Rush Limbaugh's Scott Walker Takeaway

Radio host Rush Limbaugh has a reputation as a blow-hard.  It's undeserved, of course, as are most of the cruel characterizations put out by our liberal friends.  On the contrary, Rush Limbaugh is one of the most acute political analysts in the USA.



Said Rush this morning: The Scott Walker achievement means that there is a fairly simple and easy way of dealing with state budget problems.  All you have to do is stop union collective bargaining on government employee benefits and then unilaterally force government employees to contribute a bit more to their pensions and health care.



Hey, what could be more practical?  What could be more compassionate?  And the public employees will still be earning about 50 percent more than they could get in the private sector and they will still be working with civil-service protections and be pretty well sitting in lifetime jobs.



Of course there is still the problem that these folks will still be operating a school system that stinks, especially for the poor.  They will still be operating social services that stink.  They will still be getting paid whether or not they produce anything of value.   So they will still have, I would say, a pretty cushy deal.



The other thing, of course, is that politicians all over the nation will be looking at the Scott Walker experience and be telling themselves that you can take on the government employee unions and win.  But you had better have real cojones down there between your legs.



By the way, could we just mention Scott Walker and his courage and coolness under fire?  For nearly 18 months this man has been subjected to the most outrageous abuse.  Liberals, Democrats, and union members--and of course their willing accomplices in the media--have occupied the state capitol, tried to stop the operation of the state legislature by absenting themselves, abusing the recall election process, using every intimidation tactic in the book short of actual violence.  And it started at the top with President Obama putting in an ill-judged remark about union-busting.  And now, instead of letting himself go with triumphant rage, he merely calls for unity and says that Wisconsin should heal its wounds and get back together after the divisions of the last year.



There is class, and then there is class.

Wisconsin Proves It

There are only three themes in politics.  There is "We the people are getting screwed!"  There is "They the rebels must be destroyed!"  And there is "Death to the invaders!"  The remedy in each case is simple: War!



You can see this dynamic perfectly illustrated in the Wisconsin Recall War that reaches a decision today, Tuesday June, 5, 2012.  The government employee unions in Wisconsin for years had obtained remarkably generous wages and benefits for their members.  They got this by tireless lobbying and campaigning, using the money extracted by payroll deductions for union dues.



But when Gov. Scott Walker (R) ran on a platform of reducing union power and then immediately began to put his program into action, the unions and their supporters were outraged.  They were determined to fight.



Of course they were.  That is what politics is all about.  It is civil war by other means, a battle for the spoils of office, the opportunity to use the power of the state to reward your political supporters and punish your political enemies.



Whenever your opponents steal a march on you then you mobilize your supporters and tell them that they have been royally screwed, that they are the people and your opponents are powerful barons intent upon destroying every good thing.  So the unions in Wisconsin mobilized their supporters with mammoth demonstrations, and Democratic state legislators attempted to intimidate the governor and Republican legislators by decamping to the neighboring state.  Then they collected petitions and demanded recall elections.



Of course, this response to a cruel world is nothing new.  It was cunningly depicted over a century ago by Anthony Trollope in Phineas Finn.  He describes the political views of Mr. Bunce, the landlord of the hero Phineas Finn.



Mr. Bunce, “a thoroughly hard-working man, doing pretty well in the world... had joined a Trade Union”.

He longed to be doing some battle against his superiors, and to be putting himself in opposition to his employers;--not that he objected personally to Messrs. Foolscap, Margin and Vellum, who always made much of him as a useful man;--but because some such antagonism would be the manly thing, and the fighting of some battle would be the right thing to do.

This is the whole point of left-wing politics: to put yourself in opposition to something: corporations, low wages, the Pentagon, the Catholic Church.  Of course, conservatives play this game too.  We rail against unions, big government, community organizers, and liberal professors.  They are communists and socialists trying to wreck the United States and American exceptionalism.



The question is: what can political action, the mobilization of "civil war by other means" really achieve in this world?  The left has always railed about the futility of war.  They were against the Cold War and are now against the War on Terror, because war never solved anything.  So far so good.  But the left is anxious to prosecute domestic moral equivalents of war, such as FDR's war on economic royalists, the War on Poverty, or conjuring up  threats like the "war on women" and the "war on gay marriage."  Of course they do.  Politics is civil war by other means.  Every political struggle is a war.



The problem with politics, of course, is that the bigger government gets the more it is likely to create victims of government force, people with a grievance about money taken from them in taxes or given to the other guy rather than to themselves.  And that just creates new causes for civil war.



Today's recall election in Wisconsin is just a battle in our ongoing "civil war by other means."  The winners will rejoice and the losers will determine to fight another day.



But humans are not just political animals, determined to contest every insult and right every wrong, even unto the death.  Humans are social animals, that cooperate for mutual benefit.  Whatever happened to that idea?

Whose Emerging Majority?

Early in the new century, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira argued that the Democrats were entering on a new era of dominance, becoming The Emerging Democratic Majority.  The new majority would center around the educated, the minorities, and the youth.



On the contrary, argues Sean Trende in The Lost Majority, under the two party system the future is always up for grabs.  That's because there is always some demographic group wavering in the middle between the two parties.



James Piereson proposes a more grandiose vision in The New Criterion.  He calls it the Fourth Revolution.  He looks at a 50 year Democratic dominance starting with the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, a 50 year dominance for Republicans starting in 1860, and a 50 year dominance for Democrats starting in 1932.  Each of these periods of dominance came to grief when the political case for the dominant or "regime" party collapsed.



Right now there is an impasse between the two parties because the support for the "public sector" party, the Democrats, is about equal to the support for the "private sector" party, the Republicans.

This impasse between the two parties signals the end game for the system of politics that originated in the 1930s and 1940s. As the “regime party,” the Democrats are in the more vulnerable position because they have built their coalition around public spending, public debt, and publicly guaranteed credit, all sources of funds that appear to be reaching their limits.

I have been arguing something similar, and from a more negative viewpoint, that nothing will change on the entitlements front until the federal government runs out of money.  Republicans may have been warning for the last generation that entitlements will bankrupt the state, but the fact is that, for today's beneficiaries, it makes no sense to reform.  Most of the beneficiaries, like me, are senior citizens.  We will probably be dead, or nearly dead, when the crash comes.



The discouraging thing about the welfare state is that, from Greece to Argentina, an over-extended welfare state does not reform its entitlements honestly.  It can't because the beneficiaries will take to the streets.  The only thing it can do is devalue its currency and default on its debt.  That has the effect of reducing entitlements (and screwing creditors) but doing it by the back door in a coup de main.  You wake up one morning and find that your bank account is worth 50 percent of what it was worth yesterday, and the government has unilaterally cut the interest rate and the principal owed on its sovereign bonds.  They already did that in Greece.



Many people have criticized the president for his Obamacare as a reckless expansion of entitlements.  But to the president, it is a solution to the health care crisis, because it buries all health care decisions in a heap of bureaucratic procedures and "death panels."  It hides the decisions to ration health care.  And it may be that most Americans really don't care how bad their health care is as long as it is "free."



If there is really to be a revolution and a fundamental reform of the welfare state it will happen because a majority of the American people want an honest system that is based on freedom and un-coerced social relationships.  The trouble is that everyone wants freedom in the abstract; they just don't want to have to pay for it.



But one thing, surely, we have learned in the 20th century.  Big government is always unjust, because it always reduces society to a power play between powerful interests, and reduces politics to a question of rewarding your supporters and punishing your opponents.  We have seen that played out in spades with the Obama administration as it has openly rewarded friends, from green energy companies to labor unions, without regard to the national interest, and done corrupt bargains with special corporate interests in order to get its legislation passed.



The point of human society is that it softens the natural war of all against all into mutually beneficial cooperation.  Society is nothing if is does not reduce the need for and the compass of force.  That means that government must be limited, because government is force, and politics is civil war by other means.  This is surely not that hard to understand.

Signs of Life on Jobs

Yes, I know.  Everyone is throwing themselves on the floor about the uptick in the unemployment rate from 8.1 to 8.2 percent.  And the number of jobs in the establishment survey is only up 69,000.



But the reason the unemployment rate did an uptick is that people are reentering the labor force in strength.  The labor force number went up by 642,000 last month, which is very good news.  It means that people are getting out there and looking for jobs.  Employment went up by 422,000, which is also very good news.  But since it didn't go up as much as the labor force, the unemployment rate went up.



What is going on?



This is another case where liberals have been sending the wrong message for decades, and now they are getting snake-bit by their own misdirection.  The thing is that in the early stages of a recovery, as people start to judge that jobs are available, they will come into the labor force and start looking.  Since they probably won't find jobs right away, they will raise the unemployment rate.  This is good.  But in the Nancy Pelosi playbook, when Republicans are in charge, you rail about a "jobless recovery."  So what do you do when the same thing happens in a Democratic administration?  You tell me.



In the subpar Obama recovery, one of the reasons that people have not got back to work is that the 99 week extended unemployment benefit makes people put off looking for a job.  We've heard recently that a lot of people are running out of their extended benefits, and are thus "forced" back into the labor force.  Maybe that is why people are returning to the labor force.



Liberals have done a lot of misdirection on economics over the years, from Keynesian stimulus, to lifetime employment, to union thuggery, to first-dollar health benefits to "price gouging" to "vampire" capitalism.  They have encouraged millions of Americans to have unrealistic ideas about the economy.



Well, mark down 2012 as the year of the return to reality.  All the liberal economic myths are coming home to roost and the liberals find themselves in a replay of Hitchcock's The Birds.  And they don't know what to do.



The simple truth is, of course, that every government intervention harms the economy and privileges some special interest over the common interest.  And that starts with cheap money and every single government subsidy and corporate goodie, and it ends at the mortgage interest deduction, Social Security and Medicare.  Sure.  Don't touch My Medicare!  But some poor slob or slobette is working 40 hours a week so that well-to-do seniors like me can get subsidized health care.  Talk about fairness.



As Bill Clinton said in another era:  Everything that should be down is up, and everything that should be up is down!  But Bill Clinton and his team were a much better political team than President Obama and his lot.  And it shows.

Alcibiades on Socrates

When Alcibiades turns up, drunk as a skunk at Agathon's Symposium, he is startled to find himself lying next to Socrates. To Socrates annoyance, he starts making indiscreet comments about Socrates' qualities, physical, mental, and moral.

Socrates has a big head, he crows.  He's proud, because he'll grumble if he doesn't get a wreath as a man who "has never lost an argument in his life."  He has hollow legs, because he can drink all night and not get drunk.  He implies that Socrates talks rubbish ("the truth is just the opposite").

Socrates is like Silenus, i.e., ignorant, drunk, and lustful, but full of the images of the gods.  Or he is like Marsyas, also a satyr.  He's "impudent, contemptuous, and vile", a good "fluteplayer", that "possesses" people with words alone.  He's the only person that can make Alcibiades "feel shame".

Socrates is crazy about beautiful boys but not because they are beautiful.  He poses as an ironist, but inside he is godlike, "amazing".  Socrates is not really interested in carnal pleasures.  Alcibiades got alone with him and all he did was talk.  Then he got Socrates in bed with him and, in his "arrogance and pride," Socrates still wouldn't bite.

But now Alcibiades stops the clowning around and proceeds to admire Socrates' "courage and fortitude" with "strength of character and wisdom".  Money means nothing to him.  He's a hardy man, that "stood up to hunger" better than anyone in the Potidaea expedition.  He doesn't like to drink but when he does, nobody sees him get drunk.  And he's resistant to the cold.  He can focus on a problem, and he is brave, staying back to help and rescue the wounded Alcibiades and his armor, but was happy to have Alcibiades get the credit.  Even more brave was his coolness in retreat from Delium with Laches.

Socrates is unique; there is nobody like him.  You laugh at his arguments and "the same tired old words" but you come to realize that they are "worthy of a god, bursting with figures of virtue inside".  He's a deceiver, who "presents himself as your lover" but makes you fall in love with him.  Watch out, he tells Agathon.

At the end of the Symposium we see that Plato is a cunning fellow.  He knows that the best way to put across his idea of Love is not with the pedestrian mumblings of Eryximachus or the high-flown rhetoric of Agathon, or even Socrates hiding behind Diotima.  No, the best way is to bring riotous Alcibiades in and have him pretend to make a fool of Socrates, and in fact show that Socrates is the very incarnation of a man on the top rung of the ladder of love.  He is beyond loving one beautiful boy, or even several, or even learning beautiful things.  Look at him inside his armor of irony, and you see "just what it is to be beautiful."

Germans of Character

Obviously, the most important country of the last two hundred years is the good old U. S. of A.  Talk about lucky.  The difference between South Africa and the US, I once read, was that in the US the aboriginal North American population died from European diseases whereas in Africa the Europeans died of African diseases.

But the second most interesting people has to be the Germans.  You can start with Kant and Wittgenstein. Between those two the Germans did most of the philosophizing and most of the science.  Not to mention the political science and the psychology.  Then we get to the military arts, organization, strategy and tactics.  And don't forget education.

But while the US was incredibly lucky, the Germans were incredibly unlucky.  Their practical politics stank, from Bismarck to Kaiser Bill to Adolf Hitler.  Now, of course, the poor bloody Germans are caught in the mess of the Euro.

It's easy to think of the Germans as fascist pigs until you start to read about them.  I just finished a memoir of life in Germany from 1944 to 1951, German Boy: A Child in War by a man, Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, that was 10 years old in 1945 and living east of the Oder in Sagan, a town now in Poland.  Or there is the mother of Hans von Spakovsky, who got her professional ballerina certificate in Dresden in 1944.  Both of these young people were caught in the Soviet Zone, and both had harrowing escapes.  Both seem to have grown up to be adults of almost saintly virtue.  Both, of course, came to America, Wolfgang because his mother married a sergeant in the USAF after divorcing her wayward German husband.  Hans's mother Traudel also immigrated to the US in 1951 on her status as a refugee, a Flüctling, from eastern Europe.

There are many moving passages in German Boy, including the moment just before Wolfgang and his mother and father left the Soviet Zone to sneak across the border into the West.  Wolfgang was worried about getting his grade book so that he could show the teachers in the West his status.  It wasn't until he was explaining all this to a trusted teacher in his Communist school that he realized what a terrible mistake he was making.  Fortunately his teacher told him that he wouldn't need his grade book.

"Just go. Don't say anything to anyone. Do you understand what I am telling you? Don't say anything to your friends, to other students, but especially not to any teachers. Say nothing to anyone."

It's important to remember that, in the midst of terror, in the midst of utter collapse, when children are begging for food and mothers are selling their bodies for food, there are people of profound goodness, even in December 1946 in the Soviet Zone of defeated Germany.

We often say that crisis brings out the worst in people.  But it also brings out the best in them.

Plato's Ladder of Love

It is telling that when Plato finally wants to get down to brass tacks in his Symposium on Love, on Eros, he finally calls in a woman, the divine Diotima.  Apparently it's all very well for the lads, from Phaedrus to Pausanias, to Eryximachus to comic playwright Aristophanes and the noble tragedian Agathon to discourse on Love, and it's all very well for Socrates to demolish Agathon's soaring prose in his usual manner.  But Diotima is needed to give Love a feminine flourish and teach Socrates a thing or two about Love.

Even the pedophiliac Greeks seem to think that a woman needs to be called in to get to the heart of Love, and so Socrates recalls a conversation on Love with Diotima of Mantinea.  And Diotima leads Socrates up the Ladder of Love.

Yes, she says, you start with your love of a single beautiful boy, on the bottom rung of the ladder, and make beautiful speeches to his beautiful body.  But you'd have to be pretty dull not to realize that if one body can be beautiful then it is a single step upwards to realize that another can also be beautiful.  And if two bodies are beautiful then it is merely a single step upwards to "become a lover of all beautiful bodies."

But if bodies are beautiful, surely beautiful souls are even more valuable, and you will step up and seek to make the souls of young men better.  To do this you will be forced to "gaze at the beauty of activities and laws" and begin to think that "the beauty of bodies is a thing of small importance."

But customs and laws are one thing; it is merely a step up to move on to appreciate the "beauty of knowledge" and learn to give "many gloriously beautiful speeches, in unstinting love of wisdom."  So here we are back at the philosophy ranch boosting the glories of philosophy and philosophers.

Then at last you can take the final step up and view the Form of beauty.  It is not beauty in contrast to ugliness, or beautiful body parts, or speeches or knowledge or indeed instantiated in any Thing, but "learning of this Beauty, so that in the end you comes to know just what it is to be beautiful."  It is to "see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality."  And thus, "looking at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen" you can give birth not to "images of virtue" but "true virtue" itself.

The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given birth to true irtue and nourished it, and if any human beling could become immortal, it would be he.

So much for that.  The next moment everything gets thrown into turmoil when the turbulent rich kid Alcibiades turns up at the gate, drunk as a lord.