Romney Team Comes to Play

The name of the game in politics is defining what people are allowed to say.  You can talk all you like about the First Amendment, but the truth is that there are a lot of things that you aren't allowed to say, not if you want to keep out of trouble.  We all understand this instinctively; it's part of who we are as social animals.



What is going on here?  It is simple.  If government is force, politics is intimidation.  The whole point of politics is to intimidate the other side into silence or meaningless babbling.  You want to be able to laugh off their proposals as so far out of the mainstream that they have left America; you want to be able to cast them as unpatriotic--liberals hate being on the receiving end of this.  And you want to be able to cast the other side as racist, sexist homophobes--conservatives hate being on the receiving end of this.



In normal times, in between elections, conservatives are at a disadvantage in the intimidation wars, because the mainstream media, from which most Americans get their news, tends to parrot Democratic talking points.  It's true that Fox News provides some push-back, but not a lot.  Put it this way.  The charge of racism sticks to conservatives and can be a career-ender.  But nobody dares to read the racist Reverend Al Sharpton out of polite society.



Everyone knew, during the Republican primaries, that as soon as the party had chosen a nominee the Obama campaign would launch a monster campaign of intimidation, and Republicans feared that Mitt Romney wouldn't be up to the challenge.



Well, forget that one.  The last couple of weeks, with the "never did a day's work in her life" flap and the Dog issue, demonstrate that the Romney campaign is ready to play rapid-reaction politics.  The campaign jumped on the Ann Romney attack with Twitter, and demolished the "war on women" meme.  Now with the discovery that Barack Obama claims to have eaten dog meat, according to the first of his autobiographies, the "dog-on-the-roof" meme is neutralized.



That's important.  My liberal friends love to bring up the story of the Romney dog on the car roof.  But hey, what about dogs in the back of pickup trucks?



Oh, and by the way, if you are worried about Mormon polygamy, what about Obama's dad?



All these side issues are, of course, "distractions."  But they are part of a campaign because they are attempts to intimidate the opposition, or counter attempts to intimidate.  It's good that the Romney campaign seems to be ready to play the intimidation game and win.



The question is: Can the Obamis take it?  The Obama people are from the one-party city of Chicago, where intimidation rules, and anyone that isn't a Democrat knows that you have to pay to play, and lay your tribute at the feet of the politicians.  But can they deal with their own dust being kicked up into their eyes?



Stay tuned.

More Platonic Immortality

In the Phaedo, the Socratic dialog that Plato wants us to believe took place on the day of Socrates' execution by poison, the condemned philosopher and his young friends discourse on the question of immortality.  It all revolves around the "proof" of the soul as a permanent unchanging thing.  For one thing, if you can understand geometry then it must be that your soul existed before you were born and that you are merely "recollecting" what your soul learned before birth.  We can understand concepts like Equal even though there are no two things on this Earth that are exactly equal.  So we must have learned about Equal in the underworld.

But even if our souls were born before our births, what if the soul is dissipated away in death, ask Socrates' young friends?  Well, since the soul is unchangeable and nearly fixed, and is to the body as the Forms of the Good and the Beautiful are to actual instances of goodness and beauty, then it stands to reason that the soul is as immortal as the Forms are eternal.

In the Socratic argument by analogy, it is possible to argue almost anything, as long as you choose the right analogy.  We want to believe that we, or at least our soul or spirit, will live forever, so any analogy looks good to us.  For me, though, the meaning of immortality is closer to home; it is children.  All the rest--Heaven and Hell, sitting at the right hand of God, the life eternal in the next world, divine judgment--they don't resonate for me.

Modern philosophers, chastened by the shaking of the foundations of the last century, have come to this.  As you rise in complexity, each leap seems to involve an irreducible mystery, a secret ingredient.  For instance, we are as yet unable to describe chemical reactions in terms of physics.  Chemistry is not merely a branch of physics: there is something extra at work.  So also there something irreducible in the leap from organic chemistry to biology, chemistry in the service of living things, and then in the leap from vegetable to animal.  So also in the leap from great ape to human.  It is some spark, some spirit, some irreducible something, the mystery in-between body and mind.

This mystery, this spark, is kept alive from parent to child, from the ancestors to the living generation to generations yet unborn.  It is more than the contract between generations, it is a mystery.  We only know that, when a human dies without issue, that individual human spark dies forever, the spark of immortality quenched.  But all is not lost, because other humans, other children, pick up the fallen lantern, and hold it aloft once more.

For humans, as social animals, are not just their progeny, nor yet their footnote in history, an earnest increment to knowledge, to techne, or to affect.  Humans are not just individual egos but intersubjective communicators that affect each by speech actions.  All humans affect each other all the time, and the precipitate of their communicative reactions blend into the human destiny, immortal and forever, and this seeding of the future is not just broadcast by the genius from an ivory tower, but also those "who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Today we are bidden to release our grip on all foundations, all divine props, all familiar spirits, all relationships with the divine, and all hopes for immortality.  But humans still search for meaning, live as though life could last forever, and long to find eternal bliss.  It may be that the idea of immortality, and a divine judge at the gate of Heaven, is merely a device of social control to put the fear of God into mortals here below.  Now that God is dead, the court of divine judgment has been replaced by the judgment of history.

Through all the changes in religious and secular orthodoxy and the terrible threats issued from gods to humans as from masters to slaves, most humans most of the time instinctively shrink from betraying the future to the present.  There is no more damaging judgment on a fellow human than "he has no future."  Humans live as if their lives matter, forever, and so each human contributes, in her particular life, a single spark to human immortality.

Sex and Nostalgia

The usual hit on conservatives is that we are impossibly nostalgic for a past that never was, of perfect marriages in spotless suburbs: mom and dad and three children.  Anyway, it was never as spotless as the nostalgists pretend:  think of Mad Men drinking and bonking the night away before they get home to Scarsdale.

But maybe the opposite is true.  Maybe in the old days the relations between the sexes was much more exploitative than the one-man-one-women-for-life of the bourgeois ideal.  Certainly the aristocracy regarded marriage as a power and property transaction.  Young princes and princesses were ruthlessly married off for reasons of state and dynastic survival.  And the poor?  They were struggling to survive, and mostly failing.  Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms argues that before 1800 agricultural society in England was a downwardly mobile society in which the rich had more surviving children than the poor, and the extra rich children crowded out the children of the poor in the scramble for resources.  After the industrial revolution the poor developed into the respectable working class and adopted bourgeois cultural norms--at least until the welfare state came along.

Perhaps the bourgeois cultural model is not a hopelessly old-fashioned notion but a radically new idea that is being attacked by the nostalgists of the left who long for the good old days when powerful political figures got all the women they wanted, including servant girls, and the poor did without.  The current liberal fashion for "polyamory" is curious considering how liberals inveigh against Mormon polygamy.  The idea that men and women would mix together in multiple-partner relationships without rich men dominating the process is laughable.

But we already know this.  Since the sexual revolution and the mass entry of upscale women into the workforce, women are reporting less happiness.  Could this be because women don't thrive in the loveless sexual hookup scene?  Could it be that enforcing a cultural norm for women to work at careers is anti-woman?  Could it be that no-fault divorce, supposedly enacted for the benefit of women trapped in abusive, loveless marriages, actually works against the desire of women for permanent loving relationships?

Conservatives make a big deal out of the notion of "civil society," the proliferation of "mediating structures" between government and the individual: family, churches, associations.  But who really breathes life into these civil society institutions; who does the day-to-day grunt work?  I'd say the answer is simple: women.  And when women are dragooned into wage-work it means that there are fewer people to contribute to civil society.  And government gets more powerful.

The idea that bourgeois marriage is old-fashioned is a crock, published by the devotees of big government and politics-with-everything.

Capitalism's Century Five

What will happen when we do the wrap on capitalism's Century Five in 2050?  Could it be, could it possibly be the end of big government?

Century One, from 1550 to 1650, was the century when the Dutch invented Dutch Finance.  They created a funded national debt and made the government's rock-solid bonds the foundation of the credit system.  The Dutch invented all this in their struggle for political and religious independence from the empire of Spain.

Century Two, from 1650 to 1750, was the century when the Dutch exported their financial system to Britain.  Historians disagree on whether the Brits invited William of Orange to be king, or whether his 500-ship invasion fleet flat out invaded the sceptred isle.  But the result was the Bank of England and a funded national debt.  The bad news is that the Brits used their new-found wealth to conquer India and North America, and scaled up the profitable notion of plantation slavery to make fortunes in the millions--and millions of slaves--in the sugar islands of the West Indies.

Century Three, from 1750 to 1850, was the century when capitalism invented cheap cotton textiles for the poor--with techniques stolen from the Bengalis--and railroad transportation for everyone.  It was a revolution, because for the first time the poor could get clean, and could travel around on something other than their feet.  The year 1800 is a watershed.  In industrializing Britain, it began an era of rising expectations.  The poor expected their children, maybe for the first time in history, to be better off than they were.  The bad news is that the French tried to wreck it all with their violent Jacobinism, and the folks migrating off the land to the industrial cities had a pretty rough half-century transitioning from the life on the land to the life in the city.

Century Four, from 1850 to 1950, was the century that started with ocean steamships that let the poor migrate across the world, from the Pale of Settlement to the Lower East Side, from Ireland's potato famine to Boston and New York, from the Mezzogiorno to Little Italys all over the northern United States.  Then the capitalists cut oil prices by 90 percent, steel prices by 66 percent, and motorized and electrified Everyman.  The bad news was that the "shock of the new" inspired a ton of people to believe that capitalism was the anti-Christ.  Two huge global wars were fought to neutralize reactionary movements against the new order of freedom and cooperation: one a nostalgic attempt to return to the communist egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers; the other a nostalgic attempt to return to the blood and soil of kinship and clan identity.

Century Five, from 1950 to 2050 is already half over.  We already know part of what it means.  Capitalism has brought about a communications revolution.  Now you can travel half way around the world in a day with jet travel, and you can communicate and work with anyone and anything with the Internet and computer technology.  We cannot know what the second half century will bring.  Some hope for an utter demolition of the big-government welfare state, a nostalgia for the bureaucratic centralism of the absolute monarchs, to match the demolition of communism and fascism in Century Four.  The bad news is that another movement of nostalgic rejection has arisen to challenge capitalism, the Islamic longing for the caliphate of 700-1500.

Nobody knows how Century Five will turn out.  But if we are going to roll back the injustice of the welfare state we would have to start in 2012 with the decisive rejection of the politics of the social-democratic educated class and its poster boy, the President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Liberal Media Bias: Has Fox News Made It Worse

Back in the old days, the liberal media at least used to pretend it was neutral and objective.  But now that there is Fox News, the liberal media feel that since there's a conservative alternative they can put the pedal to the metal on their liberal bias.



That's the argument of Robert Stacy McCain at the American Spectator.

The very existence of a conservative-friendly TV news alternative, however, relieves liberals at other networks of any twinge of conscience about bias in their programming. They may well reckon, "If conservatives don't like it, let 'em go watch Fox." And given how liberals have demonized Fox -- portraying it as an all-powerful evil force in media -- some reporters may even feel the need to slant their coverage more stridently leftward, so as to counteract the exaggerated right-wing news menace.

He's probably right.  The trouble is that conservatives get the worst of the exchange, because there about 24 million nightly viewers of the network news versus 3 million for Bill O'Reilly on Fox News.



On the other hand conservatives need to stop whining about this and stand back for a moment.  We need to appreciate the enormity of what we are trying to do.  The yellow press grew up in the 19th century servicing the rising working class, dishing out scandal, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.  For two hundred years there has been a bigger audience for corporate scandals than for government failure.  That's not just because of liberal media bias, it's because a lot of people experience themselves as victims of powerful forces, and buy the idea that government and journalists protect them from those powerful forces.



The destiny of the modern conservative movement is to change this culture, the culture of the working man railing against his boss, the victim railing against the Man.  It is a profoundly middle-class movement, based on the idea that if you want to change something, you get together with your neighbors and change it.  You do not wait around moaning about exploitation until some community organizer in a radical suit turns up to lead you.



In the United States there is a political party that represents people that prefer the "get-together-with-your-neighbors" model of society.  It is called the Republican Party.  There is also a political party that represents the "moaning about exploitation" model of society.  It is the over-under coalition of educated elite and suffering victims we call the Democratic Party.  Liberal media or no liberal media, there is no doubt about where to go if you are a Tocquevillian American that believes in forming voluntary  associations to do public work.  And there is no doubt where to go if you feel that you are a victim of powerful forces.



The point is that, for nearly a century, the majority of Americans have clearly felt that they benefited from a government that ran social programs like Social Security and Medicare.  So long as a majority believes this, the current system will continue.



If you want to change this status quo then you have to start a movement.  Obviously such a movement will experience resistance from the present elite and from the present beneficiaries of the status quo.  It is right and proper, therefore, that we should have a liberal media that defends the status quo, and ridicules the conservative movement that wants to change it.



But if the status quo should be seen to fail, or if its major proposals for change are experienced as negative change (Obamacare) then all bets are off.  That is the situation right now for the liberal media and the educated elite that backs President Obama and the Democratic Party.  Its programs are running out of money.  There is a danger of "austerity" or a collapse of the current patronage/clientage system in a sovereign default.  ("Austerity" means minor cuts in government programs that are experienced as life-changing by people that have adjusted their lives to rely on government programs for basic necessities).



When "austerity" bites, or default happens, then all bets will be off.  Then, and only then, people will be looking for a new political home, and they will be looking for a new media home.  All of a sudden the Democratic Party will find that it must adapt or die, and the media will find that it needs to change its politics or die.



There is no doubt that the Democrats would not have done as well as they did in 2006 and 2008 without the assistance of the mainstream media.  But what good did it do them?  They recklessly pushed through Obamacare, and then suffered the worst reverse in a mid-term in half a century--even though the Tea Party, vehicle of the reverse, was roundly denounced by all establishment opinion makers.



All in all, it is best to think of the media as a trailing indicator, like the unemployment rate, rather than a leading indicator, like stock prices.  When the welfare state collapses--as it will, because government always runs out of other peoples' money--the liberal media will shrivel up and slink away.  And nobody will give it a second thought.



But politics will not change.  People will still be out looking for free stuff from the government.

The "Out-of-touch" Stakes

The Democratic Party, everyone knows, is the up-to-the-minute, modern, hip, intellectual party.  The Republican Party, on the other hand is old-fashioned, turn-back-the-clock, anti-intellectual party--and out of touch.



That's all very well, but if you are running a presidential campaign you can't afford to be sitting around in a big room telling each other how hip you are and how out of touch the other guys are.  You need, at least, to get out more and listen to those out-of-touch people.  Because in a few short months they are going to be entering the voting booths and making decisions.



So the verdict on Week One of the presidential campaign has exposed a dangerous out-of-touchness in the operatives of the Obama campaign.  Let's just list the things that are going wrong.

1. The Trayvon Martin case.  Someone messed up on the due diligence when it turned out that George Zimmerman is half-Hispanic.  It is no secret that Hispanics don't like blacks, and think they are lazy.  (Whites, on the other hand have been carefully taught.)  I have a feeling that while the Trayvon case may raise black turnout, it will send Hispanics into the arms of the Republicans.


2. The Buffett Rule.  Maybe it seemed like a cool idea to gin up a gimmicky idea to make Mitt Romney look like an out-of-touch under-taxed rich guy.  But if this complicated idea only raises $5 billion a year, what's the point?  And then there is the dirty little secret that high tax rates don't really hit the rich.  They hit the people trying to get rich, all the way down the food chain to Joe the Plumber.


3. The Ann Romney Flap.  It's telling that the Romney campaign was ready to execute on a moment's notice on this one.  No sooner had liberal-feminist doofus Hilary Rosen delivered her "never had a job in her life" line that the Romney folks ginned up a Twitter account and were ready with a 1,000-gun artillery barrage.


4. The Social Darwinist Budget.  Democrats have raised Cain for 50 years every time Republicans have raised the question of entitlements.  Of course, Republicans have been right.  The sooner we get the government out of managing pensions, health care, etc., the better for the American people.  But the Republicans have never been able to get the voters to agree.  It's easy to see why.  The voters are right, from a selfish point of view, in agreeing with the Democrats.  The current generation of seniors will always be dead before the entitlements run out of money.  Only not this generation of seniors.  This may be the year when you can get Americans worried not about cutting their benefits but about not "doing something" about the budget.

The Obama guys are smart.  Even now they are reviewing the messes of the last month and making course corrections.  The question is whether they are smart enough to make strategic course corrections.

Because it is just possible that the Obamis are preparing to fight the wrong election.  That would really be "out of touch."

Plato Strikes Out on Immortality

When modern philosophers decided that you couldn't prove the existence of God--or the non-existence of God--they put an end to a vibrant industry.

The same thing applies to immortality.  How would we know if we are immortal?  It's a matter of faith, and properly a question for religion, the sphere of the human quest for meaning.  And everyone is on that quest, whatever they say.  Christians are on a quest to save their immortal souls by experiencing God's love.  Environmentalists are on a quest to save humanity from sudden mortality by saving the planet from humans.

Plato was no slouch in the immortality stakes; he entered at least two likely runners.  There's the proof in the Republic and the proof in the Phaedrus, for a start.

In the Republic, Socrates wants Glaucon to believe that the soul is different from the normal operation of good and bad things on the body.  If something bad "attaches itself to something... [it can] break it down completely and destroy it."[609a6]  Obviously this applies to disease of the body.  But to the disease of the soul, not so.  If you get sick, the sickness can kill you.  If you act unjustly, the injustice doesn't kill you.  A deficiency in the body can kill you, but not a deficiency in the soul.  So, if "something is not destroyed by a single bad thing--whether its own or an external one--clearly it must always exist.  And if it always exists, it is immortal."[611a1]

But why should a deficiency in the soul afflict a man in the same way as a deficiency in the body?  Maybe a deficiency in the body will kill you, but a deficiency in the soul just makes you into a monster.  And if a deficiency of the soul doesn't kill you, or sicken you, it doesn't mean that it's immortal.  It just means that the soul is different from the body.


In the Phaedrus, Socrates uses a different argument on his young friend Phaedrus.  "[W]hatever is always in motion is immortal".[245c5]   That's because something always in motion never had beginning, for if it had a beginning then it must have come from another source.  For us this is ridiculous, because we post-Newtonians believe that everything moves forever unless accelerated by something else.  But for the ancients, things sat around immobile unless they were pushed, like Eeyore.  The idea of something moving perpetually was unnatural, godlike, and therefore immortal.

But really, Socrates, how do you know?  How do you know that the "something" you see in motion was always in motion, or could have been always in motion?  You are pulling a fast one on us.  The idea of perpetual motion is not something that we humans experience.  We only experience objects that seem to have been moving before we first observed them, and that we assume will continue to move after we terminate our observations. We believe with Wittgenstein of the Tractatus: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."