Riots and Progressive Politics

Our liberal friends live in a curious world. On the one hand, they are convinced of the sophistication of their politics, and that the average person really isn't qualified to judge political matters. On the other hand, they often reduce politics to us-versus-them slogans such as Republicans "ending Medicare as we know it" without mentioning the sophisticated concept that Medicare is going to end as we know it with or without Republicans because otherwise it will eat the budget and then the economy.

So it is with public safety. Liberals talk a line to us about poverty causing violence. But they also work to make it a reality by sending community organizers into poverty-stricken areas to remind the people there how the Man is ruining their lives and that police brutality is a form of institutional racism.

Actually, the interesting question is why young underclass males don't riot more. The whole point of modern urban police forces, ever since Robert Peel invented urban policing for the Anglosphere in the 19th century, is to control young underclass urban males. The city is an agent of concentration, for merchants, for workers, for intellectuals, and also for young single males.

Whenever young single males gather together their thoughts, if you want to call them thoughts, turn to mayhem. It is the job of police to look them in the eye and tell them "just you try it." But left-wing politics since the French Revolution has been fueled by the idea of the oppressed rising up against their oppressors. So the left has always worked against the forces of order and encouraged the forces of disorder--young single males--as the potential gunpowder for their hoped-for revolution. Thus the left is always articulating ways in which the police are brutalizing the poor. Of course they are. The police are at war with the natural propensity of young single males to create mayhem.

But there is an additional factor to be considered. And that is the welfare state. In the old days, before the welfare state, the poor had an authentic culture and neighborhood society. They had to, because otherwise they would have perished. But the welfare state has demolished the culture of the poor and substituted middle-class supervision and pensions. The consequence in countries like Britain is that something like 15 percent of the adult population subsists on welfare or "incapacity" benefits. For young adults, the proportion is higher. NEETs, they are called: young people Not in Education, Employment, or Training.

According to figures from the Department for Education, 927,000 people aged 16 to 24 - 15.3 per cent - were classed as Neets between the start of January and end of March [2010].

All in all, you can figure that in cities where the police are restrained from harassing young single males, and the family and the neighborhood culture has been utterly demolished by the welfare state, the wonder is that they don't have riots every night of the year.

If you want to understand the nature of policing the underclass in Britain, the place to start is "Inspector Gadget's" Police Inspector Blog.

The End of an Era

It always ends like this. Whether it's a dynasty, a corporation, or even a marriage, it ends in a collapse of confidence, with the guardians of the old order spitting with rage as their facile shibboleths vaporize into thin air.

The authoritarian welfare state was never going to reform itself into something "sustainable" or organized according to the "precautionary principle" on its own. It was always pure politics, with political raiders plundering the wealth of the nation to hand off to their supporters. It was always going to keep going until it ran out of money.

So now the century-long fantasy of the progressives has come up against the cold hard reality of a credit downgrade. Now the American people are waking up and wondering if its political elite knows what it is doing. They are wondering if all those facile promises of benefits will ever be redeemed. They are wondering if they will even have jobs.

We are not yet to the point where people will start to sneer at politicians offering free lunches. Not yet. But the day will come when people will laugh at the idea that anyone imagined that government could deliver social services effectively and prudently. They will laugh at the idea that government could run a pension scheme. They will sneer at the idea that government could run a health system. They will joke about the bad old days when government ran a system of stunningly ineffective schools. But that day is not yet, for there are before us many years of failure and default that will be necessary to drive the lesson home.

The central fact about these Downgrade Days is the utter cluelessness of the ruling class. President Obama is, in these times, not a disappointment, but the very poster boy of the ruling class that he heads. He is a scion of the progressive dynasty, raised to continue and extend the power of his class. Unfortunately, they never taught him how to deal with retreat and defeat. So now the president is sitting in the White House wondering how to save his presidency.

You can almost see Scarlett O'Hara whining to Rhett Butler after three hours of simpering and manipulation: "Where shall I go, What shall I do?

Frankly, my dear liberals, I don't give a damn.

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?