Michelle Obama vs. Ann Romney

In the old days they didn't think about having the candidates' wives up at the national political conventions telling us all about their families.



But now it's essential.  Why?  Because of the women's vote.  Women don't abstract politics and its issues into a corner.  They see politics as part of their entire world of relationships.  And they judge the worthiness of people they know by their familial performance.  They need to know how a president relates to his wife and children.  And more than men, women need to know that the president "cares about people like me."



So how well did Ann Romney last week deliver, compared to Michelle Obama this week?



I'd say that Ann Romney did the job, which was to humanize Mitt Romney.  You could tell that her speech was a duty, a job that she had to do for her husband's sake.  You'd never know, from the mainstream media and President Obama's negative ads, that Mitt Romney is an exemplary man and husband.  Now we know.



But Michelle Obama is a politician, and it shows.  So her speech was a bravura performance from a real pro, combining touching stories from her family with heartfelt advocacy for her husband's liberal vision.



Of course, there isn't much difference between the two parties on the ends of politics.  We all want a prosperous world where kids get a good education, everyone can get health care, and old people get cared for in their golden years.



Everyone agrees upon the ends of politics.  The differences arise when we get to talking about means.  How do "we" educate our children.  How do we help the poor?  What do we do about health care?  What do we owe our parents in their declining years, and how do we deliver that care?  And who is "we?"



The difference between liberals and conservatives is stark.  Liberals believe that most of these social goods should be delivered through politics and government on the basis of "rights," a right to education, to health care, to income support.  Conservatives believe that most social goods should be delivered through "civil society" associations like churches, unions, and fraternal associations and mutual-aid societies.



Liberals base their "rights" talk on the Exploitation narrative.  The reason that people can't get the material goods they need is because it is denied them by an unjust ruling class and the savage ways of the market economy.  What's needed is a new ruling class that will redistribute the spoils of economic exploitation to the people that have been, up to now, denied access to these necessary social goods.



Conservatives base their "civil society" talk on the Invisible Hand narrative.  People are naturally social; they instinctively act to offer services to others in return for the material things they need to live and prosper.  But there is a problem.  It is the "freeloader" problem.  Some people take advantage of the system to take but not make.  There's the husband who won't work or deserts his wife and children; there's the slacker at work.  There's the neighbor that won't keep his yard clean.  There's the bum that would rather live rough than get a job.  Conservatives believe that if you get most people to join civil society associations then you take care of the "freeloader" problem.  That's because nearly all humans care about the good opinion of the people they know.  And people know who is slacking and who is pulling their weight.  Once you have taken care of the freeloader problem then the safety-net problem becomes much simpler.



Of course, society can never be a pure government welfare state; nor can it ever be a pure conservative civil society state.  But right now, conservatives argue, it is tilted too far towards the government welfare state and that tilt encourages freeloading and a destruction of healthy societal cooperation.  Liberals don't think we have gone far enough in guaranteeing rights.



Which brings us back to mom and apple pie.



Everyone wants our president to be a good man.  Everyone wants a world with education for children and care for the poor and the aged.  And everyone wants to look to the future with hope.



The question is: which way to the future is better?  And how much is enough?



The American people will get to adjust the "which way" and the "how much" in November.  Not by a lot, of course.  But certainly enough to make a difference.

Over the Cliff? Or Not?

There's a chilling article by Nicholas Eberstadt from last weekend in the Wall Street Journal about the progress, if you like, of entitlement spending.  Back at the beginning of the 1980s about 30 percent of US households were getting benefits from the government.  Today it is about 50 percent.



So you can understand the pessimists that say it is useless to expect anyone to fix the federal budget.  After all, since the time when the Franks were invading the German lands a thousand years ago for loot, politics has been about paying off your supporters.  What politician is going to do that?  Before the money runs out.



When the money runs out, of course, things get interesting.



The Republican line in 2012 is simple.  Let's "do something" about entitlements before the money runs out.  But are the American people listening?  If 50 percent of the people are already receiving federal government benefits (like me) then won't they opt for continuing the benefits in the hope that the next generation will the one that goes over the cliff?



It's interesting to wonder what the voters will decide, especially in light of the analysis of Joel Kotkin.  He argues that the Democratic Party has moved away from Bill Clinton's attempt to appeal to the center.  The party is now an "upstairs/downstairs" party of the urban gentry and the minority dependent class.

After decades of fighting to win over white working- and middle-class families, Democrats under Obama have set them aside in favor of a new top-bottom coalition dominated by urban professionals—notably academics and members of the media—single women, and childless couples, along with ethnic minorities.

And, of course, the center of gravity of this coalition is single women, as "more than half of all American women are single."  Now you understand the "war on women."  But the problem is that the new coalition has pushed away the center ground,

the predominately white working- and middle-class families whose goals centered around achieving home ownership, basic essentials, and the occasional luxury. These groups have been leaving both the core cities and the Democratic Party for generations.

The problem is that the "upstairs" part of the new Democratic coalition has done very little for the economic improvement of the "downstairs" folks, the minorities.  It's all very well to have cities that appeal to the single twentysomething.  But what about the minorities living in the city that don't got no jobs?



The truth is probably that the "downstairs" people will, like the servants in the TV series Upstairs Downstairs, identify more with the reflected glory of the "upstairs" family and be content to molder their lives away achieving nothing rather than take the risk to break away from the basement in Eaton Place and climb up into the challenge of middle-class responsibility.



Of course, if the government goes over the cliff, then the "downstairs" folks are screwed.  And the "upstairs" folks will somehow get by.

The Left is Not Dead

It's easy to imagine that the left is dead, unable to produce an account of the world that even begins to pass the laugh test.  Here is Michael Ledeen writing about an Italian lefty that got religion.

I have a good friend, an Italian who lives in Milano, who for a while was the head of the youth organization of the Italian Communist Party. One day he was walking across one of the major Milanese piazzas, and had an epiphany, which he later described very simply. “I shouted, ‘There is no working class!’”

There is no doubt that there was a time when an identifiable working class existed, but the world changes, according to Hegel, and so people must update their thinking. Only,

there are plenty of people who can’t update their thinking. They’re easy to recognize, because they write and talk about a world that no longer exists. The easiest places to find them in contemporary America are Hollywood, college campuses, and the Obama administration with its attendant satellites, the dead tree media and the Democrat Party. Their common bond is anger and frustration; frustration because they can’t understand what’s going on, and anger because their remedies for contemporary problems do not come to grips with the essence of the problems.

And so, Ledeen writes, the "left has ceased to exist as an intellectual force worth taking seriously."

That's interesting to me, because the subtext of my forthcoming book "An American Manifesto" is that we conservatives ought to take leftist thought more seriously, that we ought to get familiar with it, and understand what it is trying to say.  Here is a quick review of the best in leftist thought.

In The Dialectic of Enlightenment Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno unpack the idea of "enlightenment" and decide that it is all about domination, the domination of nature and other men.  In The Theory of Communicative Action Juergen Habermas develops the idea of the systems world of instrumental reason, the world of capitalism and bureaucracy, and the "lifeworld" where people exist not by systemic rules but by language, persuasion, and consensus.

Then there is the lefty trilogy by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: Empire, followed by Multitude and Commonwealth.  It is a noble attempt to resurrect the Marxian idea, the Exploitation narrative, for the 21st century.  Instead of the bourgeoisie, we have "Empire," the global cabal of national political powers and global corporations.  They call this phenomenon "Biopower".  Instead of the working class, they propose "Multitude."  The Multitude represents groupings of singularities in the world of work, no longer the "habit" of work in mass-production factories and offices, but becoming a culture of "performance" in creative occupations and productions of "affect".  The new multitude calls for a new "life in common".

Could this new form of social life use constitutional means to "establish a democracy from below of free men and women" they ask?  Unfortunately not, for the Multitude will realize itself in a spasm of revolution, a moment of "Kairos", the "moment when a decision of action is made".

Assuredly, the left is not dead.  It has plenty of ideas that take for granted the Exploitation narrative, and call for revolution to bring on the millennium of peace and justice.  And conservatives all across the world will have to fight their ideas and their eternal lust for political power and street action.

As long as there is government there will be exploitation and injustice.  Government is force, and force is unjust.  These days the problem is the huge and unjust power of the global educated elite that has tricked the Multitude into exchanging its birthright for a mess of pottage.  The question for the future is whether conservatives can persuade the Multitude that the problem is the educated elite, or whether chaps like President Obama can persuade the Multitude that the problem is chaps like Mitt Romney and  companies like Bain Capital.

"You and Your Family"

You always want to go to Rush Limbaugh to get your gut check on the previous day in politics.  Love him or hate him, Rush is the man with the golden gut.  And his analysis is that the core of Mitt Romney's acceptance speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention was this memorable line:

President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.

It deals very neatly with the central delusion at the heart of modern liberalism: we've got the social problem licked and now it is time to move on to bigger things.  All this, remember, while the whole "blue social model" is collapsing everywhere from Athens to LA.



All in all, the Republican National Convention was a success and showed us how the Romney campaign will be fighting the election.  It will be hope and change, based on Mitt's leadership, judgment and ability.  Against the proven incompetence of Barack Obama, who did the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong way, i.e., the opposite of Aristotelian virtue.



Of course.  There are only two campaign themes.  There is "Four More Years" and there is "Hope and Change."  Everything else is just a detail.



But what bothers me is the central promise of modern politics: to help you and your family.  This is the basic "lie agreed upon" in modern life.  It is the idea that the big remote central government can stand ready to help you and your family.



Reality is something different.



Big government cannot help you and your family.  It can stabilize the credit system with Dutch finance.  It can build big bureaucratic programs that slosh money around, and that you can exploit for your own benefit.  It can, in emergency, mobilize to get food and supplies to you, although Walmart did that better after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.



Here's how Big Daddy can really help you and your family.  It's the story of Mitt Romney, Mormon church elder helping a family after a devastating automobile accident.  Andrew Ferguson tells the story.

I was struck by the story of a Mormon family called (unfortunately) Nixon. In the 1990s a car wreck rendered two of their boys quadriplegics. Drained financially from extraordinary expenses, Mr. Nixon got a call from Romney, whom he barely knew, asking if he could stop by on Christmas Eve. When the day came, all the Romneys arrived bearing presents, including a VCR and a new sound system the Romney boys set up. Later Romney told Nixon that he could take care of the children’s college tuition, which in the end proved unnecessary. “I knew how busy he was,” Nixon told the authors. “He was actually teaching his boys, saying, ‘This is what we do. We do this as a family.’ ”

It's not the same thing when government gives you an unemployment check after you have lost your job.  The politician is not coming round to your house to give you a hand. Not with his money, he ain't.



I've been hammering on the theme of "confiscation" in recent days.  What I really mean by that is exactly what liberals do and what Mitt Romney was promising in his speech: government that helps you and your family.  The problem is that it is the job of civil society to help you and your family.  The way that society works is that people help each other, and community leaders help more than most.  Every single thing that government "confiscates" is a string snipped out of that social safety web.



It is a fallacy and a delusion to believe that "helping" ever happens outside of the face-to-face society of family, friends, neighbors, and church members.



In the old days, in hunter-gatherer society, the whole of society was face to face.  So you relied on your fellow tribesmen and women to help you in need.  But the basic fact of modern society is that huge sectors are removed from face-to-face relationships and are organized not on a relationship basis but on a systems basis.  Thus Habermas talks about "steering media" like money that direct human behavior.  Instead of exchanging goods and services through face-to-face conversation, people do it by the hands-off exchange of money and markets.



The same thing applies to politics.  Politicians affect the conversation of the town meeting, the assembly of the whole community.  But they are really doing something else.  Modern politics is a spectator sport.  The voters sit in the stands experiencing the game vicariously while the professionals duke it out on the playing field.  President Obama's team playbook emphasizes fairness and sharing.  Governor Romney's team playbook emphasizes individuals striving to lift their families up.  When the game is over the spectators go to their voting booths and vote for the team of their choice.  To say that such a combat is "social" in the way that discussing tribal affairs over a camp-fire is social is to live in a dream world.



We can never go back to the community of the hunter-gatherer.  The Garden of Eden is gone forever.   Our world is much more complex.  We must learn to operate the levers of modern technology, from money and credit to power tools.  Yet, as James C. Scott has written, the world cannot operate as a pure mechanical system.  Humans still interact face to face, and it is the face-to-face communication that acts as the vital lubrication that makes the whole system work.  Great powerful automated systems are amazing.  But you still need the human touch to set it up, and apply a nudge and a check every so often.



That's the way to really "help you and your family."  Could we ever get a government with the wisdom to stand back and let us all get on with it?

Ryan's Rhetoric: A Suggestion

You gotta love that Paul Ryan guy.  For his demeanor, his rhetoric, and his zingers.



How about those faded Obama posters?



But I want to add a new concept into the lexicon of conservative rhetoric.  It's a simple idea, as all good ideas are.  It's not my idea, but it is stolen from Roger Scruton in his new book on the environment, How to Think Seriously about the Environment.  He uses the concept of elite "confiscation" to critique the way in which our educated class confiscates problems away from ordinary people.



To illustrate his point, I am going to quote the various places in Environment where he uses the word "confiscate".

p. 134: "In all such cases top-down solutions have a tendency to confiscate problems from those whose problems they are."



p. 395: "the unscrupulous use of Trade-Related Property Rights to confiscate the social capital of peasant economies."



p. 158: "Once again we see the counter-productive nature of regulatory policies that confiscate risk and remove the incentive to prepare for it."



p. 171: "It comes from believing that this problem is our problem, and therefore my problem, as a member of the group. That belief disappears when anonymous bureaucracies confiscate our risks, and pretend that they can regulate them into extinction."



p. 402: "By acting always to enhance oikophilia [, love of home,] and not to confiscate its sphere of legitimate action, the state will prepare us for the sacrifices [to come]".



p. 400: "The greatest danger to the environment, it seems to me, comes from the growing tendency of governments to confiscate the powers and freedoms of autonomous associations, and to centralize all powers in their own hands."



p. 360: "[A]lthough [the EPA's] regulatory regime has provided guarantees against the worst forms of pollution it has done as much to confiscate as to support the oikophilia of ordinary Americans".



p. 150: "Any such regulation... should never confiscate a problem from those who have the job of solving it".

Do you get what he is saying?  He is indicting the whole big government idea, because its whole idea is to say: you poor diddums can't really be expected to educate your children, because we experts can do it better.  You can't really be expected to save for retirement, or deal with unemployment, or provide for your health care.  So why not let us tax your employer and the rich and we will do it all for you.



We conservatives usually like to talk about "responsibility," and that is fine.  But it really misses the point.  The whole thrust of progressive politics, starting with Marx, is to "confiscate" problems from society at large, to deny the opportunities for responsibility, and sequester them forever in the political sector where liberals live.



This confiscation is bad for one simple reason.  We humans are social animals.  We live by our cooperative social thoughts and acts.  But if we don't use them, they atrophy, just like a muscle that we don't exercise.



And then, when a crisis comes, we don't have the skill or the will to do the social thing.  We are no longer social animals, but dependent animals.



Scruton picks up a point made by Aaron Wildavsky, the idea of "resilience," which prepares us for adversity.  You can manage risks by "altering the object that presents them" or by "altering the subject that confronts them... by changing ourselves or our competences in order to cope better when things go wrong."



In the liberal welfare state the liberals confiscate risk and confiscate the opportunity for ordinary people to develop the resilience and the competence to cope with things when they go wrong.  Are they really helping us?  Or are they helping themselves, grabbing all the satisfactions of social life, of life in common, for themselves?



Whaddya think, Paul Ryan?

Trumping the Race Card

When Americans voted for Barack Obama in 2008, were we racists?  Were we voting for a man because of the color of his skin, rather than the content of his character?

In my case, I voted for Obama because it was time for Democrats to put their money where their mouth was on the War on Terror.  And anyway, I think that the essence of democracy is Buggins Turn.  You alternate the parties in power so they don't get paranoid.

So if Americans vote for Romney in 2012 does that make us racists?  If we don't like the way the US Justice Department decided not to prosecute New Black Panthers for standing in the polling station door does that make us racists?  If we don't like President Obama's liberal bureaucrats tearing up the consensus on welfare, does that make us racists?  If we don't agree with ObamaCare does that make us racists?

Jonah Goldberg is looking at the race card today and wondering why we haven't got to post-racial politics.  He reckons that if Michael Eric Dyson, professor of sociology, can judge Mitt Romney's lame birth-certificate joke as "resorting to 'some of the basest, most despicable bigotry we can imagine'", then things can't really be that bad on the race front.  I mean, can a lame joke be that much of a problem?

A lot of Americans thought that in voting for Obama they would put America into a post-racial era.  After all, if you vote for a black guy for president, then surely nobody can call you a racist any more.

Yeah.  Good luck with that, old chum.  But Goldberg thinks that the race baiters may be shooting themselves in the foot.

But I think both the cynical and the sincere race-obsessives fail to fully appreciate the damage they’re doing to their own cause. In 2008, the hope for many was that Obama would transcend race, moving the nation beyond the exhausting topic. Today, instead of being post-racial, our politics are saturated with ridiculous charges of racism. “No Drama Obama” is instead a source of constant drama, often hyped in the most ludicrous ways.

 What Obama has done, in the analysis of Shelby Steele, is change from a race "bargainer" to a race "challenger."  Race bargainers give whites the benefit of the doubt on race, on the understanding, nod nod, wink wink, that they vote those benefits.  Race challengers accuse whites of racism up front until they vote the benefits.

But what if typical white Americans have decided that enough is enough, forget the bargaining, forget the challenging, they have voted in a black president: been there done that?  Suppose average middle-class Americans reckon they now have to take care of their own needs in this sluggish Obama economy?

Well, who knows?  That's why we have elections.

What Comes Next?

Pat Buchanan says that this election is the "Last Hurrah" of the "New Majority" put together by Richard Nixon.  In 1972, Nixon "annexed the Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Christian conservatives of FDR's coalition to win 49 states in 1972."  With the Todd Akin gaffe on "legitimate rape" that whole coalition seems like an embarrassment.

Come on Pat.  The social conservative majority had its Last Hurrah with Bush's 2004 reelection, and collapsed in the shame and ignominy of 2006 and 2008.  And if Todd Akin is a laughingstock, then the idea of the abortion ladies headlining the Democratic National Convention next week is absurd.

Nixon's majority has been history since 1992.  Instead, we are at the end of the Third Way era, the idea that you could have your cake and eat it too.

Here's what I think.  I think that the American people are confused and waiting for leadership.  You can see that from Frank Luntz's experience with undecided voters here.

After the exhaustion of the Bush years, the Democrats had a once in a generation opportunity to create a new coalition based on the promises of America's first black president to get beyond the partisan divisions of the previous decade.  People were hoping we could get beyond the race wars and the culture wars.

Instead, President Obama has intensified partisan division in the country.  Instead of putting race behind us, he has unleashed the race-card sharps.  Instead of using his majorities in Congress to craft a bipartisan consensus on economic policy, health care, and environment that would co-opt Republicans as junior partners in a new era in federal policy, he rammed stupid partisan garbage straight down the nation's throat.  President Obama has thrown a gigantic opportunity into the garbage can, and so everything is up for grabs.

My own view, expressed yesterday here, is that we have reached the end of the stunningly hypocritical "socially liberal, economically conservative era."  For years our top 20 percent has been happily talking socially liberal while acting socially conservative.  Meanwhile the bottom 30 percent has been descending into social hell, with reduced marriage for women and less work for men and shattered homes for children.  Our Democratic friends like to say that we should return to the days of high tax rates and good unionized jobs at good wages of the era from 1950 to 1979, but they are longing for a time that can never return.

Socially liberal and economically conservative are like oil and water.  If you want to be socially liberal then you are going to need a big government welfare state to pick up the pieces of shattered lives.  If you want to be economically conservative then you are going to have to be socially conservative too, because a small government requires big, responsible citizens.

So what does that mean for the future?  You could simplify it all into two ideas, but that would be too naive and simple.  But what the heck.

First of all, we need an America where ordinary people get to solve their own problems in their little platoons.  That means that liberals must stop "confiscating" problems and insisting that only they have the chops to solve big national problems.

Second, we need a social culture symbolized by the idea that abortion should be "safe, legal, and shameful."  In other words, we shouldn't be trying to legislate morality.  No indeed.  But humans are social animals.  That means that we collectively, in our conversations, rough out an idea of right and wrong, and then we properly judge those people that violate our ideas of right and wrong.  I'd say that one thing Americans ought to be able to agree on is that taking the life of an unborn child is not a good thing.  Sex is a serious business, and pretending that it is recreational, or just a matter between her and her doctor is a lie.  But criminalizing social issues is stupid.

Freedom means nothing if it does not mean the right to make a mistake.  But actions have consequences, and, socially liberal or socially conservative, economically liberal or economically conservative, a mistake is a mistake.  The question is: how do we, as social animals, help our fellow citizens in avoiding stupid, life-harming mistakes?

The second question is: when do we stop lying to ourselves?

Once America's top 20 percent resolves its stunning hypocrisy on the "social liberal, economically conservative" issue then the confusion of the Frank Luntz's undecided voters will disappear.  They will all start mouthing the platitudes of the New Responsibility consensus.

And the political party that best communicates the ideas of the New Responsibility era will win most of the elections.