A Test of Class War

Republicans rail at Democratic "class war" rhetoric.  That makes sense because the Republican Party is a resolutely middle-class party.  Republicans, who are mostly neither rich nor poor, think that class-war politics is likely to damage the prosperity of the corporations they work for or the small businesses they own.



But maybe President Obama is on to something.  Maybe he can pump up the rage of the unemployed and win the election with it.



The problem is, of course, that the experts all say that you can't win an election merely turning out your base.  You have to win the moderates, the independents.



Here's Jay Cost writing that President Obama can't win without the independents, and right now he has 35 percent support from independents.  Jay Cost proposes a thought experiment.

[L]et’s conduct a little thought experiment. Suppose that the same percentage of Republicans, Democrats, and independents turn out in every state in 2012 as happened in 2008. Let’s also suppose that Obama does as well with Republicans and Democrats, but with independents he suffers a 17 percentage point decline in every state (which is in keeping with his dropping from 52 percent support among independents on Election Day 2008 to 35 percent today). What would that election look like?

It would look like 2004, and the Republican would win with 50.5% of the vote.  But that scenario is really too generous to the Democrats, he reckons.  More likely, Republican "soft partisan" vote will swell and the Democratic "soft partisan" vote will shrink in 2012 when compared to 2008.  On that scenario the Republicans win in a blowout with a 10-point lead in the popular vote.



Then there are the Catholics.  Colleen Campbell details how in numerous instances the Obama appointees have pressed Catholics on sensitive issues, from abortion to adoption to traditional marriage.

A candidate who won their support by pledging to respect the religiously grounded views of those with whom he disagrees has morphed into a president whose administration relentlessly attacks religious liberty.

The fact is that President Obama and the Reid-Pelosi Congress has done nothing for independents.  Stimulus, ObamaCare, and cap and trade were all about throwing money at the Democratic base.  Yet now the president is running for reelection by ginning up the Democratic base.



Does he really think he can raise enthusiasm on his side without waking the sleeping bear on the other side?



The problem with big government is that it amounts to a kind of secular religious state.  In every big program it is pushing secular religious morality and repressing traditional religious morality.  Liberals absolutely hate the right "legislating morality."  But they seem to be clueless about their own agenda. And that boils down to "legislating liberal morality."



Everyone except liberals hates it when liberals legislate morality.  So that's why I wonder about Obama and his class-warfare campaign for reelection.

Government, Business, and Religion

In the lefty documentary The Corporation the usual suspects on the left excoriate business for its soulless attention to profit.  They, the corporations, don't believe in anything, says documentarist Michael Moore.  That's why they will sell him the rope to hang them with.

That's not really fair, Michael.  Corporations do too believe in something.  They believe in production for profit.

Generations of lefties have been outraged about this, and generations of practical people have tried to come to terms with it.  But it's true.  Business will do what it takes to make a profit, subject to the the natural and social limitations placed on it.

Wouldn't it be better to go back to a simpler age where economic activity was more closely integrated with human values?  Yes, it would.  And it would be nice to put all the evils of the world back in Pandora's Box.

But that fact is that humans are resourceful and inquiring creatures and over the recent millennia we have differentiated our simple hunter-gatherer culture.  No longer are governing, production, and meaning all mixed together in a unified single narrative and ritual.  Now they are differentiated and specialized.  Just like our knowledge of the world, which used to be called natural philosophy, is now differentiated into a hundred disciplines and specialties.

Today we have government, and government is the specialist in force.  Apologists for government spill barrels of ink trying to show that government is kind and compassionate, but they are fooling themselves.  People resort to government when they give up on getting what they want by exchange or persuasion.  They go to government to because they want to use its force.

Today we have religion, and religion is the specialist in meaning.  It may be that the world has no meaning, as the Stoics insisted, but humans, and indeed all living things, act as if it does.  It is the job of religion in its broadest sense, encompassing transcendental faith, secular faith, culture, and language to breathe meaning into the world.   It is meaning that tells us what we "ought" to do.

Today we have business, and business is the specialist in production.  As Marx realized, business in the old days was veiled in custom and mystery, but capitalism has stripped it of all its mystery, and reduced everything to "callous cash payment."  Business is all about exploitation: using human and physical resources in the most cost-effective way.  Exploitation is not necessarily good or bad.  It is just getting the best value for money.

So when the lefties rail on and on about the "harm" that corporations inflict, we have go say: so what?  If you don't want corporations to buy clothing from sweatshops then make it illegal and put the CEOs in jail if they break the law.  And when the CEO of a public member-owned cooperative does the same thing, put him in jail.  That is what government is for, en-"forcing" the law.  But in the real world, things aren't quite as simple as they appear in lefty documentaries.  The workers in sweatshops are usually teenage girls fresh off the farm.  And their wages, small as they seem to us, actually mean a lot to their families back on the farm.  So, do we insist that sweatshops pay more?  Even it that means that those teenage girls don't have jobs?

The bigger question is the question of meaning.  We think that human life means more than government force and capitalist production.  We humans are social animals, and that means that we don't like to force our kin, our friends and our neighbors. We would rather persuade them.  We don't like to use our kin and our friends as means to an end.  We want good for our friends for its own sake, because we wish them well.  The great challenge of the modern era, where people deal all the time with people who are not their kin or their neighbors is how to make the whole world social and persuadable, avoid treating strangers as numbers, and keep force to a minimum.

In other words, how do we create a culture where CEOs don't ruthlessly externalize all their costs, because we have built a culture that teaches people to think about the harm they do to other people before they act?

Where's the Astroturf?

When the Tea Party emerged in the winter of 2009 and staged numerous Tea Parties across the United States on April 15, 2009, the reaction of the liberal elite in the media and in politics was uniform.  It was contemptible and it was anyway, as Nancy Pelosi said, astroturf.



That is, the demonstrations were ginned up by the Republican Noise Machine and were not authentic grass-roots political activism.



Now that the Left has taken to the streets in the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Right is quick to discover a guiding hand in the movement from the Obama campaign and from labor unions.



Who is right?   Who knows?



All I can say is that the Tea Party activism was a surprise to me.  In the winter of 2009 I experienced the Republican/conservative coalition preparing to hunker down, ready to compromise as necessary with a popular new president and his agenda.  I think the "Republican establishment" was initially taken by surprise and confused by the Tea Party, and also worried that Tea Party extremism might compromise their ability to appeal to the moderate middle.



Yes, but what about the Koch brothers?  Yeah, well what about George Soros?



It makes good left-wing copy to conjure up a movement organized by the Koch brothers, but if you want reality, not a conspiracy theory, you have to recognize that the Koch brothers have been funding libertarian think tanks for decades, and were probably taken by surprise as much as anyone.  But once the Tea Party emerged, they were glad to help and organize.  Hey that's politics.



But what about the Occupy Wall Street crowd?  How close are they to the liberal establishment, and more significant, how close to the Obama campaign?



My guess is: a lot closer than anyone is letting on.  It's curious, isn't it, that the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations started just after the president committed to a class warfare campaign with a jobs bill that was designed to be indigestible to Republicans.



I'm not arguing for a conspiracy here.  Its just that the relations among the various groups on the left are a lot closer than on the right.  It starts right with the notion that on the left politics is everything, and that the whole point of politics is to mobilize the marginalized and raise their consciousness with organizing.   That's the point of the president's brief internship as a "community organizer."



The bigger question is whether all this street activism will work?  That remains to be seen.  On the right we tend to believe that left-wing street activism is all about the sacred rituals of the "over" part of the over-under coalition we know as the Democratic Party.  Our liberal friends see themselves as altruistic and idealistic leaders of the marginalized and the exploited.  They do not stop to ask whether their enlistment of the poor into their political army is not a mere cynical exploitation of the poor to prop up liberal power.



What does the American people want?  Ask me in December 2012.

A Tale of Two Tariffs

Back in the 19th century the Republican Party rode to victory, election after election, on the Tariff.  It was common sense, really.  By charging a fee on imports we Americans could make imports from decadent Europe a little more expensive and help boost American jobs and wages.



It all worked like a charm until the economic Armageddon of 1929-33.  Then the Smoot-Hawley tariff helped bury the Republican Party for a generation.



That was then; this is now.  Now the Democratic Party is reaching the end of the line on their Tariff.  The Democratic tariff is not a tariff on imports.  The Democratic tariff it is a tax on jobs.



Think about it.  If you are a "job creator," as we Republicans like to say, you find that when you pay a new employee you must also pay the government for the privilege.  There's the 7 percent payroll tax, the 1 to 6 percent unemployment tax, the premiums on the state's workers' comp. program.  It could add up to a 20 percent tariff that you pay the government on each dollar of each worker's pay.  Then the worker pays their share of the payroll tax, plus income tax if they earn decent money.  That's another tariff, another tax on jobs.



But hey, it's just common sense, right?  We have to fund the government's social insurance programs for retirement, health care, and unemployment compensation somehow.  Right?



Back in 1937 when Social Security taxes first started the tariff on jobs was one percent on the employer and one percent on the employee.  And only the rich paid income tax.  The big 1937 recession was probably not caused by the new FICA tax, but by the 1935 Wagner Act that resulted in huge boosts to union wages.



But now that the tariff on jobs--on ordinary low wage jobs--is hitting 20, 30 percent...  Well, just think back to the days of the Smoot Hawley tariff, when tariffs on imported products reached almost 20 percent.



Economist Deirdre McCloskey writes:

“‘Jobs’ are deals between workers and employers, and so ‘creating’ them out of unwilling parties is impossible. The state, though, can outlaw deals, and has.”

Let us expand this notion.  If "Jobs" are deals between workers and employers, then "Products" are deals between producers and consumers.  Everything the government does to get between workers and employers or between producers and consumers is going to sour the "deal."  Whether it's a tariff on an import, or a tax on a job, it makes the deal less attractive to the parties to the deal.  At some point, they are going to say: "screw it, the deal is just not worth it."



So now tell me that the Obama administration, intent upon raising the tariff on labor, is as smart as they say it is.

Let's Make the Payroll Tax Cut Permanent

Conservative talk-show host Michael Medved is worried that President Obama has a plan to make the current payroll tax cuts permanent and make up the difference on higher income tax rates.  The president has already tipped his hand that 2012 would not be the right time to "raise middle-class taxes".

[T]he new low rates in payroll taxes for every American household, from 6.2 percent in 2010 to 3.1 percent in 2012, won’t suddenly evaporate at the end of 2012; they will become permanent almost inevitably, shrinking revenues not by $240 billion in a single year but by at least $2.4 trillion over 10 years.

But I say: Bring It On.



The current payroll tax, falling heaviest on wage earners, is part of the system of political defense in depth for Social Security and Medicare.  It preserves the illusion, promulgated first by FDR and believed by many Americans, that Social Security and Medicare are insurance programs.  I paid into the trust fund, Americans say, so I got my benefits coming.



But if politicians cut the tax so that it clearly is no longer funding Social Security properly, then the inconvenient truth starts to emerge, that Social Security is really a welfare program.  Then, of course, the sacred aura surrounding the program starts to fade away.  People might start to say: how come those Latinos down in Chile got a genuine savings program and we just have this joke of a welfare program?



Yeah. Let's raise income tax rates.  Let's screw the rich.  But the problem is that US tax rates are already pretty high by international standards.  If we make them higher then people are going to start serious tax avoidance, and maybe even move to more friendly tax regimes.  And the higher you make the rates, the more that it pays people to pay politicians to carve out crony capitalist exemptions and deductions.



And there is another reason.  One of the ways that Democrats prospered in the 2000s was that the professional middle class was doing well, tax wise.  Taxes on wages were moderate, and tax rates on capital were reduced.  The result was that upper-income people did not need the Republicans to represent their interest and started to dwell more on the embarrassing religious enthusiasm of the downmarket social conservatives.



President Obama's interest in taxing the wannabe rich is going to concentrate the minds of the "economically conservative, socially liberal" educated professional classes.  And that won't add up to votes for our Democratic friends.

"Care About" or "Care For"

The eternal complaint about the government is that the government doesn't care, and so politicians are always anxious to present themselves as caring.  The pollsters are always asking the question to voters: "Does the government care about people like me?"

So Peggy Noonan listening in on a couple of focus groups hears this:

What do they want in a political leader? Someone who cares about "Jane Doe on Main Street that can't pay her electric bill." Someone "with passion not for himself but for America."

The problem is that it is a short step from a leader "who cares about me" to a government that "cares for me."  But this is actually a big step.  It is the step into slavery.  Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger tell how this worked in England in The Year 1000.  Slavery back then could be a penalty for crimes ranging from "certain types of theft to incest."  And, of course, you could be captured by the Vikings and sold into slavery.  But you could become a slave by your own act.

People also surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine or distress...  [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands...  It was a basic transaction--heads for food.

When a free man places his head in the hands of his lord he gives up his freedom, his birthright, in return for a mess of pottage.  He no longer wonders if his lord "cares about" him.  He has changed the relationship.  Now his lord must "care for" him and provide his food.

In reality this boundary is not as clear cut as it might seem.  You can see this in the way that ordinary people in Peggy Noonan's focus groups think about the role of the banks in the mortgage meltdown.

Who are the culprits behind our economic calamity? "The banks and the people who took the loans." But more the banks, because they had, as one woman put it, "the authority." When they gave out the loans, people thought "it must have been OK." People were "lured in" by the banks—don't worry, home values will keep going up—which pocketed the fees and kept walking.

I've noticed that a lot of people think this way.  The bank has responsibility because they shouldn't have loaned to me if I couldn't pay.  The whole authoritarian welfare state, of course, is built upon this equivocal attitude to freedom.  Employers don't just have a responsibility to pay you, but to provide benefits.  Corporations are supposed to act not just as purveyors of products and services but "give back" to the community.

This subordinate attitude, so encouraged by our liberal friends and the mainstream media, would have seemed shameful to the sturdy folk in George Eliot's Adam Bede.  In the English Midlands of 1800, Adam Bede is a modest carpenter, and believes that his work is part of his religion, "that good carpentry was God's will"; he is the perfect expression of Max Weber's Protestant ethic.  Adam looked to himself and his interpretation of the Bible to guide his life.  There is not a whisper of subordination in his character, or in the remarkable character of Dinah Morris, a twentysomething lay Methodist preacher and textile worker.  These people of the Great Awakening lived a culture of deep moral inquiry and personal responsibility.  They did not think to blame others for their troubles, and they had plenty of them.

Our time is a time when the "care for" culture of the authoritarian welfare state is collapsing in moral and actual bankruptcy.  There is a simple reason for the collapse.  Government is force.  Government does not care for anything except its power.  Government must "care about" its people, because their prosperity is the foundation and the reason for its existence.  But when it pretends to "care for" its people then it enters a wilderness of mirrors.

Conservative Jonah Goldberg jokes that too many of our liberal friends believe in a government that is a "non-hierarchical, consensus-based, extremely deliberative form of direct democracy." In their confusion they grasp a truth.  Humans as social animals prize as an ideal a society that is non-hierarchical, consensus-based, and deliberative.  But government is necessarily hierarchical, and its consensus is always something of a sham.  Because when the majority votes a bill into law after due deliberation, it votes to compel the losers to obey the new law.  Government is force, and always will be.

Unions, Soros Join "Occupy Wall Street"

Back in the 1960s the New Left used street protest to oppose the Vietnam War.  They brought down a Democratic president and helped elect a Republican, Richard Nixon.



In the 2000s the Angry Left, assisted by capitalists like George Soros, the mainstream media, and the Democratic Party, took to the streets to oppose President George W. Bush and everything he stood for.



Now, with the Occupy Wall Street movement, we see the Democratic Party use street demonstrations to support an incumbent president. And George Soros and the labor unions are along for the ride.



With sympathetic reporting on the protests from the mainstream media, we must assume that President Obama is backing the protests as part of his Soak the Rich reelection strategy.  It shows that he really is a movement leftist, as his conservative critics have charged, and really lives his community organizer values.  Left-wing protest is what he knows; left-wing protest is what he does.  So he has decided to live or die by the street protest.



Just one thing, fellas.  When the Democratic Party last tried this in the late 1960s the American people hated it. The liberals and the mainstream media all fell over themselves about the wonderful "kids" demonstrating for a just and liberated society.  But the American people went the other way.



In fact, the protest era of the 1960s and 1970s ended the Democratic Party's reign as the Everyman's party. That's because for the American people, as opposed to rent-a-mob activists, the economy and the country must work for them to prosper and thrive.  It may be tremendous fun for "students" to create mayhem in the streets, but ordinary working people need to get back to peaceable work.  The people most upset by the Wall Street protests are the retail business people in the area (often immigrant minorities) trying to run a business.



In a way, I feel amazed.  President Obama and his people can't really believe that they can get reelected this way.  By sending left-wing demonstrators into the streets?  By making the American people afraid?  If it works, they will be geniuses.



But my money says that President Obama is creating a gigantic opening for the Republican Party to take and hold the center ground of American politics.  One big reason: Women.   Politicians in recent years have avoided calling people into the streets because they know that women hate that sort of thing.  Women hate street fighting.  They like to see politicians that get together and discuss their dilemmas and all agree to get along.  Candidate Obama of 2008 was a politician who was all about people getting along and getting past the childish partisan games of the 2000s.



What has changed since then?  The answer is Obama himself.  Back then he was the cool challenger, and everything was going his way.  Now he is the embattled incumbent and things seem to be falling apart.



When pilots experience an emergency, they go with their training.  That's why the airlines do tons of emergency training.  When something goes wrong, the pilot doesn't have to think, he just applies his training.



That's what President Obama is doing in the current emergency.  He is going back to his training.  And his training is in left-wing grievance politics.  The problem is that his training doesn't really apply to the welfare state in crisis with failed programs, massive debt, and 9 percent unemployment.



So he will make it worse.  That is going to cost the US.  Big time.  And it is going to cost the Democratic Party.  Really big time.