America After Blue Destruction

For conservatives longing for an end to the Age of Liberal Hegemony Walter Russell Mead has good news.  The "Blue Social Model" of the liberals will end not just because conservatives hate big government but because the mid-20th century bureaucratic model is so inefficient that liberals will give it up.  Liberals want government to "do" things.  They are becoming frustrated that it is getting progressively more and more gummed up.

There is an anti-government case for moving beyond the blue model and there is a pro-government case. Some people will push to transform the civil service and increase the productivity of workers in government and government-related services (above all, health and education) because restructuring and re-engineering government is the only way they can provide the services they want the public sector to provide.

From a rational perspective, you would have to agree.  But you wouldn't have noticed any such notion from the rapid expansion of government under President Obama.  ObamaCare, after all, is the biggest monument to bureaucracy even enacted, and creates dozens of new bureaucratic committees with the IPAC, the Independent Payments Advisory Commission, at the very center of its bureaucratic lotus flower.  Maybe some lofty academics have a gleam in their eye, but you wouldn't know it from the liberals you meet at parties, who have an unquenchable faith in "single-payer" healthcare.



No, I suspect that there really is little chance that the Democrats will agree to reform their welfare state in time.  Why should they?  It would mean suggesting to their voters that they have been lying to them all this time.  The only way Democrats will go for reform is when "austerity" hits, when the government is forced to reduce spending because it can't sell its debt to the bond market.



The world doesn't work by timely accommodations to reality.  It works by "creative destruction," as George Will writes in an article about that good old American institution, Sears.  In the middle of the 20th century everyone shopped at Sears.  But a chap called Sam Walton in Bentonville, Arkansas, had a different idea, and today Sears is going down for the count.



What will the government of the future look like?  Don't look now, liberals, but the best leading indicator is the military.  The big battalion model grew up in the era of gunpowder as generals learned to differentiate the feudal host into rigidly hierarchical and disciplined regiments.  They built a rigidly bureaucratic government to tax the people so they could afford their expensive, bureaucratic armies.


But the rigid model began to break up in the 19th century with rifled gun barrels and the "lethal battlefield."  By the end of World War I the armies had developed a new model based on the squad, often led by an NCO. In the 1920s the German Army under Gen. von Seeckt decided that it needed a new kind of soldier: "self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility."

Today, the US armed forces operate under just that kind of philosophy.  Responsibility is pushed downwards as far as possible.  And with the rise of special forces, the trend is likely to intensify.

The bureaucratic model gradually spread from the regiments of the absolute monarchs to the social programs of the welfare state.  Today, government is a monolithic monster that rewards place-men and people who go along to get along.  If liberals really want government to be effective they will have to change the model to the responsibility model that now obtains in the armed forces and also in the private sector.

But conservatives must ask: do we really want a new generation of liberal government employees "self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility?"  Imagine the damage they could do!  On the other hand, perhaps the responsibility model would force government to be less oppressive and less hegemonic.

It would probably be better for us all if government goes down for the count, so that almost everyone would agree that big government was a human disaster that must never be repeated.  But that would mean horrible suffering for the folks that drank the Kool-Aid and turned their lives over to government.  That would be a tragedy, not just for them but for all of us.

Obama Doesn't Care About Debt

Should we worry about the debt and the deficit?  Everyone says they do, politicians especially.  But nobody does anything about it.



Except now.  Except for Rep. Paul Ryan and his second House budget.  The first one is here, and the second one is here.  The White House doesn't like Ryan's budget.

The House budget once again fails the test of balance, fairness, and shared responsibility. It would shower the wealthiest few Americans with an average tax cut of at least $150,000, while preserving taxpayer giveaways to oil companies and breaks for Wall Street hedge fund managers.

What Democrats care about is their programs.  Writes David Harsanyi:

Democrats are willing to move heaven and earth for the things they do care about. They were prepared to whip up political turmoil and put the presidency and Congress on the line to pass Obamacare. Yet they won't risk offering a budget, lest anyone glimpse their priorities.

Some of the things that Democrats care about are patronage/clientage things, like the great social programs that dish out benefits to ordinary voters and dish out a little on the side to the poor.  Other things are elite things, like green energy and the environment and abortion, which are issues that the educated class cares about.



But debt and deficits? Not so much.  Because for Democrats the programs are the thing.  They figure that, one way or another, their programs will survive in the rough and tumble of partisan politics.



Unfortunately, in the long term, the one sure thing about governments is default. The point about debt and deficits is that, when you get to the Grecian formula, where the government cannot issue debt except upon ruinous terms, and the next step is sovereign debt default, then ordinary people are going to suffer.



Why?  Because when you Go Greek two things happen that are bad for ordinary people.



First of all, the government defaults on its debt and devalues the value of money and ordinary people are usually invested in government debt through their savings and their pension funds.  So ordinary people get screwed out of their savings.



The other thing is that government expenditures get cut.  When you look at where the money goes, and the place to look for that is usgovernmentspending.com,  you see that most of it goes to ordinary people for ordinary Social Security, ordinary Medicare, ordinary Education, and then some stuff for Welfare.  Out of $6 trillion a year in spending, you get about one trillion each for Pensions, Healthcare, Education and Defense, plus (once we get out of the Great Recession) $0.5 trillion for Welfare.  So that is $4.5 trillion out of the $6 trillion.  And that is before interest on the national debt.



Politicians and the educated class don't need to worry too much about deficits and debt and default.  They have skills and assets and connections.  They will probably come out of it OK.  But ordinary people will get screwed.



Back when the Soviet Union collapsed, I asked a Pole about conditions in the old Communist block.  He said that it really hit old people the worst.  They ended up "eating the paint off the walls."  There is no reason to expect that things will be any different when our government runs out of other peoples' money.

No It's Not the Internet, Peggy

As a baby-boomer male, I guess that I know less than nothing about the world of today's battle of the sexes.  But I take a flaccid note of the voices of the young and strong.



Here is "Christian libertarian" Vox Day taking out after Peggy Noonan for suggesting that today's War on Women issues from the baleful influence of the Internet.



Oh no it doesn't, writes Vox.  It issues from the profound injustice visited upon young men these days.  It started for him the day that a girl started a fight with him on the playground and he got into trouble. "[G]irls were just as good as boys, but we must never, ever hit them back even when they physically attacked us."

It is neither the Internet nor the anonymous commentary it provides that has brought about the ongoing revolution of the male perspective concerning what once used to be known as "the fair sex." It is, rather, the result of the first generation steeped in feminist propaganda from kindergarten to college graduation reaching an age where their voices are finally being heard. And the voice of the male half of Generation X and those generations following it is a contemptuous one indeed, because many of these men, including some of the most articulate, understand how utterly they were lied to by every authority figure they ever knew concerning the opposite sex.

Here's how:

• In high school Gen X was told that girls wanted "nice guys" but found that they preferred "socially dominant and the athletic".
  
  


• In college Gen X was told that girls were just as interested in sex as boys were.  Only it turned out that sex was rape for any reason--or for no reason.
  
  


• "When we entered the workforce, we were told that women only wanted equal pay for equal work, then watched as they called in sick more often than we did, came in later and went home earlier than we did, asked us for help in doing their jobs, then were handed promotions and raises by virtue of their affairs with the middle managers and executives."
  
  


• And woe betide anyone that committed the sin of expressing interest in a woman while "insufficiently attractive".
  
  

So Vox Day's generation has rejected the pretty lies they were taught.  Through better experience they have won through to a new social horizon.

What Peggy Noonan does not realize is that whereas men once assumed that a woman was a lady until proven otherwise, increasing numbers of them assume women are shallow and superficial until they are provided with credible evidence to the contrary.

And as the "game" theoretician Heartiste insists, there is no darker hell than the world of the "beta male".  Here he suggests to Charles Murray that rather than shame men into shaping up he should try shaming women instead.



One thinks of Stein's Law.  "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop,"

Obama's Flubbed Debt Deal and January 2013

Is the mainstream media stepping away from Obama?  That's one possibility in the wake of a tick-tock story in the Washington Post about the debt-deal negotiations last August.



The official line, of course, is that the Republicans are to blame because they refused to compromise.  But WaPo reporters Peter Wallsten, Lori Montgomery and Scott Wilson tiptoe up to a different judgement.

Obama, nervous about how to defend the emerging agreement to his own Democratic base, upped the ante in a way that made it more difficult for Boehner — already facing long odds — to sell it to his party. Eventually, the president tried to put the original framework back in play, but by then it was too late. The moment of making history had passed.

Or you can take Rush Limbaugh's Monday morning judgement: Obama lied. The Republicans had agreed to a tax increase. But Obama wouldn't agree to a plan that would upset his base.



Who knows what really went on. But it becomes more and more clear that the liberals will not agree to genuine spending cuts until the US goes Greek. And after all, why should they? If the money is still there, they should insist on their programs, their tenure, and their sinecures.



The Democrats' man at the Wall Street Journal, Alan Blinder, worries that the federal government is heading for a fiscal cliff in January 2013 unless something is done.

If the House and Senate don't act in time, a list of things will happen that are anathema either to Republicans or Democrats or both. The Bush tax cuts will expire. The temporary payroll tax cut will end. Unemployment benefits will be severely curtailed. And all on Jan. 1, 2013. Happy New Year!

On top of that there are $1.2 billion in spending cuts from the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction that kick in in January.  All told, Blinder predicts 3.5 percent GDP in fiscal contraction in January from tax increases and spending cuts in January unless something is done.



But this is silly.  The reason that all this stuff has been kicked down the road to January 2013 is that there is a stalemate between liberals and conservatives right now.  Liberals don't want to reduce their programs and conservatives are damned if they are going to cough up more dough to fund the liberal welfare state.  Sooner or later, the American people are going to have to choose.  Otherwise, as in the case of Greece, other forces will start to choose for them.



In November the American people will get to choose whether they want President Obama to impose the Democratic solution on this stalemate or whether they want a Republican to impose a Republican solution.  Whatever the solution is, it will be something of a kludge, representing the political state of play that will emerge from the election results.



My betting is that the Democrats would have got a better deal in August 2011 than they will get after November 2012.



Hey, that's democracy.

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.