FoxNews in 2012

It all began in 1964, according to Jeffrey Lord, when the news media took out after Barry Goldwater, calling him the "rallying point for white resistance" to desegregation.  Barry Goldwater?

The man who, during his tenure on the Phoenix City Council and in the Arizona National Guard, helped desegregate all Phoenix schools, restaurants, and the state's National Guard itself?

At the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, former President Eisenhower couldn't take it any more.  He said this to the delegates about the three liberal networks.

The delegates, he said, should "particularly scorn the divisive efforts of those outside our family, including sensation seeking columnists and commentators, because… these are people who couldn't care less about the good of our party."

The Republican delegates reacted instantaneously.

Delegates shot to their feet, shouting furiously, their applause thunderous. Many jumped up on their chairs in decidedly un-choreographed and quite spontaneous rage turning to face their media antagonists, literally shaking their fists at what Goldwater biographer Lee Edwards would describe as "startled anchormen in the glassed-in television booths high above the convention floor."

But it took 32 years before America had its first conservative TV news network.  Rupert Murdoch opened the Fox News Network in 1996 and put Republican operative Roger Ailes in charge.  Today Fox News earns a little less than one billion a year, and it defines TV news.  Now our liberal friends know what it is like to watch political stuff on TV that trashes everything you believe in.  Everyone should have that experience.  It builds character.



Probably 2008 was the last hurrah of the liberal media, as they jumped in the tank for Obama and, by hiding all the questionable stuff about him, were responsible for electing perhaps the worst president in living memory.  Here's a item that illustrates the point.  President Obama is not a man that likes to get on the phone with Democratic Senate leaders.



But in 2012 the American people will be desperate to consume political news that tells them how to get out of the horror of Obamanomics, ObamaCare, Obama's truckling to the labor unions, Obama's horrible left-wing racism and classism.  Now, with a seasoned Fox News, a teenager at 15, they have a place to go to get the news they want.



That, as they say, is progress.

Social Animals in an Age of Instrumental Reason

The trouble with capitalism, Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, is that it is inhuman.

The bourgeoisie... has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment."  It has drowned... [everything] in the icy water of egotistical calculation.  In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

 And on top of that, the bourgeoisie had also conquered the "modern representative State" making it into a "committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie," and dominated presumably by the same commercial, calculating culture.

What Marx and Engels forgot to add is that culture itself had bowed to the cash nexus, for it was in the 18th century also when a professional writing class emerged into the public square, producing cultural product to be marketed to the great middle class by "publishers" with the idea of making money from culture, and truckling to the fantasies of the reading public.  And that leaves out the great calculating religious movements, specifically the Great Awakening of the mid 18th century in Britain and British North America that was run like a modern political campaign, with planning, advance men, advertising, and free media.  How inhuman, how calculating, exploitative, lacking in spontaneity, is that?

A century later, in the middle of World War II, a new generation of Marxists faced a world at war and looked into the abyss.  The whole modern project, they realized, from science to capitalism to the modern state was the project of "instrumental reason."  But instrumental reason, wrote Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, is pure domination.  Bourgeois business ends up as bourgeois domination, and this is already encoded in the idea of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason.  "What men want to learn from nature is how to dominate it and other men."  And so "Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men."

The more you think about it the more you realize that everything is tainted by this indictment.  Business and its pursuit of profit, government bureaucracies and their attempt to confine the world in a box of rules and regulations, movies, books and their prurient exploitation of fantasy, academic scholars and their pursuit of knowledge for the sake of tenure and fame, everything is exploitation, using other people for your own ends.

So what do we do about it?  Let us propose three ideas.  First, there is the idea of the separation of powers.  The sine qua non of winning battles is the idea of strategic concentration.  Concentrate your forces and disperse the forces of the enemy.  The way to limit the exploitation by instrumental reason in all sectors of modern life, from business to government to moral/culture is by a greater separation of powers, preventing the sectors from ganging up against society as a whole: no crony capitalism and the unholy combination of politics and business; no established churches (and that includes secular churches like liberalism) and the unholy totalitarian combination of religion and politics.

But if the principle of force is to be reduced, then how does society work?  The second answer lies in the very structure of the human brain, its approximate division into rational, emotional, and instinctive spheres.  If the rational sphere is all about exploitation, bending the world to our will, and the instinctive is about staying alive from moment to moment, the emotional sphere is the world of the social animal, the reduction of conflict from the bloody murder of force and feud at least to social hierarchy, the hierarchy that kept the peace in the agricultural age, and at best to friendly social cooperation, the egalitarianism of the old hunter-gatherer groups.

Marx writes of what had been drowned in the "icy water of egotistical calculation."  It was the emotions: the "heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor," "chivalrous enthusiasm," and "philistine sentimentalism."  No doubt these emotions are as capable of dominatory excess as instrumental reason.  But as a mitigation between the pitiless gaze of reason and the blind workings of instinct, it provides the rose-colored vision of the social virtues.  If the world of the future is to be a world in which domination is minimized then it must be a world in which people cooperate and work together without the promptings of the lash or the enforcement officer.  That would be a world in which the four pagan virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, and courage; are joined to the three Christian virtues: faith, hope, and love.


The third idea is the working out of voluntary cooperation.  It was Adam Smith who noted the peculiar operation of economic cooperation.  Man the social animal takes care of his own needs by satisfying the wants of others, thus delivering public benefits from private selfishness.  Despite the despotism of instrumental reason, people do not often try to exploit each other, especially others with whom they have a long-term relationship.  They like to cooperate.  Even in the most rigorous bureaucratic organizations, even in the modern army, people have found that the best instrumental results are obtained when people are freed from the tyranny of rules, when they are given responsibility and are encouraged to work together and help each other.

Humans are social animals.  Humans do best when their natural sociability is encouraged and developed.  What a concept!

Peggy Noonan and Narratives

Peggy Noonan recently got back to LiberalLand after attending a symposium in Colorado and she was struck by the ubiquity of The Narrative.

The Narrative has nothing to do with what is actually happening in the country. That would make too much sense. The Narrative is the story of a candidate or a candidacy, or the story of a presidency. Everyone in politics is supposed to have one. They're supposedly powerful. Voters believe them.

No, no, no, writes Peggy. You can't impose a narrative from above; it bubbles up from below.



Sorry, Peggy.   You are talking rubbish.  The Narrative is everything in politics.  Every leader must learn to tell the story of America so far, and the story of America as it is meant to be.  Ronald Reagan was the master of The Narrative, shamelessly appropriating the notion of the city on a hill and the last best hope of mankind on earth for all those who must have freedom.  Get the story right, and you've got the election almost sewn up.



But once you get elected then you better make sure that your narrative meshes with reality.



The Democrats have got completely tangled up in their narrative, and none more so than President Obama.  Their problem is that they are spinning stories for tactical moves, trying to move the public opinion needle, changing the story every time they speak to a different audience



The whole point of a narrative is to make sense of the world as it is, and as it ought to be.  The Democrats' problem is that their Grand Narrative, from Keynes to diversity to evil Bushism is failing.  It is failing because it does not explain how the world works.  It only shows that the Democrats don't know how the world works.



There is nothing catastrophic about this.  Narratives fail all the time.  Democrats love to talk about the failure of the Creationist narrative at the hands of Charles Darwin.  And talk and talk about it.  They talk so much that they don't notice that their own narrative is failing at the hands of a conservative future.



Peggy explains the Democratic obsession with narrative from their misreading of the Reagan era.  They thought Reagan's ideas were rubbish, and that he fooled the American people with a good story about Morning in America.  OK, they could play that game too.



But the Democrats decided Reagan was rubbish because they had to.  They had to believe that in order to keep on believing in their big-government narrative.  Reagan showed them that their economic and social ideas were all washed up.  They couldn't bring themselves to admit it.



But now the Democrats are about to pay for their delusion, big time, in the court of public opinion and election results.



Every human lives by narrative.  But the smart ones know when the old narrative is washed up and it's time to find a new one.

Liberals Always Go Too Far

Karl Rove thinks that President Obama will have his work cut out for him next year.  It's not going to be easy to pivot from base-pleasing class warfare to principled moderate and uniter.  Particularly as Obama is badly down with the voters that got him elected in 2008: young voters, Hispanics, and women.



In fact, says Jonah Goldberg, Obama has done the one thing he must not do.  He has awakened the sleeping bear of America's innate conservatism. "If you make no sudden moves and talk quietly, you can get a lot done. But if you wake the bear, as Democrats did in the late 1960s and early '70s, the ursine silent majority will punish you."  Of course, you could argue, Democrats still got Medicare and Medicaid passed back then, so it was worth it.



Anyway, that was then and this is now.  Peter Ferrara thinks that we are looking at a wipeout for the Democrats next year.  With the loss of Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, the blowout mid-term elections, and now the loss of an historically Democratic seat in New York City, things are trending worse for Democrats than in the Carter presidency.



Let us be clear.  The Obamaification of the Democratic Party is not just Obama.  The whole Democratic Party wants to be the party that Obama has made it.  It wants ObamaCare, wants swingeing regulation of everything from banks to light-bulbs, wants "green" energy, wants bigger government.



Back to the sleeping bear.  It woke up the moment that Obama was elected and it hasn't slept a wink since then.  But what does the awakened bear want?  John Agresto has an answer.

[T]he fairest nation on earth will be the one that prattles least about “social justice”; that the most neighborly will be the one that least tries to enforce artificial community; and the most compassionate will be the one that most cultivates the qualities of freedom in the souls of its citizens.

The tragedy of the educated class is that it couldn't be satisfied with persuasion, to educate the American people to its modernist religion of equality and peace and justice.  It decided that it had to have power as well, to force the bitter clingers to do the right thing.  But the combination of religion and politics has never gone well in the modern era.



In America, of course, the combination of church and state is actually illegal.  But the educated class attempt to combine its secular religion with the powers of government is obviously worse that a crime.  It's a blunder.

Rush! Make the Complex Understandable!

Yesterday a listener called Rush Limbaugh and riffed on the Elizabeth Warren flap.  The hypothetical business owner she cited, benefiting from the taxes and police and fire and roads, wasn't just benefiting from the government.  He was benefiting from the labor of the workers he hired.  Said Jeff the caller:

He didn't get rich because he dug more ditches than anyone else. He got rich and most people in the country get rich because they've got other people working for them, which means they're selling the labor of these other people for more than they're paying for it. They're paying a guy $8 to dig a ditch, and they're charging somebody else $20 for that ditch. Abraham Lincoln said that "before there's capital there's labor, and all capital comes from work that real human beings do."

This line, Rush was quick to tell his listeners, comes from the Daily Kos, in a January 29, 2009 article, "Abe Lincoln: Pro Labor. Send THIS to your R friends.", boosting the famous stimulus of that winter.  The "THIS" in question is an image and a quote from President Lincoln, here, made in his first message to Congress in 1861:

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

Rush responded, in due course, that this goes back to the idea that labor is paid less than it is worth.

This guy believes (I'll use myself here as an example) that I am getting rich -- and I'm not admitting that, by the way -- by paying the people who work for me less than what they are worth (not what they deserve, less than what they're worth) and getting rich off of it. Therefore, I am screwing the people who work for me.

Of course, the idea that it is scandalous that a contractor bills his client $20 for a employee that costs him $8 comes from Marx.  To justify the intervention of politics into the relation between worker and employer, Marx needs to find an injustice.  He finds it in the fact that the worker does not obtain the full value of his labor.  The employer gets more than he does by appropriating the surplus value of the worker's product over and above the value of the wages paid to the worker.



Help us out here Rush!  Let's come up with a rejoinder to these lefties and Marxists!  Let's make the complex understandable!



Here's my take.  It is true that "labor is prior to capital."  Of course it is.  That is why the capitalist must pay the  the worker his wages before he pays the bank. Before he pays his taxes. Before he gets paid by his client. Before he pays the bond-holders.  And before the chaps that come last of all, the shareholders, the risk-takers.  That is the principle of capitalism; it agrees with Abraham Lincoln.  The worker gets paid first.  The stockholders, accepting the risk proposition, come last; they live off the remainder left after all other stakeholders have been paid.  They make profits, or they suffer losses.



The welfare state is different.  In the welfare state the non-workers, from Social Security recipients to Medicare beneficiaries to welfare recipients to politicians to government workers, they all get paid first. And if there is enough money left over after all this government beneficiaries have been paid, then the workers can get paid.



In socialism, things are different.  There the workers do not come first.  They do not come last.  In socialism, the only thing that matters is the state.  So the workers do not really exist.  That is why they often just starve.

Herman Cain's 9-9-9 Plan

On the face of it, Heman Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan to reorganize federal finances on a three-legged stool, with 9 percent personal income tax, 9 percent corporate income tax, and 9 percent national sales tax sounds like a winner.  Remove all the complicated exemptions and deductions and let's get real!



But the obvious question is: who benefits?  On the face of it, the rich.  Surely they will benefit if high income tax rates and corporate income tax rates come down.



But the 9-9-9 plan also replaces the FICA tax on wages.  Right now (forgetting the temporary cut in FICA) the total FICA bite is 15.3 percent.  So a moderate income worker is going to get a cut on that (assuming that the worker gets the employer share of FICA).



The 9 percent sales tax will obviously hit the poor hardest.  Sales and excise taxes on consumer goods have always been understood to hurt the poor.  But maybe the poor will suffer more from elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which can be $2,000 per family per year.



The wild card is the corporate income tax.  If you eliminate FICA and reduce and simplify the corporate income tax it is going to have a substantial effect on corporations.  That will raise stock prices, but it will also enable employers to bid more for employees.  What really is the net effect for ordinary people when you lower corporate taxes?



The problem with a huge change like the 9-9-9 plan is that a ton of people are going to get a windfall gain and a ton of people are going to get a windfall loss.  The people experiencing a windfall loss are going to be really upset.



Herman Cain may find that out the hard way in the months ahead.

The New Praetorian Guard

Every schoolboy knows that, as the Roman Empire aged, its emperors declined from being Augustan gods to being shuffled in and out by the elite imperial guards, the Praetorian Guard.



Maybe Julius Caesar started the rot when he violated Roman law by bringing his army in Gaul across the Rubicon river and marched it into Rome.



As the welfare state careers towards disaster we are seeing the emergence of a new Praetorian Guard.  It is the organized mobs of government workers outraged that their over-market wages and over-market pensions are being cut.  You do not see dangerous mobs of ordinary citizens in the streets, unless you consider the peaceable and good-natured Tea Party a mob.  You see the civil servants in the streets.  No doubt the events in Madison, Wisconsin, of last winter will be repeated elsewhere as noble teachers and professors demonstrate their outrage now that their life-time employment and pension deal turns out to be less than gold-plated.



You could have seen it coming.  The politicians enrolled these supporters into powerful special interests to help them with their reelection.  And now their supporters are demanding that the checks keep coming.



In a perfect world, I'd say to hell with this ungrateful recipients of government loot.  For make no mistake, every dollar poured into the pocket of a government worker or a government benefit recipient has been obtained by force.



But reality is not as simple as that.



Our liberal friends have built their supporters up into a formidable political force.  That was the easy part.  The hard part is going to be persuading these lottery winners that you don't get to win the lottery every day of the year.  The tricky thing is going to be getting these folks to retreat without burning the place down as they leave.



Some politician is going to figure out how to do this, and I suspect that the key is understanding that most government employees--nurses, teachers, social workers--are women.  Let's face it, women in government, unionized as they are, aren't like the miners and the railroad workers and the auto workers that defined the union movement.  Women just don't do rioting in the streets.



Still, a grand betrayal of all the progressive promises is heading right down the tracks.  It is essential that the blame is put right where it belongs, on the liberals that promised that government could conjure up wonders.



What a crock.  Government is force.  If you want to do something practical, something productive and compassionate, perhaps, then you don't get government involved.  You rely on the cooperative nature of the social animal we call homo sapiens.




Meanwhile we've got the new Praetorian Guard trying to scare us into coughing up more money, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.