Change Starts with a Moral Movement

To conservatives, the Obama administration has been a smash-and-grab conquest of the American heartland.  The question that conservatives ask, after ObamaCare, Keynesian stimulus, Solyndra, czars in the White House, is whether ten thousand swords will indeed leap from their scabbards in November, or whether "the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory" of America is extinguished forever.

But for liberals the Obama administration is nothing of the sort.  For liberals ObamaCare is the culmination of a great and generous moral vision, that everyone would have access to health care, so that nobody would ever lack health care because of cost.  Green energy is a moral quest to save the planet from ruin in the wasteful burning of non-renewable fossil fuels.  It is well to remember that it is the ends of the liberal moral system that justifies the means of liberal politics.

To conservatives the whole story of Obamism is its trespass on the Constitution and its fallacious belief in the idea of government as a moral force.  Big government programs lead to big dependency and big time unintended consequences.  As liberals used to say, you cannot legislate morality, even environmental ethics and social justice.

Of course this is rubbish.  Legislation is always the legislation of morality, the enforcement of some vision of the good.

But liberals have an important point: just not the one they think they are making.  Liberals may strongly resist when conservatives try to legislate their morality, but they cheer on loudly their own liberal leaders when they try to legislate liberal morality.  They are in fact all in favor of legislating morality: their morality, or ethics, as they prefer to call it.  What is the movement for "gay marriage" after all but an attempt to legislate liberal ideas of the moral life--the idea that marriage is a partnership of love between two people, any two people--over the conservative idea of the moral life--the idea that marriage is a social institution to protect women and bind men to the support of their children.

No, the point about legislating morality is that legislating morality comes second, after you have established your morality in the first place.  You want to ban slavery?  First you must mount a moral crusade to make it into a scandal in the hearts of men and women.  You want civil rights for African Americans?  First you must mount a moral movement to make segregation into a revolting practice about as evil as the Peculiar Institution itself.

If conservatives want to roll back the welfare state and replace it with the opportunity state or the mutual-aid state or the charitable state or a combination of the three then conservatives must make the current welfare state into a scandal "not to be endured."  Conservatives must mount a moral movement to change the hearts and minds of the American people.

That is the argument of William G. McLoughlin in Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform.  He writes that

great awakenings are periods when the cultural system has had to be revitalized in order to overcome jarring disjunctions between norms and experience, old beliefs and new realities, dying patterns and emerging pattern of behavior.

In other words, politics begins with religion.  And that goes for secular religions as well.  You cannot understand the modern era without experiencing socialism and Communism as great secular religious Awakenings that moved men's minds long before they made revolutions and passed social legislation.

Loughlin's particular interest is the great religious awakenings in American history, beginning with the Puritan awakening in 1600.  Our current liberal culture and governance, he asserts, dates back to a great awakening that took place at the end of the 19th century and gave us the Social Gospel and the welfare state.

To conservatives the welfare state is a horrible disjunction between a supposed noble vision and its corrupt experience, between the visions of the anointed and the grubby failures of crony capitalism and "unintended consequences."  The clumsy programs of welfare and ObamaCare only make things worse.  To liberals, the welfare state has liberated the exploited and the traditionally marginalized from a life of subjection and want.  Whatever the minor faults of individual programs, we should never forget what the United States would look like without them.  It would be a mean and brutal place where the rich got richer and the poor went to the wall.

It is almost certain that liberals overreached in 2009 and 2010.  Americans don't want an America where liberals boss them around with an endless procession of 1,000 page bills.  But Americans do believe in Social Security and Medicare, as pollster Scott Rasmussen makes clear.

The two biggest entitlement programs -- Social Security and Medicare -- are seen by voters as trust funds they pay into during their working lives and then get back in their retirement years.

Want to reform Social Security and Medicare?  First you have to change the notion voters have that there is a "trust fund" out there with their money in it.  And clearing up that little misunderstanding will be nothing compared to the effort it will take to undermine and destroy the moral standing those two programs have in the hearts and minds of Americans.

In other words, if you want to change society, don't think about politics.  Not yet.  Think about a moral movement to make the current arrangements into a scandal and a moral outrage.  And then do something about it.

The Democrats' Educated Voter Problem

Everyone likes to pose our great political divides as Republican problems, as in the "gender gap" and in "moderate voters hate Republican social conservatives."

No doubt, and that matters in swing states like Colorado, Virginia, and North Carolina where the pundits say the November election will be decided.  Why?  Let William Tucker tell you.

Now, what do these three states have in common? Very simply, they are the nation's new "suburbs," the emerging middle ground between urban centers of the East and West Coasts and Upper Midwest... These are Joel Garreau's "Edge Cities" or David Brooks' "Latte Towns" -- take your pick -- inhabited by Richard Florida's "Creative Class." Their voters are college-educated, employed well-paying, high-status jobs, but far enough away from the media centers so that they haven't yet bought into the liberal dogma that the only way for things to be "fair" in America is to vote for Democrats.

These folks are the paradigmatic voters that say they are "economically conservative and socially liberal."  Actually, according to my interpretation of Charles Murray in Coming Apart, they are reverse hypocrites.  They act socially conservative but talk socially liberal.  Go figure.

Let's stipulate that those college-educated folks with their high-paying jobs hate the bitter clingers and their God and their guns.

But what about the other side of the equation?  Remember how Candidate Obama was going to heal the wounds of the Red-Blue divide?  Remember how he only got out a teeny squeak of his "share-the-wealth" agenda to Joe the Plumber back in 2008?

Not any more.  These days President Obama is class-warrior-in-chief.

How about this reckless statement.  Suppose those college-educated folks in Colorado and Virginia and North Carolina just hate the class-warfare rubbish coming out of Democrats' mouths--from the president to the superb Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and on down the Democratic food chain to the execrable Occupy crowd--suggesting that rich folks, the one percent, "pay a little more."

Class warfare may play well in the inner city or with the government union employee that gets two to three emails a day from the union boss telling her how she is being screwed by the Republican governor.  But the college-educated employee working for a young technology company is an achiever.  He or she has made a big investment in education and a career.   Share-the-wealth means that he or she will have to pay more taxes out to slackers.  It means that the return on all that investment and achievement is going to be reduced.

Yet here we have President Obama doing the Democratic equivalent of Rick Santorum.  The "socially liberal" educated voter hates Rick Santorum and his social conservatism.  Why wouldn't the "economically conservative"educated voter hate President Obama and his economic class warfare?

Just asking.

Obama Really Believed in Green Energy

President Obama is batting on a bit of a sticky wicket these days. Gasoline prices are increasing, reaching $5.00 per gallon in some places, and he is having to pretend that he didn't want this all along. From Jonah Goldberg:

Obama was recently asked by Fox News’s Ed Henry whether high gas prices are a deliberate result of White House policies. His response was telling. “From a political perspective, do you think the president of the United States going into reelection wants gas prices to go up higher? Is there anybody here who thinks that makes a lot of sense?”

If you parse the statement you can see that the president is not opposed to high gas prices per se. He just doesn't like high gas prices when "going into reelection."

But it turns out that the president is not the cynical political monster we imagine. He really believes his green energy hokum. He really thought that green energy was going to jump start the economy. James Pethokoukis:

Week after week, [White House economic adviser Christina] Romer would march in with an estimate of the jobs all the investments in clean energy would produce; week after week, Obama would send her back to check the numbers. "I don’t get it," he’d say. "We make these large-scale investments in infrastructure. What do you mean, there are no jobs?"

Let me help out here Mr. President. Green energy is a fantasy, at least for the next 20 years. That's because the whole point of energy is to have concentrated energy. Nuclear is more concentrated than oil; oil is more concentrated than coal; coal is more concentrated than wood. Wind and solar and biomass are less concentrated than the above. So people won't use them unless you force them. And because they are economically worse than current oil and gas technology, green jobs are going to cause a net decrease in jobs, as the Spanish have discovered.

Everyone says that they are in favor of science, but the fact is that science cannot tell the future. Therefore we humans are forced to use faith when preparing for the future. Conservatives have faith in the market and the free enterprise economy to adapt successfully to whatever the future may bring. Liberals have faith in the ability of government and academic experts to prepare for the future.

The only time that you can change anyone's mind is when things go wrong. Of course, you don't change the minds of the true believers. You just change the minds of the folks who went along to get along, the proverbial "moderates."  In the case of green energy and global warming, the American people have gone along because green energy and global warming were about the only narrative they heard from their news broadcasts, their teachers, and their children.  Until now.

Now it seems pretty clear that something is wrong with the green energy/global warming "consensus" and so now is a moment for conservatives to get in and push a conservative energy strategy based on oil and gas--especially the new and exciting horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technology--and maybe spend a little money midwifing a move to modular nuclear in the years ahead.

On nuclear, the big problem is the popular notion that if there is a nuclear accident we are all going to die. Even though in the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami the current death toll is: death from tsunami: 20,000; death from nuclear radiation: zero.

The Limits of Rule 13

President Obama, we are told, is an avid student of Saul Alinsky, the lefty that developed the art of community organizing into a science.  And nothing that Alinsky said or did eclipses his famous Rule 13 on page 130 of Rules for Radicals.

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

That's how you keep your supporters amped up and committed to the cause.



But there's a problem and I trust that the president and his handlers understand it.  The whole lefty political-action playbook is based on a vital assumption.  It is that "we", the community organizer and his flock, are the underdogs.  "We" are oppressed and marginalized by the big corporation or the big government that bears down on us and exploits us like slaves, and against which we are peacefully protesting.



But suppose that "we" is the Obama administration of the United States of America.  Doesn't it get a bit difficult to pose as the underdog when you have $3.8 trillion, the Pentagon, the FBI, the Justice Department and the EPA at your command?



This morning there's a flap about an Obama internet ad that attacks Sarah Palin, among others.  Was this wise?  Let us count the ways:

1. What with the movie Game Change I thought Sarah Palin was an ignorant idiot that didn't know what the Fed does.  So why would she be worth the bother of an attack?  All it does it give her the opportunity to sound like she knows something after all. "Party like it's 1773" and all that.


2. It deploys the power and might of the United States government against a private person.  Liberals have demolished whole National Forests declaiming against the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s.  You'll remember that the big deal was using the power of government to persecute innocent individuals with unpopular views.


3. Back to the point about Alinsky.  If you are the government, and you are freezing, personalizing, and polarizing some individual, a lot of people are going to think, wow, next thing they will be coming for me.

There is no question that the president and his top aides, men like red-diaper baby David Axelrod, are really smart when it comes to the day-to-day tactics of political campaigns.  But you don't want to give a has-been like Sarah Palin a chance to write this about the president's failures:

Just off the top of my head, a few of these concerning issues include: a debt crisis that has us hurtling towards a Greek-style collapse, entitlement programs going bankrupt, a credit downgrade for the first time in our history, a government takeover of the health care industry that makes care more expensive and puts a rationing panel of faceless bureaucrats between you and your doctor (aka a “death panel”), $4 and $5 gas at the pump exacerbated by an anti-drilling agenda that rejects good paying energy sector jobs and makes us more dependent on dangerous foreign regimes, a war in Afghanistan that seems unfocused and unending, a global presidential apology tour that’s made us look feeble and ridiculous, a housing market in the tank, the longest streak of high unemployment since World War II, private-sector job creators and industry strangled by burdensome regulations and an out-of-control Obama EPA, an attack on the Constitutional protection of religious liberty, an attack on private industry in right-to-work states, crony capitalism run amok in an administration in bed with their favored cronies to the detriment of genuine free market capitalism, green energy pay-to-play kickbacks to Obama campaign donors, and a Justice Department still stonewalling on a bungled operation that armed violent Mexican drug lords and led to the deaths of hundreds of innocent people.



I’m sure I missed a few things, but the list is just for starters.

I know, I know.  Sarah Palin didn't actually write all that (although it does contain some of her rhetorical tics like "fearful" and "detriment").  But then President Obama doesn't write his stuff either.



I tell you what I think.  I think that in the last week we've seen some blood in the water.  Everyone thought the Obama administration was cleaning up on its opponents and winning the message war.  Yet all of a sudden, the polls are turning south and the president looks vulnerable.  So maybe while the courtiers were applauding the Obamis were shooting themselves in the foot.



And here's why.  I think that the American people expect the president to be presidential.  He is, after all, supposed to be president of all the people, not just his liberal base.  It's a tricky thing, running for reelection as president.  You want to destroy your opponent, but you need to present yourself as the sunny, confident father of the people.  It's not as easy as it looks.

"Yes We Can," Mr President

You remember the good old days.  When Candidate Obama campaigned around the country exclaiming: "Yes We Can!"



But now he's running around whining that no, we can't.  The late Steve Jobs complained about this to Walter Isaacson, his biographer.  Remember the dinner that Obama had with Silicon Valley tech titans?  It didn't go very well.

According to his biography, when Jobs organized a dinner of Internet executives with Mr. Obama, he concluded, "The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can't get done." He added, "It infuriates me."

Golly, who would have thought it?  Here's another meeting Jobs had with the president.

In Jobs’s meeting with Obama, held at the Westin San Francisco Airport in the fall of 2010, he told the president that setting up factories in China was easier than in the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult. Jobs also criticized the American education system, calling it “crippled by union work rules.”

 Gosh!  Obama's America is a place where "No, we can't."  What went wrong?



Now we have the president's ill-considered No We Can't Have $2.50 a Gallon Gasoline remarks.  Newt Gingrich has suggested that if we pursue an all-of-the-above energy strategy we can get to $2.50 a gallon gasoline, down from its present $4.00 per gallon.



No we can't, said the president in his weekly radio address.

But you and I both know that with only 2% of the world’s oil reserves, we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices – not when consume 20 percent of the world’s oil. We need an all-of-the-above strategy that relies less on foreign oil and more on American-made energy – solar, wind, natural gas, biofuels, and more.

Lots of people on the left jumped in and agreed with the president, people like Ezra Klein. But others have pointed out that the president just doesn't understand how markets work.  Markets anticipate the future, so if the president really implemented an all-of-the-above policy with regard to fossil fuels and allowed more drilling on federal lands, allowed drilling offshore, okayed the Keystone pipeline, kept the EPA out of gasoline formulations, etc., you would see a change in gasoline prices.  A lot bigger than anyone would think.



But of course liberals don't want that kind of energy policy.  That is why they all jump in and say it is impossible.  They believe in Peak Oil, in global warming, in CO2 as a pollutant, in getting out of cars and into mass transit, in future technologies like wind and solar, and on and on.  The last thing they want is low gasoline prices, except in the two months before a presidential election when gas prices are hovering around $4.00 per gallon and Americans are hollering for relief.



But we have a different idea.  Yes we can, Mr. President.  Because Big Government is all about Can't.  And Americans are all about Can Do.

Does a Happy Man Need Friends?

Can a solitary man be happy? Maybe. But if you are Aristotle, and you believe that "man is a political creature and one whose nature is to live with others" it would be strange for a happy man to live like a Hindu sadhu in solitary contemplation.

Some people, Aristotle notes, disagree. They say that the fortunate man doesn't need friends. But they are missing the point, at least in Aristotelian terms. For such a person measures other people by their usefulness. His friends are the second-class friends that are not founded on "goodwill" but pure utility or pleasure.  Enough of him!

That is not Aristotle's way. For him, happiness, eudaimonia, is full human flourishing, and full human flourishing must mean friends of the best kind: other virtuous men full of practical wisdom that do the right thing for the right reason in the right way at the right time. A happy, virtuous man needs friends, not for what they can do for him, but for what he can do for them. For a happy, virtuous man will want to spread the wealth around.

And besides, a solitary man would find it hard to be "continuously active," says Aristotle, and since activity is in itself pleasant, therefore friends are needed to provide the occasion for activity. Not only that, but "a certain training in virtue arises also from the company of the good." Even in Aristotle's time, people had to "use it or lose it." And that goes for virtue.

And besides (again?), just as life for animals is perception, life for man is defined "by the power of perception or thought". Thus to perceive and think and see that we perceive and think, and to perceive that one lives is in itself pleasant etc., etc., and since life is desirable and pleasant so then will be the perception of the life of a man's friend, because all the happiness and pleasure of considering one's own life will apply to the consideration of one's friend's life, "and this will be realized in their living together and sharing in discussion and thought".

Oh good. So that is settled. You can see, as so often in Aristotle, the charming hidden agenda. The purpose of life is to sit around and philosophize with a worthy friend. So therefore the happy man, reaching his full flourishing, is a man with the capability and the virtue to philosophize wisely--with a like-virtuous and happy friend. Q.E.D.

ObamaCare's Culture of Compulsion

It's tempting to ask the Catholic Church: where were you?  Now, finally, at the eleventh hour, the leaders of the US Catholic Church have come out and opposed ObamaCare on the grounds that it forces Catholic employers to pay for contraception and abortifacient services in violation of long-standing Church moral policy about contraception and abortion.



After all, the Catholic Church, at least since the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, has held to the principle of subsidiarity.  From Wikipedia:

The principle is based upon the autonomy and dignity of the human individual, and holds that all other forms of society, from the family to the state and the international order, should be in the service of the human person. Subsidiarity assumes that these human persons are by their nature social beings, and emphasizes the importance of small and intermediate-sized communities or institutions, like the family, the church, labor unions and other voluntary associations, as mediating structures which empower individual action and link the individual to society as a whole. "Positive subsidiarity", which is the ethical imperative for communal, institutional or governmental action to create the social conditions necessary to the full development of the individual, such as the right to work, decent housing, health care, etc., is another important aspect of the subsidiarity principle.

The idea is that, because humans are social beings, that government should only do things that people cannot do for themselves and cannot do for each other in mediating structures.  Why is this?  Because government is force.  Whenever you have government involved in anything it involves force.  When force enters the equation it means that the normal interactions of humans as social beings has broken down and needs to be compelled, to be forced to provide something that people cannot or will not do themselves.



The fact is that our liberal friends obviously understand that.  Otherwise they would not be trying to change the subject on ObamaCare.   When they say that the issue on Catholic employers is a question of women's reproductive rights, they are saying that reproductive rights are only possible if employers are forced to provide a service that costs $9 per month.  That is a joke.  We are talking here about three lattes a month or a couple of beers.  We are talking about ten percent of the cost of a fully supported iPhone with voice plan and data plan.  Our liberal friends understand very well that they are trespassing on First Amendment rights.  That is why they are changing the subject.



We know what is going on here.  Since time immemorial, politicians have bought the votes of the credulous by offering them free services to be paid for with other peoples' money.  In a way, the smaller this free service, the better.  After all, who can object to the cost of a mere $9 a month.  How cheap can you get?



But the fact is that government is force.  Politics is the threat of force.   And every subsection in a thousand page bill is another little instance where the life of humans as social beings is replaced by government force.  In each case we are talking about something that is removed from flexible social cooperation and replaced by rigid police force.



I suppose that many provisions in any thousand-page bill are not there because of some pressing need, but are really there as a demonstration of power by some organized special interest.  Attention must be paid!  Thus, if you are a feminist, you want to make sure that the nation's comprehensive and mandatory universal health program includes your big issues--contraception and abortion--otherwise you are demonstrating to the world that you don't really count as a power in the land; you are irrelevant.  When the special interests are sitting around the table, it matters that your issue gets added to the grand bargain that reflects your relative weight in the councils of power.



But every new addition to the power of government adds to the phalanx of force, and it diminishes the "autonomy and dignity of the individual."  It also diminishes the autonomy and dignity of all subsidiary institutions of social cooperation below the level of government that imposes its new rule of force.



In the Bush years our liberal friends sometimes became hysterical over the intolerable compulsions that Bush's policy laid upon them.  They do not seem to be so sensitive to the dangers of government force now that they are doing the forcing.



It is wonderful that the Catholic Church has woken up from a sound sleep and manned the ramparts of freedom.  Here's another wonderful thought.  How about we now discuss the forced confinement of children in government custodial facilities from age 7 to age 18?  What does that do to the "autonomy and dignity of the individual" child and its individual parent?