And Now Black Race Riots

In the aftermath of the civil rights revolution in the 1960s America had a choice. It could abandon race politics forever, or it could reformulate it along new lines. It turned out that our liberal friends couldn't resist the temptation of making race work for them, aping the way that Southern whites had made race work for them in the century of Jim Crow.

But just as Jim Crow politics turned the South into a mean and nasty place, a brutal white hegemony, so liberal race politics has turned liberals into monsters.

And it has created a monster too, the widespread black racism that has now metastasized into flash mobs of black youth, organized on Facebook and Twitter, that are disturbingly preying on peaceful whites.

It's easy for conservatives to say "I told you so." It is obvious that, in a modern, commercial, multiracial society no group can be allowed special license to act out its racist fantasies. But liberals have been condoning, and even whipping up, frank racism in the black community for half a century.

Now here we are, in the middle of a nasty great recession, in which young people, as usual, are hardest hit, and young undereducated, undersocialized, underemployed blacks are rioting. This is not like the urban riots of the 1960s in which blacks mostly burned down their own neighborhoods. This is frank race rioting, with black gangs seeking out whites to brutalize.

So now what do we do? We have a large underclass, harvest of 50 years of government subsidies for idleness; we have a catastrophic decline in black wealth, courtesy of the sub-prime mortgage lending of the last 20 years. We have an undereducated youth, courtesy of a century of government education. And we have a sluggish recovery, courtesy of the exploded Keynesian notion that more government spending and cheap money is the way to jump-start an economy. And don't mention the black cloud of ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and the S&P downgrade.

Yeah, Mr. President. Why don't you Do Something about all this?

Government-sponsored Theater

I'm back in Ashland, Oregon, finishing up a week of Shakespeare with my daughter and family.

It's always something of a trial, of course. The Shakespeare, not the family. Because Ashland and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is liberal-land.

The whole experience is a bit like watching the mainstream media: liberals telling each other how wonderful they are.

This year, all three plays we watched are GSEs: government-sponsored entertainment, as in the program's announcement that

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival's productions of Measure for Measure; Julius Caesar, Henry IV, Part II and Love's Labor's Lost are part of Shakespeare for a New Generation, a national theater initiative sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts in cooperation with Arts Midwest.

Obviously, when you do a project like that, it turns out to be tuned to political perfect pitch. That means that the cast is exquisitely racially balanced, a lot of the plays are directed by women, Julius Caesar is played by a woman, and the humor is physically exaggerated so that even someone that has never cracked a book can get the jokes. It also means that a lot of the physical gestures of TV-land get imported into the productions. TV is our modern cultural lingua franca, and live theater has to learn to speak TV-speak or lose its audience.

Having said that, I found that under the dross you can still find the timeless question at the center of Love's Labor's Lost, the daunting question for any young woman: How can she trust the man wooing to get between her legs? He's thrown up all his grand plans as soon as he's caught the twinkle in her eyes. Very nice, very flattering. But then what? The answer is the old answer: better make him work for it.

In Henry IV, Part II there is still the question of the rising generation: will it amount to anything? Will it ever get serious? And as for the ruling generation, can we ever get out from under the debt of its quarrels, its enmities, its hypocrisies?

Unfortunately, the Julius Caesar had nothing in particular to recommend it. You'd hardly realize that she, Caesar, was a standout army commander and power politician. You'd hardly realize that the play was about ruthless high politics between the great ruling families of a great empire rather than a bunch of actors doing a workshop production in their street clothes. But maybe you can't expect a new generation, especially a new generation that helped elect Barack Obama as president, to have a clue about politics. Maybe director Amanda Dehnert should have had the courage of her convictions and had the conspirators conversing with iPhones and Facebook.

Never mind, the weather was glorious, the swimming was good, and the visit with my daughter and her family delightful as I played the role of grumpy old grandpa the best I knew how.

But next year, next year we'll be right in the middle of the liberal Annus Horribilis and the meaning of Mistress Quickly's demand that she'll have "no swaggerers here" may apply to the body language of that eternally marginalized Ashland minority. I am talking about conservative Shakespeare lovers.

For What Should Obama Sacrifice Himself?

Yesterday we introduced the concept of Obama as the Dying King. It's an ancient concept that goes back to the dying gods of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Not to mention the Christian God who died on the Cross for the sins of the world.

If you are a king, a real king who represents his country before all eternity then he knows that eventually, he must sacrifice himself for his people. Think Lincoln. Think George W. Bush crucified for eight long years by the "civility" chaps over at the DNC.

But if Obama is to nobly sacrifice himself for his country, then the next question is: for what does he sacrifice himself? ObamaCare? Clean energy? Very fast trains? Er, sorry, chums. But those issues are simple bribe-the-voters progressive chestnuts. And they are part of the basic narrative of the Obama administration: He Made Things Worse.

No. The cause for which Obama can honorably sacrifice himself is the issue by which he entered national politics, his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention where he declared that we are all one people.

The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them... We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Yeah. Something got lost there in the "leading from behind" presidency of "false choices" and Professor Obama lectures and the "great dissuader."

So here is President Obama's great opportunity for a lasting legacy. He can end his failed policies and return to the great promise of his great 2004 speech. He can be remembered as the president that ended the racial divide. He can be the president who ended the Blue State Red State polarization. What a legacy that would be! How the president would go down in history!

But he won't, of course. Because President Obama isn't thinking much about the bigger things. He is sitting in the White House in a funk and the only thing he is capable of doing is doing what he has knows how to do. And what he knows how to do is to play the Alinsky community organizer, the chap that prods marginalized communities into political action to serve the ideological agenda of the left. Trouble is, of course, that he's been doing his community organizer thing for the last two years and it has got him into the biggest mess that a president ever got into in our lifetimes, Nixon excepted. What can he do about it? Who knows? The problem is that nothing in his life, up to now, is a preparation for this moment. The president is like all the other liberals that thought, in 2009, that that were entering upon a new era in America, a fundamental change that would usher in Hope and Change. Only they weren't. Instead they were flying up a box canyon, and it's now too late to turn around without crashing.

The president won't take my advice. Heck no. But, if you ask me, the best thing he can do with the rest of his presidency is to bring America together and stop playing the left-wing politics of division and hate. Bring Red State and Blue State together Mr. President. Bring black and white together. Bring feminist and conservative Christian mothers together. Bring gays and heteros together. Then you will go down in history as the President for All Seasons. Even if you lose in 2012.

Obama as the Dying King

What is Obama to do now? He and his Democratic are lashed to their ten ton deadweight, ObamaCare. They are sinking fast, and dragging the country down with them.

How does Obama win reelection? How does the nation prosper? What on earth happens next?

Tellingly, Hugh Hewitt's chappie Clark Judge writes that folks inside the Beltway are starting to sneer at the president. He quotes center-left Politico.

“McConnell wanted to negotiate primarily with Biden, concerned that other Democrats, especially Obama, would prove to be less trustworthy bargaining partners... GOP House staffers were burnt out after months of fruitless meetings at the White House that they had taken to calling ‘joke meetings’ or worse still, ‘Professor Obama’s lectures.’”

Oy! So Jonah Goldberg writes that Obama is between a rock and a hard place.

He’s got no place he can go, but he can’t stay where he is.

I have an idea. It is an old idea, perhaps the oldest idea there is. Obama must become the Dying King, and sacrifice himself for the greater good of the nation.

The Dying King myth began as the dying god. The Egyptians had Osiris. The Mesopotamians had Dumuzi. For Christianity there is Jesus Christ, the Son of God who died for the sins of the world.

We have had Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.

The dying king must sacrifice himself that the country might live. George W. Bush understood this at the very moment of 9/11. He knew that he must wage a long war against Islamic terror, and he knew that he would end up being sacrificed for the greater good of the country. And so he was, as liberals turned against his policy at the earliest tactical opportunity, and demonized him for eight long years. But his policy endured, as we know, with Obama essentially continuing his policy, only without the determination and commitment.

Now we have liberalism in free fall, in moral and financial bankrupty. Now it is time for President Obama to step up, in his turn, and submit to the destiny of all worthy leaders, to accept that he must take the incoming rounds (metaphorically) so that the community, the tribe, the nation may endure.

Does he have it in him? Democrats have never really thought about this dimension of political leadership. They just think abou the one-dimensional glory of government programs that care about people. But now they are committed to a terrible Goetterdaemmerung of liberalism. Will the president suck it in and die a noble political death with dignity? Or will he continue as the divider-in-chief, scoring political points and blaming millionaires and billionaires like some Latin American thug dictator.

Next year, 2012, is going to be an annus horribilis for our Democratic friends. The only question remaining is whether the Democrats deal with this immense challenge with fortitude and honor, or whether they funk it and bring the whole nation down around them in a chaotic rout.

What's Next?

The Rushes and the Shauns weren't too happy yesterday as they discussed the debt deal. And they are right of course. The deal does allow for tax increases and defense cuts, and has very little in the way of spending cuts. We should be outraged!

But think what the dirty compromise means. It means that we will have the same argument in the Fall when it comes time to do the Appropriations bills.

Or does the debt-ceiling deal mean that we don't get any appropriations bills this year?

In any case, whenever the next skirmish occurs it will be the same old thing. Republicans will be calling for solving the debt problem and the Obamis will be arguing for tax increases. What in the world is wrong with that?

Let's not forget what this is all about. This is about changing the political culture of the US from the spend and elect culture to the cut and elect culture. You don't do that overnight. It takes years to make a difference and move the ship of state in a new direction. If Republicans had got what they wanted in the debt deal then we could disband the Tea Party patriots and go home. That would not be a good deal. What we want is for our chaps to be outraged at the other guys and not too happy with our guys and go out there and start organizing to put a lot more Tea Party supporters in Congress and in the state legislatures.

Let's admit, at least, that the president got what he had to have, which is a debt ceiling to get him through the election and the prospect of revenue increases and defense cuts to wave like a wand in front of his supporters.

Strategically, the president is flying up a box canyon. If he wins then he has to implement spending cuts. Period. And his second term will be a nightmare that will chop the Democrats down to a remnant. Much better to lose and let the Republicans make the tough choices. Then Democrats can barrack from the sidelines and complain that Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid "as we know it" have been destroyed.

Politics is all about fear. Used to be that the way to frighten the voters was to accuse Republicans of taking an ax to beloved social programs: Mediscare. But now the fear factor is a two-edged sword. There is the debt fear factor and the entitlement fear factor. Are you more afraid of ending up like Greece or more afraid of throwing grandma into the street?

That's how politics is shaping up for the next decade. Which is more frightening? Uncontrollable debt or cuts in entitlements?

Another Telling Skirmish

We aren't going to get the Clausewitzean decisive battle until the fall of 2012. But if Sunday's tentative debt-ceiling deal holds we just saw another telling skirmish on the march to 2012. The new Republican House made a difference. Again. You can tell that because Paul Krugman is outraged.

Well, he would be anyway because the President is forced into at least token spending cuts in return for an increase in the debt ceiling. So the president can't do a big spending stimulus to tide him over the election.

Of course what the economy needs is repeal of ObamaCare to take the weight of uncertainty off the backs of business, repeal of Dodd-Frank to re-energize the credit system, and income tax rate cuts to end the capital strike. But it won't get that until the Republican president is inaugurated in 2013 and the Republican Senate is seated.

Well, maybe, as the economy continues to splutter into next spring, the president will get religion and propose some tax rate cuts. God only knows what Paul Krugman will think of that.

But the fact is that, going forward, the issues favor the Republicans.

This is confusing to Democrats who think that they are the party of the little people. Here is pollster Stan Greenberg feeling confused.

I see clearly that voters feel ever more estranged from government — and that they associate Democrats with government...

Oddly, many voters prefer the policies of Democrats to the policies of Republicans. They just don’t trust the Democrats to carry out those promises.

Yes. Of course voters like the idea of free services. They just don't like paying for them, and they really don't like paying for them when the economy is in the tank.

The fact is that the Democrats have blown it. They really believed their Keynesian economic fantasy. They really thought you could blow through a big recession on a debt wing and a spending prayer. Now they have crashed into the ground and they are dazed, and really don't know what has happened to them.

But we know what went wrong. We know what the problem is.

When you have a big easy-money boom the boom ends in a crash. Then the bad debt has to be liquidated and the credit system repaired before growth can resume. Unfortunately, there is still plenty of bad housing debt around, and plenty of unsold homes. Until we turn the corner on that, the economy will continue to languish.

Sorry Dems, but you created the mess with your stupid "affordable housing" policies and you deserve to pay the piper for it.

In my view the chances are 60-40 that the Dems will suffer a punishment similar to the experience of the Republicans in the Great Depression. But don't worry, Dems. Republicans won't be able to invoke the name of Obama to frighten the voters, as Democrats did with President Hoover, for the next 50 years. Dems have a good cheering section in the media and the academy, so I expect they will be able to rehabilitate President Obama within 20 years, tops.

Why "Central Planning Lite" Failed

Beyond the sound and fury of the debt-ceiling debate is a signification that means something. It is "The Failure of Central Planning Lite," as Robert Tracinski puts it.

It is the failure of the faith that the Fed and the Treasury could manage the business cycle and avoid big swings with properly timed economic interventions.

This system can be thought of as Central Planning Lite. By the time Communism collapsed in 1989, it was no longer plausible to claim that full-blown socialism or full-blown central planning were the wave of the future. But our political and intellectual leaders were not quite willing to give up on the dream, so they insisted that we could have a watered down Third Way between capitalism and communism.

No we can't. The Crash of 2008 and the pathetic recovery of 2009-11 give the lie to that conceit. But what is the real problem? What went wrong?

The problem is that the Fed and the Treasury actually have an impossible task. Their job is to mitigate the distortions that politics inserts into the economy.

Politicians are politicians. Their trade is winning elections, and they win elections by promising benefits and subsidies and cheap credit to their supporters. These actions distort the economy in various ways, and so the politicians need economists to tell them how to get out of a jam when all the bases are loaded and the count is 0 and 2. Keynesian economics is a way of trying to game the economic system in a downturn to minimize the damage to the beneficiaries of government largesse. It is, therefore, not a way of structuring the economic system to make it safe, but a way to game the system in the hopes of minimizing the consequences of government interventions. The trouble is that it doesn't work very well.

Ludwig von Mises writes that a recession is the period of adjustment for the liquidation of the malinvestments of the previous boom. Keynesian economics wants to slide out of the recession with bridge loans and printed money--but without actually fixing the problem, the malinvestments encouraged by the cheap credit in the previous boom.

So the experts end up advising the government how to cheat, rather than setting up the parameters for a fair and just economic system.

You can call this the Treason of the Clerics, or the Co-optation of the Experts. Either way it is a big problem. Ever since Wilhelm von Humboldt set up the first research university in the early 19th century, governments have looked to academic experts to support and advise them. The result is that our academic friends have ended up in the pockets of the politicians, using their expertise to advise the politicians on how to maximize their power. Whether it is physicists helping build H-bombs, sociologists helping organize the welfare state, economists helping government game the credit system, or climate scientists inventing hockey sticks, the problem is clear. The professors have entered into a pact with the devil. In return for grants and funding and fame they have danced to the politicians' tune. They have helped build the big government state and helped to damage the health of civil society, the space between government and the individual.

We do not know whether the ordinary people are ready to tell the government to stop gaming the economic system, although the Tea Party gives us cause for hope. But the time is long past for honorable experts to stop feeding the beast, from Central Planning Lite to the whole corrupt bargain of the modern authoritarian welfare state.

After all, the first responsibility of an expert is to do no harm.