberal response to injustice that is really ingenious. For liberals argue that it is they, the political elite, that is the agent most appropriate to correct the injustices so keenly felt by working people, women, minorities and the traditionally marginalized. What a coup. The liberals defend their political power by siccing the police on greedy bankers, unjust employers, rogue polluters, and racist, sexist, homophobic bigots.

The question that we non-liberals must ask is whether our liberal friends have overdone all this. You can say that, e.g., it was necessary to use government force to reverse the age-old injustice of slavery and to bring African Americans to full citizenship by force. You could say, perhaps, that the working man needed assistance in the turmoil of the early industrial revolution. But it seems to me that in the early 21st century there is a ton of government compulsion going on that is based on the flimsiest possible demonstration of injustice. The world is, after all, seething with injustice, from the most petty problems in the workplace through the most savage enslavement of a whole people. The question is: where is the dividing line between a minor humiliation and a need for government force?

That is the great task before us.

2012 and Mediscare

Are Republicans vulnerable on Medicare? Should they cave on Medicare and wait for it to crash or should they fight back? Some people reckon that Democrats will demagogue on Medicare from now till November 2012, so there is no way of avoiding a fight.

Perhaps it is telling that Marco Rubio (R), junior US senator from Florida, the second-biggest Medicare state, has chosen to come out strongly in favor of the Ryan Plan. Reports Marc Thiessen:

For those who criticize Ryan, Rubio asks: “If it’s not the Ryan plan, well then what plan is it? The White House has not offered one. The Senate Democrat leadership has not offered one.. . . They have not offered a budget, much less a plan to save Medicare.”

Rubbish, writes Stanley Kurtz. The Democrats do have a plan. It is called IPAB; it is a monster, and Republicans should attack it 24-7.

What the GOP hasn’t yet done is go on offense against IPAB (the Independent Payment Advisory Board), the clique of Obamacare bureaucrats who are going to ration Medicare into the ground. IPAB is what’s really going to push granny off a cliff, giving her far less control of her fate than the Ryan plan.

Mediscare works best in the later stages of a campaign when Democrats get a chance to stampede seniors with scare talk. But if Republicans get started establishing a message now then the late-campaign Mediscare won't work.

It was Sarah Palin that first articulated Kurtz's strategy when she called the IPAB a "deeath panel." The president wants unelected bureaucrats and political cronies to determine who lives and who dies. Rationing means that you have to line up to get benefits. Unless you have a political pal in high places on the IPAB. How hard can it be to attack this monstrous policy?

The president has a plan for Medicare. His death panel will decide who lives and who dies. The government will decide who gets care and who doesn't. That's not just the end of Medicare as we know it. It's the end of Medicare, period.

There's another factor to consider. The presidential campaign season forces the mainstream media to ventilate Republican proposals and sound bites, if reluctantly and illuminated with unflattering light. Plus the paid media of Republican candidates puts the Republican message into America's living rooms. That makes it much harder for the Democrats to win on Mediscare.

Anyway, what's the point of being a Republican if you just run and hide whenever the Democrats try to electrocute you on entitlements. The whole point of Republican politics is that Americans are sturdy but cooperative individualists. They are proud of their independence, proud of caring for their own, and proud of giving a helping hand to those in need.

Entitlements are the opposite of Americanism. They are the politics of serfs and peasants, doffing caps to the lord of the manor as he drives by in his expensive gas-electric hybrid, hoping that he'll fight for them when grannie get sick. Because, after all, he did promise.

Revolt Against the Empire of Lies

Why not use the rhetoric of the American revolution to report today's politics? In that case, according to Andrew Klavan:

The week just past was a great one for the New American Revolution — that guerrilla assault by alternative media minutemen on the amassed redcoats of the Empire of Lies.

Yeah, that is one way of reporting Andrew Breitbart's exposure of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) as "a lowlife and liar." The problem with Breitbart, for the Empire of Lies, is that he is fearless.

Then, writes Klavan, there is Glenn Beck, who will be starting his own on-line network GBTV when he finishes with FoxNews. Beck has been replaying some of his on-air predictions, "predictions for which he was sometimes called crazy and which have more often than not come true."

Then there is Ann Coulter and Demonic, arguing "the thesis that the American left is the party of the mob." I wonder why she thinks that?

Klavan finishes with this:

The Mainstream Media’s Empire of Lies is still an empire, after all. They still have most of the money and almost all of the air. The alternative media is still, as it were, taking potshots at them from behind rocks and trees.

But last week — man oh man! — it sure looked like Lexington and Concord to me.

And, as I suggested to an e-mailer, using a different colonial metaphor: There are definite signs out there that "the natives are restless."

The Welfare State: When It's Broke

The fight over the welfare state will, at the tactical level, occur around the questions of national bankruptcy and a sovereign debt crisis.

But the moral-cultural question is the fulcrum around which political and economic leverage will work. For the great question about our modern age is this: How much are we slaves to our system of instrumental reason, the great edifice of science and technique? To what extent is our prosperity founded upon the mankind's domination of the natural world, and to what extent is it founded upon the domination of one man or woman by another? We use natural resources as though we owned them. We domesticate and use plants and animals as though we owned them. We use other people as employees, as service personnel, as means to our ends. But at what point to we acknowledge that this use is a kind of slavery. We each act as if we owned the whole world and that everything is subject to our commands, down to the last penny in our bank account.

The question of domination is pretty clear when a human is bent to the yoke after an army is defeated in battle or a nation is defeated in a war. The wrong is pretty clear when an oil company pollutes a vast ocean in an oil-well blowout. But what about an employee under industrial discipline? What about a citizen forced to pay for and to join a government program? What about children sent to school for ten to twelve years according to compulsory attendance laws? What about the conversion of wild plants and animals to human breeding and domestication? What about the use of "non-renewable" natural resources? What about the release of "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere?

In human society these questions to be resolved according to the prejudice of the current ruling class. A century ago the ruling class was the commercial middle class, and so questions got decided according to their prejudice about employment, credit, and personal interest. Now the ruling class is educated liberals that rule with the support of the working class and government program dependents, so a different set of prejudices dominate.

The question is: isn't there a better way to decide social and economic questions than the domination by elite prejudice and political power? Can't responsibility and power be distributed more widely?

This all reduces to the problem of mistakes and the ways in which mistakes can be recognized and corrected. For it seems that it is very difficult for humans to recognize a mistake unless it has already caused a disaster. This is certainly true at the individual and family level. It is often true in business, where CEOs can sometimes run a corporation into the ground rather than quit a money-losing strategy, limited only by the equity and the credit of the corporation. This is especially true in politics, where special interests can usually block reform of their wasteful and dangerous subsidies and privileges up to the point where the very survival of the state is threatened by a sovereign debt crisis.

The problem in communications, an expert once explained to me, is not how to transmit the data. The problem is what to do when something goes wrong and a message is garbled. How do you resend the message, and how do sender and receiver finally agree that a correct message has been sent and received? The same is true in human society at large. When things are going wrong, when do we take corrective action? How long can we afford to put off corrective action, if we can agree what that action should be? When there is a mess in the business sector, the mess is cleared up in the bankruptcy process. It's a painful process, as judges and lawyers wrangle over the details of who gets to take the shortest haircut. When you decide such matters in the political sector it means that the correction will be decided by force, or at least a show of force. Humans can do better than that.

Wait Till Medicare Crashes

The upshot of NY-26 and the Democratic successful demagoguing of Medicare reform, featuring the delicate cinematography of The Agenda Project's commercial of Rep. Ryan pushing grannie of a cliff, is simple, according to John Derbyshire. It means that we can't reform Medicare. "There's nothing for it but to wait for the crash."

And that means, if you weren't paying attention, we can't reform Medicare until Medicare crashes the federal government's finances. Greek City, AZ, in other words.

It's tempting to accuse the Democrats of shameless demagoguery on Medicare, but I think we should give them credit for believing in their belief system.

Democrats believe that the way to help the poor and the marginalized is with comprehensive and mandatory government programs inspired and directed by the educated class.

They honestly look at the premium subsidy program of Rep. Paul Ryan and say: well what about the people who can't afford any Medicare premium? What about seniors, e.g., with dementia, who can't even rationally decide what Medicare option to choose?

The liberal conceit is that, given the fact that someone is going to fall through the cracks, a government program is the answer, a government program inspired and directed by evolved, educated people like themselves.

This is the central faith of our liberal, educated elite. Liberals are the most educated, evolved people in America. By virtue of their education and their advanced social views and their rational ethics they are the only people with the standing to decide all social and political matters, and to design rational and equitable programs to implement their advanced and evolved views.

That is why John Derbyshire's remark rings true to me. We Americans are not going to be able to resolve the central political questions of our time until our liberal friends have crashed in ruins. They may--they probably will--still cleave to their liberal faith after the crash. But nobody else in America will believe.

Conservatives never did believe in the liberal faith, but moderates weren't sure. Up to now these go-along-to-get-along folks have picked up the liberal faith as the default option. You go with the belief system implied in the TV news, on your worker's rights published on the bulletin board at work, and in your government schooling because that is what you do as a practical, conforming, social animal. And anyway, if the government is offering free stuff, why not?

But when you, as a moderate, find that you life is ruined, your savings account wiped out, your job evaporated, your Social Security capped, your Medicare rationed, then you look around for someone to blame. You do more than that. You lash out and you go after the first person that looks like they could be to blame. When that happens, any rational person will know who to blame: Greedy bankers.

Yeah. That's the great task of conservatives in the next few years. It is to make sure that liberals don't find some convenient scapegoat and dodge the blame for national bankruptcy and the failure of all their government-centric welfare state programs.