America's Moral Challenge

Throughout its history, writes Michael Barone, the Republican Party has attracted "voters who are generally seen by themselves and by others as typical Americans."  For many years that also meant northern and Protestant.  And the Democratic Party base was Southern and also Northern Catholic.

But now everything has changed, and the Republican Party's base is typical Americans that are "white married Christians."  A consequence of this is that over the last two decades the Republican Party has lost the votes of educated suburbanites, as Democrats have attacked the social conservatism of non-college whites as "extremism" while still insisting that the GOP is the party of northeastern big-business WASPs.

You could say that the 2008 election was a perfect storm for Republicans as affluent suburbanites recoiled from the Texas taint of the George W. Bush years and happily voted for America's first black president.

Today, of course, the affluent suburbanites aren't quite as affluent, and they feel that they didn't quite get what they bargained for in America's first post-partisan president.

But I think there is a real moral problem with the educated suburbanites that advertise themselves as "fiscally conservative and socially liberal."  Because I think that the socially liberal world-view is responsible for America's biggest problem.

The problem is exposed in Charles Murray's Coming Apart about white America.  Briefly, the top 20 percent, the educated elite, is doing fine.  But the bottom 30 percent is not doing fine.  And the main problem with the bottom 30 percent is that about half the children don't have married parents.  Lower-income women often don't get married to the fathers of their children, and lower-income men often don't work.

There is no particular mystery about this.  America is organized for the benefit of the upper 20 percent and the kind of life they want to lead.  The top 20 percent sends their kids to college-prep high schools and on to college and graduate school.  When they are established in a career at about 30 then it is time for marriage and children.  And 80 percent of 30-49-year-olds in the top 20 percent are married.

For people like this the "socially liberal" world view makes sense.  You are relaxed (but careful) about your sexual life, and take care not to get a kid started before you are ready for marriage.

But suppose you are not college material.  Suppose you don't get on in school.  Then you are living across the grain that the top 20 percent has designed and built for America, and things aren't going to be so easy for you.  There are credential problems associated with the good jobs; there is the minimum wage, which makes it difficult to get started and work your way up by acquiring skills as you go.  There are the swingeing taxes on employment, especially outdoor work like construction, that make labor expensive but sequesters a lot of labor income in government trust funds for Social Security, unemployment, and workers comp instead of giving it straight to the worker.

But heck, if you are a young man you still want to get laid, and if you are a young woman you still want to have a baby.  Social liberalism means that it's OK to get laid and it's OK to get an abortion or raise a kid as a single parent.

Only, of course, kids of single parents have much worse prospects that the kids of married parents, including the problem of abuse from the sexual partners of single parents.

Now I have a word for the situation in which the bottom 30 percent is placed by decades of government and social policy dictated by the top 20 percent.  I call it "injustice."  I think that the educated top 20 percent has ripped apart the culture and the well-being of the bottom 30 percent like a tornado.  They confiscated the right for the bottom 30 percent to solve their own problems and live life on their own terms.  The top 20 percent built the society they wanted for themselves and they threw money at the people that didn't want, or couldn't compete, in their Brave New World.

Nobody has asked "non-college whites" what they want.  And the college whites, the people that live in affluent suburbia and work in office parks with good salaries and benefits, have been led by liberal Democrats to sneer at the opinions of the non-college whites: "bitter clingers" as Candidate Obama explained to his rich-bitch contributors in 2008.

There is hypocrisy here.  The top 20 percent do not actually live the "socially liberal" lifestyle they affect to support.  They are pretty family oriented and pretty careful about their sexual behavior.  After all, the upper-20-percent life trajectory requires a careful husbanding of human and economic capital.   You need to study hard in school and then work hard in your profession.  You need to select a mate carefully, to make sure that your investments in your career aren't compromised.  Fortunately, if you make a mistake--an unwanted baby or an arrest from an excess of high spirits--then Mom will clean up your mess for you.

In my view the great challenge for America in the years ahead is to thrash out a new moral culture.

No, wait.  In my view the great challenge for the upper 20 percent in the years ahead is to give the "typical American" non-college whites the cultural space to build out their own authentic culture without marginalizing it as "extremism" or "bigotry."

This will not be easy for the top 20 percent.  It will take an effort in "consciousness raising" similar to the effort that pushed the civil rights revolution through in the 1950s and 1960s.

The problem is that just as there were powerful Southerners standing in the schoolhouse door pushing back against civil rights there are powerful liberals today in education, politics and culture pushing back against any move to mainstream marriage and reform education and the workplace to make it more non-college friendly.

So things are going to get worse before they get better.  And many people in the bottom 30 percent will suffer grievously.

Who Is Mitt Romney?

Presidential campaigns almost always package their candidate as a kind of demi-god.  There's no mystery about this.  Modern presidents are almost always presented as the Father of their country, a leader of the American tribe, and presidential handlers naturally want to touch the mystic chords of memory that attach humans to their tribal leader.



In the case of Barack Obama, this reached a crescendo of kitsch in the famous acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention at which he spoke in front of a faux Greek temple.  The good thing about all the messianic rubbish of 2008 is that the real Obama came nothing near the absurd image that the liberal echo-chamber gave us.  People are disappointed, even demoralized.



Mitt Romney, in the Wall Street Journal today seems not to care about his "image," the perception that people get of Romney the man.

[T]he former businessman and governor, who gets more respect than adoration from voters, vows in an interview that he won't be part of the celebrity-style culture often favored by politicians. Despite pressure to be more revealing, he says he won't use his campaign as "a way to personalize me like I'm a piece of meat."

No doubt.  But you can be sure that his handlers are focused like lasers on using next week's Republican National Convention to get out to the voters an idea of who Mitt Romney is.



Probably he is not much more that what he seems, a results-focused business executive who has lived in the world of private equity, getting new businesses off the ground and trying to fix troubled businesses and turn them around.



Really, if you wanted to pick a guy to symbolize what America needs after a generation of putting things off, it would be the guy who writes, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, about fixing a problem of fraudulent billing at a Bain Capital company.  A competitor had been fined for fraudulent billing, so Mitt decided they had better check up on their diagnostic laboratory company, Damon.  Sure enough, Damon was doing it too.  So Mitt swung into action and audited Damon.  Writes Mitt:

The experience taught me that when you see a problem, run toward it or it will only get worse.

There is a military motto that says the same thing:  "March towards the sound of the guns."  Why?  Because if you get to the battle-field in time you will have a chance to decide the outcome.



This tells us that Mitt Romney is a classic leader with the will to win.



In the old days, military leaders ran a highly disciplined organization that used soldiers like dumb pawns in a game of chess.  And big government followed the example of early-modern armies, building rigid bureaucracies.  Same with big business and its rigid assembly lines.



But eventually military and business leaders changed their organization model.  They changed to the model advocated by Gen. Hans von Seeckt in the 1920s, who wanted soldiers that were "self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility."



Now every army wants the same, and every business too.  That is why businesses are always going on about "teams."  That is why Bain Capital always worked hard to educate and train the people they supported with their money.  They knew that success wasn't about the money; it was about the team.



But there is one sector of America that hasn't got the message.  It is liberals and big government.  That is why President Obama pushed through his ludicrous ObamaCare that will reduce health care to a single rigid one-size-fits-all administrative program, run from the top down with no self-reliance, no dedication, and no joyful responsibility.  Just political blame games.



The problem with big government is not just that it is cumbersome and ineffective and that, when it really gets serious, as in the Soviet Union and Mao's China, its centralized plans end up killing people in their millions.  The problem is that big government is inhuman.



Barack Obama comes from a world that hasn't got the message.  Mitt Romney comes from a world that has.  So America has a choice this fall.

Let's Play the Race Card

PJMedia's chief honcho Roger L. Simon tells a little story about his journey from left to right today.  After he had "come out" he got a call from Michael Berman, brother of a liberal congressman from west LA and a liberal campaign mastermind.  Only Michael was no longer a liberal.  Why?

Because of what the Democratic Party did to black people, he said.

But some people, like Francis Fukuyama, still haven't got the message.  He uses a long piece about the TV series The Wire that chronicles the mean streets of Baltimore, Maryland--the gangs, the drugs, the wasted lives--to worry about the black and the white underclass.  So what does The Wire suggest to him?  Off he goes into the weeds of liberal delusion.

Blacks were the only social group that faced caste-like barriers to mobility. Their social and economic liberation and subsequent advancement required political power to achieve, first in a Civil War that ended slavery and left more than 600,000 Americans dead, and then in a long struggle against legal segregation whose end required strenuous enforcement by Federal authorities.

The trouble is, he continues, that many on the right think that the end of segregation solved the race issue, and that the "government efforts like the Great Society’s War on Poverty were a counterproductive failure" and that nothing can "be done with regard to inner-city social policy."



The message of The Wire is that the mess in the inner city comes less from "poor individual choices than [from] dysfunctional institutions", he writes.  Self help won't do the trick.  And while we think that nothing can be done here in the US, inequality is decreasing in Latin America through growth and "intelligently crafted conditional cash transfer programs like Oportunidades in Mexico and Bolsa Família in Brazil."



No doubt.  Meanwhile the US is spending a trillion a year on education, $0.7 trillion on welfare, not to mention $2 trillion a year on middle-class entitlements.  So do we now pile additional top-down programs on top of the utter waste of the current corrupt and ineffective programs?  Or what?



Fukuyama talks airily about the inadequacy of "self help" but conveniently forgets that the urban problem has always been a cultural problem, of immigrants to the city finding a way to acquire the culture and the skills that it takes to make it in the city.  And he forgets, what he wrote at the top of his article, that politicians and experts don't really give a damn about the poor.  The politicians just want their votes, and the experts just want their sinecures and their tenure.  If the politicians don't care and the experts are just thinking about their careers, who else is going to get the black underclass out of the ditch if not blacks themselves?



It all comes down to this.  America has got to dish out some "tough love."  No, not to African Americans, but to educated elite liberals.  For too long educated liberals have sucked at the government teat and, burping from the rich nanny's milk, have pompously told the rest of us what to think and what to do.



It's time we told the liberals to "get lost."  Because, as Michael Berman told Roger L. Simon, anyone who has seen what Democrats and liberals have done to African Americans cannot in good conscience vote for Democrats.

What's the Matter with South Chicago?

Back in 2004 Thomas Frank famously fumed in What's the Matter with Kansas? about the white working class that couldn't understand its economic interests, and voted instead for the Republicans.



This sort of notion is not new; it issues from the Marxian idea of "false consciousness," that people think the wrong way unless they are properly educated by the vanguard of the proletariat.



But conservatives make a similar mistake.  Here is Peter Ferrara calling for a campaign of "Cracking the Left's Fortresses."  It's the familiar refrain that Republicans don't try to talk to blacks in the inner cities.  Don't blacks realize that liberals are selling them down the river with lousy schools and death-spiral dependency?  We should do outreach with their leaders and ministers.

Hispanics and even African Americans have many more conservatives in their ranks than voting patterns would indicate. This is even more true of Asians. Even American Jews are more conservative than their ballots suggest. All these groups vote so predominantly Democrat because the Democrats tell them the Republicans hate them. The Republicans and conservatives tell them nothing, which seemingly reinforces the Democrat narrative.

Well maybe.  And it wouldn't hurt for a top-down initiative to talk to blacks, Hispanics, and Asians.  But let us turn this around and get back to "What's the Matter with Kansas?"  There might be a good reason that the white working class doesn't voter Democratic any more.  It might have to do with the fact that the white working class views Democrats as fighting for women and minorities and not family people like them.  It might have to do with the fact that the white working class is taking the brunt of Affirmative Action.  It might not be "false consciousness" at all.



On this view, we should accept that blacks and Hispanics are perfectly rational in voting for Democrats.



In fact, immigrants have always tended to vote Democratic, going back to the Irish in the mid 19th century.  They have done so because the Democratic Party has always promoted a culture of patronage and clientage, and the folks just arriving in the city respond to that.  That's how things work in the countryside: you attach yourself to a powerful cacique and hope to receive a benefit from your loyalty.



Each immigrant group goes through a similar process.  First they think of themselves as Irish.  Then Irish-Americans.  Then, finally, middle-class Americans.



Back in 2008. according to CNN's exit polls, Americans divided up by race, in percent, as follows.  Whites 55-43 for McCain and 75 percent of the vote, with Blacks 95-5 for Obama at 13 percent of the vote, Hispanics 67-31 for Obama at 9 percent of the vote, and Asians 62-35 for Obama at 2 percent of the vote.  Really the only group that votes by race is the black vote, and the extreme vote of 95% for Obama is understandable for the first black president.



But Hispanics, we are told, don't vote by race.  As they graduate into the middle class they start to vote Republican.



Now we know why blacks vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.  They do it because the Democrats scare them, and teach them to hate whites, with the race card.  Chaps like Reverend Wright in South Chicago spew race hatred from the pulpit.  You can't get to 95-5 without fear and hate.  But every day there is an African American somewhere graduating into the middle class who may wonder if it's really true that the Republicans will bring back Jim Crow.  Also, I suspect, there is a growing and desperate hunger in African Americans to achieve middle-class respectability.  Why not?  Everyone else has experienced that hunger.  One fine day that hunger will break up the fear and hate.  Because once people get into the middle class, and get what used to be called a "competence," they start to believe that they can make it in the market economy and the world without needing to truckle to a powerful patron.



There is no magic bullet here.  The reason that the white working class has abandoned the Democratic Party is that it perceives that the Democratic Party doesn't care about people like them.  There will come a day when the black middle class feels the same way.  Given the disappointment with Obama, that day may be closer than we think.

Can We Act Before It's Too Late?

Is it possible to Do Something about the federal budget mess before the nation goes over the cliff?  Probably not.  Writes Victor Davis Hanson about the Roman budget crisis:

The Roman satirist Juvenal lamented the ill effects of free food and free entertainment for the masses (“bread and circuses”) in part because he knew there was no remedy for the pathology in sight — and thus only a slow decline toward fiscal insolvency or riots were on the horizon.

Nothing changes.  The teachers of Wisconsin rioted against budget-balancing that made them contribute just a little more for their pensions.  And the Greeks are rioting against the reduction in their benefits from the state.  And these are regime supporters, people who support the idea of big government, people who should be all in favor of the government living within its means.

The irony is, as President Obama provokes the mob into rage against "the rich," that big-ticket thinkers of left and right agree that big government is a problem.  Conservatism was born in Edmund Burke as a reaction to the first hint of big government.  But it took the rise of fascism and pogroms against the Jews to get Jewish lefties like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno to agree that the instrumental reason of the Enlightenment leads directly to domination and oppression: "what men want to learn from nature is how to dominate it and other men."

So you get lefties like Juergen Habermas differentiating between the strategic action of the governmental bureaucracy or the corporate bureaucracy and the communicative action of shared meaning in language.  The rational plan of the government or the corporation is domination, any way you look at it.  But the essential social nature of humans is expressed in language and consensus.  Of course, when it comes to facing up to the truth that your social consensus is transformed into strategic instrumental reason the moment you translate your consensus into a government program, the lefties go AWOL.  But at least they have begun to face the truth of their cruel and unjust system.

Meanwhile conservatives have insisted that community and society and compassion start with the face-to-face community.  Why?  Because it is at the face-to-face community that the basic social problem can be solved, getting people "to bide by the social contract [rather] than to pretend to bide by it", as Roger Scruton writes.  It is at the local level that people can judge whether their fellows are pulling their weight or freeloading.  But when the question of freeloading is obscured by "social justice" and a government program--for who is the freeloader, the businessman or the disabled on a pension--then people start to act like Sgt. Bilko.  They see all the free stuff passing by and figure, why not get my share and cash in?

Perhaps there is a silver lining to this cloud.  Maybe today in America the mass of people are frightened more by the collapse of government finances in a budget crisis than by suffering a reduction in their benefits in a budget deal.  After all, middle-class people depend on the system continuing to work for them.  They are not like the proletariat with "nothing left to lose."

But don't bet on it.  The strategy of President Obama is clear.  He will put off spending cuts until the moment of collapse.  And in that moment of collapse, of course, the people will be willing to agree to anything, from sovereign debt default to tax increases on the middle class.

Voila!  Problem solved.

America's Real Problems

Back in the 1870s Walter Bagehot, editor of The Economist, wrote his classic book Lombard Street. It was an analysis of the Bank of England's role as guarantor of the credit system. What should the Bank do to deal with a panic in the money market? That was Bagehot's topic, after two big panics in ten years, in 1857 and 1866.

You'll be amazed to learn that his solution was not more regulation. No, he wanted stronger leadership at the Bank of England, a permanent manager rather than the rotating Governors. He wanted the Bank to realize that it had to do everything in its power to stop a panic and restore confidence, principally by lending money without limit on any good security. And he wanted the Bank to maintain a higher "banking reserve."

The foundation of the credit system, he wrote, is that most people are "sound." They maintain their assets in a prudent way, and cannot be sold out because of excessive leverage. His approach to the money market assumed that people are responsible, and that the governance of market institutions should encourage people to follow their instinct to be responsible and "sound." He thought that the soundness of the credit system was the responsibility of the credit system participants.

The contrast with our own time is palpable. Today, we don't trust the business sector to mind its own business. We believe, with certainty, that political oversight is essential to a smooth economic system. But how well does that work, in business and in the other areas of government?

Of course, political oversight means bureaucratic regulation, and effective political control of the economic sector, and the record of the last century is that the cure is worse than the disease.

Money.  Two hundred years ago, the credit system in the US was founded on a funded national debt and the government ran a surplus.  This meant that the dollar was rock solid and the government was not trying to manipulate the credit system to get out of a jam.  Today the government is always in a jam, and is always manipulating the credit system to keep its operations going.  The government regulates banks not to make them safer but to make them into useful conduits of government debt.

Education.  For two hundred years the ruling class has liked the idea of government-run education.  Maybe it had a point in the early 19th century when the people coming off the land into the city were often illiterate.  But now, in the United States, the education system spends about a trillion dollars a year to do--what exactly?  Most likely its real purpose is to indoctrinate students into the ruling class ideology.  In my view it is time to return education to the private sector, to churches, and charities.  And also revive the idea of apprenticeship--getting hands-on teenagers out of school and into the workforce.

Healthcare.  Everyone seems to think that without government nobody except the rich could afford healthcare.  I doubt it.  The vast majority of people buy food and transportation without government, why not healthcare?  The problem is that we really don't know what people want in health care, because the government so completely dominates the system that individual consumer preference is blocked out.

Work.  Used to be that workers worked for cash.  Now the government is right in the middle of the employment transaction in many different ways with regulations and taxes.  It's all meant to help the workers, to prevent exploitation and provide social benefits like unemployment and retirement.  Are we really so helpless that we need government right in the middle of everything?  And the problem is that all the taxes and regulation almost force low-skill employers just avoid the complicated and confusing formal employment sector completely, and hire people off the books.  How safe it that?

Environment.  The current top-down system assumes that ordinary people are helpless victims that cannot look after themselves.  Shouldn't we try to find environmental approaches that empower ordinary people to protect the environment?  Roger Scruton recommends a bottom-up approach based on the idea of "home." People want to protect their home.

When Walter Bagehot wrote Lombard Street he admitted that it would be impossible to change the governance of the Bank of England because people just accepted the way things were and wouldn't support any change.  In other words, people won't agree to change unless things are broken.

That's where we are with America.  There are lots of things that aren't really working, but they aren't broken.  Not yet.

Do we really have to wait to fix things until they are completely broken?

The Wages of Hate

When you are the ruling class, you get a special benefit.  You get to call the other guys nasty names, and there is not much they can do about it.



The Brits used to say, well, but we brought the rule of law to India.  Quite so, old chap.  But the Brits also conquered India and used its wealth to help fight the Napoleonic Wars.  They were such outrageous looters that Edmund Burke spent ten years trying to impeach and convict the Governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings.



The British Empire is history.  Now we have new ruling classes, and they get to put their narrative gloss on their rise to power.  For liberals, history is a progression: from helping the workers to helping African Americans to helping women to helping gays.



One of the ways you acquire the power to do all that is by demonizing the opposition.  We are the good guys that care for workers, blacks, women, gays, you say, and they are the bad guys, defending sweat-shops, Jim Crow, the patriarchy, and hate.



So, in the last couple of decades, liberals have liberally used the rhetorical device of "hate" to demonize their opponents.  If you disagree with liberals you are "divisive" and a "hater."  If you voice your disagreement, you are committing "hate speech."  And woe betide anyone that makes a liberal feel "uncomfortable."



The truth is that all politics is a contest of divisiveness.  The whole point of an election is to divide the electorate in two, with 51 percent or more on your side.  The whole point of a political movement is to mobilize people on the side of the angels, to march them to a better tomorrow.  Needless to say, anyone that resists our march to a better tomorrow is the enemy: misguided at best, evil incarnate at worst.



Our liberal friends have had the better of the name-calling business for most of the last century.  You can tell this by the moments when they were on the defensive: the Red hunting after the Bolshevik Revolution and the Sacco-Vanzetti trial; the McCarthy era; the accusations of un-patriotism during Vietnam; Bush's Patriot Act.  Whenever the liberals have been on the political defensive they have reacted as though the world was coming to an end, they have furiously objected to their marginalization, and made an event of it.



But if you are an ordinary American, you had better be careful what you say not just occasionally but all the time, especially in college and on the job.  You could easily be accused of racism or sexism, and you could lose your job or get expelled from school.



Here is how to define political power: it's the ability to define what other people are allowed to say.  Most of the time, in our time, it is liberals that get to do that.



But, of course, every ruling class eventually provokes a head of rebellion.  That goes with the nature of political power, which is to use government force to distribute money and privileges to your supporters.  People get fed up with the lies and the self-dealing and the injustice that goes with government power.  And so one day the ruling class wakes up and finds that is unpopular.



Could that be happening in 2012?  Who knows?  But one thing about the Internet and blogs and youTube.  It makes it possible for the opposition to spread the word under the radar and make fun of the ruling class.  An example is President Obama's "You didn't build that" comment.  The comment has gone viral and seems to have insulted every small businessman in the land.



Liberals have had a good run defining themselves as the good guys, defining near riots as peaceful protests, and intimidation as peaceful picketing.  And they have succeeded in defining every dissent from their orthodoxy as dangerous breaches of the peace.  Imagine if, e.g., Tea Party activists had occupied the Wisconsin State Capitol in 2011.



But eventually the rules of the game change, and the confident ruling class finds that its power is challenged.  Robespierre, the diligent price-controller, finds himself in the tumbril cart on the way to the guillotine to shouts of "Dirty Maximum!"



A new ruling class comes to power.  Among other things, they get to define the word "hate."