Nothing New: Liberals in Denial

In his review of Charles R. Kesler's I Am The Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism Mark Lilla does us all a favor.



He shows us just how deep in denial our liberal friends remain.



He starts by sneering at Kesler's story-so-far, which tells a story of Hegel (and the big state) leading to Wilson (and the updated Constitution) through FDR's New Deal to LBJ's Great Society, "bringing with it existentialist self-absorption, moral relativism and passivity in the face of the new administrative state."  Lilla, you see, thinks that blaming German ideas for the mess in America is a case of "blame the Kraut."



On the way, he fails to mention Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, which is probably where Kesler got most of his "blame the Kraut" stuff.  Does that mean that this self-described "centrist liberal" never read it?  It's an outrage, eh Jonah?  Because, whether they know it or not, and I suspect they prefer not, liberals get all their stuff from the Germans, from the big state to the government schools to the government-run social welfare.



So then Lilla makes his pro-forma rhetorical concession towards the conservative narrative.  Yes, the Great Society did overreach, he admits.  But Ronald Reagan really did change things.

Reagan did in fact restore (then overinflate) America’s self-confidence, and he did bequeath to Republicans a clear ideological alternative to Progressivism. But he also transformed American liberalism. As an author named Barack Obama once wrote, Reagan “put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” By delegitimizing Great Society liberalism and emphasizing growth, he forced the Democratic Party back toward the center, making the more moderate presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama possible. Reagan won the war of ideas, as everyone knows.

OK. Let's concede this.  Ronald Reagan did force Bill Clinton to pretend to be a centrist.  And then, after a two-year lurch to the left, Newt Gingrich did force Clinton to the center.  But Reagan didn't win the war of ideas.  Nor did he transform American liberalism.  The point about Barack Obama is not that he is moderate, but that he represents a flood of 30 years of liberal ideas dammed up by the prestige of Ronald Reagan.



Liberalism transformed?  Let's take a look.

• Are liberals converted to the idea of low tax rates and sound money?  No and No.
  


• Are liberals converted to the idea of minimal regulation that recognizes Hayekian reality that the man in Washington can't run the economy, because he can never have sufficient bandwidth? No.
  


• Are liberals ready to back away from the administrative state and reinvigorate civil society and the little platoons?  A solid No.
  


• Have liberals begun to realize that race politics is poison and that Affirmative Action and diversity imprison minorities in a liberal plantation?  Definitely No.

So how in the world can "centrist liberals" like Mark Lilla think that they represent a sort of common-sense consensus while conservatives are hyper-ventilating extremists?  You know the answer.



Because everyone that elite liberals know agrees with them.



You'd think that, with the imploding welfare states of Europe before their very eyes, with Grecian default just a matter of time and Catalonia threatening to split off from Spain, that liberals would be getting second thoughts about their project, but chaps like Mark Lilla remind us that the end-of-dynasty elites seldom see the end coming.  They are like the Bourbons, who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.  Or as Fred Bauer from the Daily Caller writes:

In the life of almost all civilizations, a time comes where, as Yeats put it, “things fall apart.” The internal principles and assumptions that used to seem to work begin to break down.

That's where we are with liberalism.  Step by step liberals built their administrative welfare state, from Social Security to unemployment to government schools to centralized health care.  And it was good.



The idea that the whole thing was a ghastly mistake, a denial of the basic social and cooperative instincts of humankind, that it lasted as long as it did in spite of all the wonderful programs and policies and cosy liberal sinecures: that is unthinkable.



The trouble is that if we are to get through the next few years without a serious crack-up--as in serious inflation and/or debt default--then liberals have to come out of denial and buy into the idea that conservatives have a point.



But "centrist liberals" like Mark Lilla remind us just how deep in denial our liberal friends remain.  And that means that things have to get worse before they get better.  Probably a lot worse.



The whole problem can be epitomized in the flatulent idea that the rich should pay a little more in federal taxes.  Let's think through what that means.  It means that the wealth created by the rich should be put to work in government spending rather than in creating new businesses and new consumption items.



Really?  Is there anything more important right now than in creating a new boom in businesses and jobs?  Is there really anything the government is doing right now that is more important than getting the animal spirits of businessmen revived?



We know, because the last century amounted to a petri dish experiment to prove it, that the administrative state is a horrible mistake.  It is a monument to the conceit of the educated elite.  Maybe "centrist liberals" haven't woken up from their nap after consuming the Sunday New York Times yet, but there are leftist thinkers that have ripped up the idea and the practice of the administrative state.



There is Juergen Habermas, the residual legatee of the Frankfurt School, who talks about "internal colonization" in his Theory of Communicative Action.  There is James C. Scott who talks in Seeing Like a State about the aesthetic pretensions of high modernism, how modern elites have tried, again and again, to force society into the mold of their elegant administrative vision, simplifying complex social structures to make them "legible" and thus controllable by a ruling elite.



The significance of Habermas and Scott is that they confirm the Hayek thesis, that human society is too complex to reduce to an administrative state.  While Hayek merely asserts that the administrative state is impossible, Habermas and Scott show how the modern educated elite has attempted  to simplify society to make it amenable to administrative control.  In Habermas, the judgement is that the administrative state is flawed because it results in "internal colonization," a colonial state like the colonies of British India and Africa; in Scott the judgement is that the administrative project has notoriously failed, time and time again, resulting in famine and misery, from the enclosures of Europe to the collectivizations of Asia and Africa.  Obamacare, on this view, is yet another attempt to make real, messy health care conform to the elite's exquisite aesthetic vision of health care.



The reason that every dynasty seems to be followed by a "time of trouble" issues from the stupidity and blindness of late-dynasty elites.  They just cannot bring themselves to see that everything they so lovingly created is crumbling down around them.  They use every last ounce of their political power to keep their hegemony going until one day the whole thing collapses and the barbarians rush in.



And the people perish.

Government is Force

Columnist Jonah Goldberg has been watching the Democratic National Convention.  And he has something to say about the remarkable idea that "government is just the word we use for those things we do together" a sentiment expressed in a short video shown at the convention.



Well, no, writes Jonah.  Government belongs to the world of non-voluntary tribalism.  We Americans have advanced beyond that to voluntary tribalism.  You could say, he continues, that we now beyond non-voluntary tribalism to the tribe of liberty.



Unfortunately there remain those that suffer from nostalgia for the good old days of compulsory tribalism when you were tied for ever after to the tribe into which you were born.  Unless you were a woman that got married out into the neighboring tribe.  Hello Catherine of Aragon.



I think we should expand the whole notion that Jonah develops.  The point about voluntary tribalism is that it expands the circle of trust beyond traditional tribal notions of kinship, of family and clan.  We could call it a philosophy of trust.  The non-voluntary tribalism, on the other hand, is driven by what philosopher Luc Ferry has called a philosophy of suspicion.  He was talking about Marxism.



Now the philosophy of trust yields a politics of responsibility, based on the responsible self invented in the Axial Age religions, while the philosophy of suspicion yields a politics of the victim.  Of course it does.



The interesting thing about the philosophy of suspicion is that, when the old non-voluntary tribes of blood have broken down--the tribes that defined people by their locality and their mistrust of the village down the road--suspicion finds new targets for its hate.  It finds its targets within the larger community, by dividing people by class and race.  The genius of Marx was to be the first person to redefine the philosophy of suspicion for the modern age.  He created the first modern politics of the victim and the first modern victim class, the proletariat.



So along come our Democratic friends and tell us that "government is just the word we use for those things we do together."



No it isn't, Democrats.  Government is the word for the rump of things that we still do under the old culture of non-voluntary tribalism.  In the new world of the philosophy of trust, peopled by the multitude of responsible selves practicing the politics of responsibility, there is less and less need for unthinking compulsion and conformism.



But there is a tribe of nostalgic reactionaries amongst us that want to turn back the clock to the bad old days of the philosophy of suspicion.  They talk about victims and rights, and programs and fair shares.  Stuck in the old world of suspicion and compulsory tribalism, they see pollution and danger, witches and heretics everywhere they look.  And they want to bring everything under the shadow of government and compulsion, so determined are they to eliminate the targets of their suspicions, whether Christians, greedy bankers and insurance companies, white racists, or patriarchs.



This is wrong, a remnant of the old order, that is poisoning our new culture of trust and responsibility.



Back in the days of the Roman Republic, the senator Cato the Elder frequently referred to the need to defeat Carthage.  "Carthago delenda est," he would say.



Our challenge is different.  Our need is to remind our liberal friends every day that government is not a nice cosy word for doing things together.  It is not.  Government is the word for things we force our fellows to do and that others force us to do.



Government is not doing things together.  Government is force.  And we conservatives should remind our fellow Americans--and ourselves--of this fact, and we should do so frequently.



Government is force.  Say it.  Write it.  Repeat it.

Race and the GOP

Oh goody.  There are 60 GOP blacks and Hispanics running for Congress.  So finally, the Republican Party is reaching out to minorities.



Or is it?  According to Patrick Reddy,

For years, since the 1960s, Democrats have courted the minority vote. Now, the Republican Party is getting more in tune with the new demographic realities of the 21st century.

He goes on:

The modern Republican Party has made solid progress in reaching out to moderate-to-conservative minority candidates who share their values on a truly colorblind basis.

Now that is all meaningless.  When you are "getting in tune" with demographic realities, it could mean anything.   And "reaching out to "moderate-to-conservative minority candidates."  What is all that about?



The truth is, as Michael Barone recently pointed out, that the Republican Party is and has always been the party of people that think of themselves as "typically American."  So, it really can't appeal to minorities until minorities start to think of themselves as, or want to become, typically American.



The telling fact is that the two black Republicans first elected to Congress in 2010 were Tim Scott (R-SC), an insurance agent, and Allen West (R-FL), a retired Army colonel.  How typically America is that?  Scott is representing a predominantly white district that includes Charleston(!); West's district now includes a sinuous district close to the Atlantic shore in South Florida.  The message of their election to Congress is that white Republicans don't give a damn what color you are as long as you can appeal to typical Americans.



The standout black Republican congressional candidate in 2012 is Mia Love.  She is running in a newly created semi-urban district south of Salt Lake City.  She's a woman from Connecticut that married a Mormon and eventually became mayor of a newly incorporated ex-urban city south of Salt Lake.



You can see what is happening.  The GOP is open, wide open, to talent.  It is recruiting minority candidates that have made themselves into typical Americans.  It is preparing itself for the time when the present minority population starts growing out of its "hypenated" stage and decides to become typically American.  Obviously the biggest target here is black America, artificially held into the Democratic Party by race hustlers like Reverends Jackson, Sharpton, and Wright that know how to play the race card and make blacks fear a return to Jim Crow.



From a strategic point of view, you can see the point of filling out GOP ranks with minorities.  It announces to minority individuals beginning to detach from the Democrats that the GOP has "people like me" in it.



But, for my money, the recruitment of minority candidates doesn't mean the GOP is "reaching out" to minorities at all.  It can't.  The GOP is based on the idea of the invisible hand and the human as an individual "responsible self."  The Democratic Party is based on the philosophy of suspicion, that "they" have gamed the system to keep down minorities, women, and the traditionally marginalized.



If you believe that you are a victim, or that you need the help of government to get a decent shake then there is nothing that is going to persuade you to vote Republican.  Democrats are always going to do a better job with their patronage/clientage politics at appealing to victims.



But the point is that, when any hyphenated American is ready to become a "typical American" then the GOP will have tons of office-holders that seem to be "people like me."

Kant and Copernicus

There's a sad truth about books with brilliant theories that change the world.  They often don't even cause a ripple, not at first.  And the audience for the book, the educated elite, sneers at it.

That's what happened to Kant after the publication of A Critique of Pure Reason in 1781.  Poor chap!  Here he had reformulated the whole basis of western philosophy and all he got for it was a few crank calls.

But the dear old chap set to work.  He published in 1783 the Dummies version of the Critique, a Prolegomena for Any Future Metaphysics.  Then in 1787 out came the heavily revised second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.  It's in the preface to the second edition that Kant makes a bid for world domination.  Copernicus, he writes,

when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and let the stars at rest.

 Yeah, Manny.  Why not compare yourself with the Great One!

Kant's revolution is a little different from the Copernican revolution.  He's not concerned with the motions of the planets.  He just wants to know how we cognize the world.  As he says: "up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects" but all our efforts on this line have "come to nothing."  So let's do it the other way around, he writes.  Let's assume "that the objects must conform to our cognition" on the view that our minds organize the world using "categories" to interpret the appearances of the world, so establishing "something about the objects before they are given to us."

One of the rewarding things about studying chaps like Kant is to see how these brilliant pioneers are getting the first fuzzy view of what the average bear takes for granted today.  In Leibniz we get the idea of "monads" which are non-visible elements of everything but which cannot be directly experienced.  That's an wonderful guess at our modern idea of "quanta" that we moderns have cognized using the penetrating power of what Locke called "microscopical eyes" and we call particle accelerators.

Then Kant, with his idea that the mind organizes reality according to categories formed in the mind, brilliantly prefigures modern knowledge about the brain and the way we organize the impulses coming into our brains from our senses.  I remember seeing a documentary as a kid where they gave people "upside-down" eye-glasses that made everything look upside down.  After about a month, the brains of the test subjects inverted the image the subject saw.  So then, if they took off the glasses, the world looked upside down again.

Then, of course, there is Noam Chomsky's idea that we are already programmed to do language before we start to speak.

Kant's brilliant step is to say: look, let's stop worrying about what the really-real is like.  Let's just think about how we experience the world and function in it.  Let's not worry about "things-in-themselves" when the only thing we know is what we experience, the appearances that we organize in our minds.

Today, two centuries after Kant, the latest "truth" about the really-real is that the universe is completely empty, except for tiny dots.  And the tiny dots turn out to be almost empty except for tiny nano-dots deep in the middle of the tiny dot.  The solidity that we experience with our eyes is just electromagnetic radiation in the "visible" part of the spectrum thrown off by pesky electrons fuzzing around a tiny dot.   If you illuminate an object with, e.g., X-rays, you see something completely different.

Of course, just as Marx turned Hegel upside down, converting Hegel's idealism into materialism, so Kant turned Copernicus upside down.  Copernicus said let's stop putting the observer at the center of the universe and put the sun at the center instead.  Kant said let's stop putting the objects out in the world at the center of our world and put the individual a priori cognition at the center of our understanding of the objects out in the world.

Hey, whatever floats your boat.

All The World's a Cult, Mr. President

We all know that cults are dangerous; they trap people in an artificial world where they can be intimidating into doing evil things.  In PJMedia Jeanette Pryor writes about her own experience in a cult.  She explains the difference between reality and cult reality.

Our interaction with the world and sense of its meaning depend heavily on individual discernment and personal analysis of cause and effect...

Cults promote a non-human way of knowing that bypasses both the sensory evidence we gather and the individual's rational processing. Cultic knowledge is a body of truths not acquired by experimentation and reasoning, but by virtue of the authority of initiated leaders.

But I think this overstates the difference between cult membership and ordinary societal or religious membership.

As Jonathan Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind, we humans are "groupish."  Here is how I wrote about his ideas in relation to corporate groupishness.

Humans love to belong to "teams", according to Haidt, from families to tribes to religions, and we do our best work when we work as part of a team. The most notable kind of team is the military squad, and it turns out that parade-ground drilling helps form the bond of the band of brothers, the critical bonding between soldiers that prompts them to sacrifice for each other. Rhythmic dancing is similar to rhythmic marching; it helps promote a "groupish" feeling.

But when we work as a member of a team we have to repress our "individual discernment and personal analysis of cause and effect" and accept the "authority of initiated leaders", otherwise there is no team.  We are social animals, designed to work in part as individuals and in part as team members.

In all parts of our lives we balance our invididual knowledge with the knowledge that we pick up from our groups and take on trust.  It's obvious that this extends to politics.  In the 2000s most Republicans accepted on faith President Bush's agenda to invade Iraq and build democracy there.  Democrats were firmly against.  Now with President Obama in the White House we have Democrats accepting on faith that the rich should pay a little more and that ObamaCare will improve health care.  Republicans don't believe a word of it.

The question for November 2012 is: when should you break with your group and leave the cultish atmosphere?  In 2008 Republicans were disgusted with the fallout of the Bush years and stayed home in the election, whereas Democrats were enthused with thoughts of Hope and Change.  What about in 2012?  We know that Republicans are a lot more enthusiastic about voting and that Democrats not so much.

The problem for the managers of Obama's reelection campaign is to keep enough people believing and enthusiastic to get over the finish line.  Thus, President Obama has a narrative that encourages his supporters to believe there is light at the end of the tunnel.  He goes on the Dave Letterman show and says that the debt is not a problem, short term, but it is a problem, medium and long-term.  We can solve the problem by asking the rich to pay a little more and reforming those programs that don't work any more.

The Wall Street Journal, of course is selling the opposite proposition, that you can't believe the president.  They run his words expressed on 60 Minutes with footnotes.

"When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history.1 And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90% of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren't paid for,2 as a consequence of tax cuts that weren't paid for,3 a prescription drug plan that was not paid for,4 and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.5

"Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10% of this increase in the deficit,6 and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.7"

The gist of the Journal's editorial, detailed in the footnotes, is that every word is a lie, including "and" and "the".  But the purpose of the president's narrative is not to persuade the Journal but to keep the wavering members of the Obama "cult" from leaving.

So the president pushes out a plausible narrative, and mixes it with attacks on his opponent to show that he is a man you wouldn't want to trust.  Also necessary is a fear campaign to remind people just how scary life would be outside the Obama cult.

Of course, Americans are not lemmings that will follow the leader over a cliff.  But every one of us, every day, makes the decision whether to stay with a group or leave it.  Some people leave at the first sign of trouble, and some people go all the way and commit suicide with with the leader in the Berlin bunker.

What will happen in 2012?  It is telling that the Republican convention was trying to reach out to independents, while the Democrats were trying to excite their base and remind them, with Michelle Obama, that Barack was a wonderful leader, and with Bill Clinton, that Republicans were cheats and liars.

But there is this.  The closer that politics gets to the kind of "cult" that Jeanette Pryor once belonged to, the more we should worry about America.

Capitalism: Which Type is Best?

Last week my email exchange with "Pete" ended on his challenge that we discuss the idea "Chris is a capitalist."

Presumably "Pete" thinks that this would put me in a box and expose my hypocrisies, because it would expose me as a heartless exponent of unregulated capitalism of the sort practiced by 19th century robber barons and 21st century Bain Capital.

But "Pete" set me to thinking.  What do we mean by capitalism?

In the 19th century, when the great critiques of capitalism were published, it seems that a new force had been let loose on the world, a new way of enslaving people to the will of the powerful.  Critics proposed that the unregulated capitalism of the textile revolution and the railway revolution should be broken up and subsumed under political power, by revolutionary change or by administrative subordination.  It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it turned out that their diagnosis was wrong: capitalism soon softened up, partly from legislation and partly from the capitalists' own discovery that they could make more money from contented employees than from slave laborers.  And the critics' prognosis was wrong.  The laborers didn't get immiserated and capitalism didn't turn, according to a law of history, into socialism.

The result is that we are all capitalists now.  The Marxists propose "state capitalism," in which the entire economy is absorbed into the political sector and run like a state bureaucracy.  There is still "capital" there is still "production" there are still "consumers."  But everything is decided by the political and administrative elite.  The problem is, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out in the 1920s, that under state capitalism you can't compute prices and therefore you cannot compute profit and therefore you cannot know whether you are increasing human prosperity or diminishing it.  Actually, you don't need to find out.  State capitalism always diminishes human prosperity.

Our liberal friends propose a mixed economy in which government takes a leading role in guiding the activities of private businesses.  Conservatives and libertarians have taken to using a pejorative for this kind of capitalism: we call it "crony capitalism."  Let us instead call it "state-directed capitalism."  In state-directed capitalism the politicians and the activists merely call all the big shots while leaving the routine stuff to the capitalists.  The problem is that politicians and experts aren't very good at calling the big shots.  They back stupid ideas like solar power and wind farms and they upset the credit markets with their various attempts at easy money.  At any rate state-directed capitalism yields government-sponsored or subsidized businesses like credit banks and wind farms that only make a profit because of government subsidies and regulation.  Health care and drug development are areas completely dominated by government subsidy and regulation although nominally in the private sector.  The result is sluggish growth and big messes like Solyndra and Fannie and Freddie.

Conservatives believe in a full-on kind of capitalism.  Let us call it "Bain capitalism" after Bill Bain and Bain Capital and Mitt Romney.  You might also call it "creative destruction capitalism."  This approach owns that capitalism is inevitably a process that Joseph Schumpeter described in the 1940s as creative destruction.  We can think of it with a life-cycle metaphor.  Businesses are always being born as some young fellow comes up with a new idea and mortgages his home to start a business.  Many businesses fail in the start-up phase, but some graduate into the growth phase.  Think of Facebook in the years up to its IPO.  Think of Amazon in the late 1990s.  Companies that survive the growth phase get into the mature phase.  Think of Microsoft right now.  Then, of course, mature companies start to age and things start to go wrong.  Think of the unionized auto industry.

Under Bain capitalism the idea is to forget about the political sector calling the big shots and trying to second-guess businessmen and the future and just let the businessmen get on with it.  Let's make it easier to start a business.  Let's make it easier for growing businesses to get access to capital.  Let's make sure that mature businesses cannot game the system with their wealth and political influence to squeeze out challengers.  Let's not try to keep failing businesses in business to "save jobs."  Let's connect the ageing businesses with the Bain Capitals of the world, try to fix them, and if not, liquidate and distribute their assets to others.

For over 150 years "Bain capitalism" has been judged as heartless, for it treats workers not as human beings but as just another resource.  We conservatives and libertarians beg to differ.

We believe that the first two capitalisms, "state capitalism" and "state-directed capitalism," while advertising themselves as necessary responses to the inhumanity of capitalism, actually make things worse.  State capitalism, as practiced by Stalin and Hitler and the Castro brothers, needs no indictment.  It was, perhaps, the most inhumane way of organizing the economy ever implemented.  But state-directed capitalism is not much better.  Whatever its advertisement, state-directed capitalism is inefficient and cruel.  It privileges the agenda of politically powerful interests, and it is very slow to recognize and correct its errors and mistakes.  We have only to look at the mistakes of the political establishment in its support of "affordable housing" and the granting of mortgage credit to people that couldn't service their mortgages.  The whole thing ended up in the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression of the 1930s and untold misery for millions that have lost their homes and their jobs.  Green energy is another scandal, a vast hinterland of political favors and subsidies, based on very incomplete science about climate change.  It will end it tears and trillions in worthless investments.

Juergen Habermas understands modern society as divided between the systems sector and the lifeworld. The systems sector includes business and government and steering media like money and power.  We could say we regret the systematization of everything but it's a bit late for that, so we are left with the need to control the power of the systems on the principle of the limitation of all power, government power and market power.  We need to remember always that the core of lived human experience is still the "lifeworld," the face-to-face experience of communication between humans using language.

Conservatives have addressed this social dichotomy ever since Edmund Burke in the 18th century.  We want to protect and to grow and strengthen the lifeworld in associations of the "little platoons," "civil society," or the "mediating structures" between the megastructures, the systems, of business and government.  It is civil society and voluntary associations, we believe, that best addresses the basic problem of the modern age, people like steelworker Joe Soptic being thrown out of work in a business failure "through no fault of their own."

We conservatives believe that everyone should belong to familial, church, fraternal, or mutual-aid associations that are separate from the businesses we work in.  Businesses come and go, mechanical contraptions, and we should stop trying to turn them into social welfare organizations.  We should look to lifeworld associations to provide security and solidarity and human caring.

We should recognize that modern society is irretrievably divided into the systems world and the lifeworld and we can't go back.  Systems are systems and we can't make them into the lifeworld.  On the other hand the lifeworld sector means face-to-face communication.  If it isn't face-to-face, it isn't lifeworld; it is systems world.

And therein lies our basic argument with our liberal friends.  Every time you chaps propose a new government program you are shrinking the lifeworld and beefing up the systems world.  Systems world is the world of instrumental reason, and instrumental reason is all about domination, of nature and other humans.  This has been going on for 150 years, and surely it is time to realize that it is time to try something different and stop creating new bureaucratic monsters.

That's why this conservative believes in "Bain capitalism."  Don't look for compassion and caring in the systems world.  Make the systems honest, and make them fair.  But compassion and caring can only exist in the lifeworld of face-to-face communication and consensus.

It is, as the philosophers say, a category error to imagine that compassion and caring can be grown in the mechanical world of systems and steering media.

An Answer to the Liberal Narrative

We humans are social animals.  More than that, we are story-telling animals.  We tell ourselves stories about how the world came to be, how it works, and how it will be in the future.

In recent years our postmodern friends have told us that "narratives" are in fact apologies for power; they are stories put about by the ruling class to make their rule seem soft and cuddly.  You could say that a narrative is the velvet glove hiding the mailed fist of power.

Here's a liberal narrative, that I received today from a liberal I shall call "Pete."  I suspect that he read my screed on the Chicago teachers' strike.  Here's what he writes (the paragraphs are mine):

You look like such a nice guy. It makes me sad that you have become a public debater who always argues one side even though you know the other side has compelling arguments as well.

I was born in 1946 in Southern California. My pals and I knew there was such a thing as a millionaire but few names came to mind; Rockefeller, J. Paul Getty, Carnegie - that was about it. A lot of people had enough money to more than get by, they had enough for ball games, the fair, movies and summer vacations or trips to the beach.

No one asked for or demanded an outrageous salary because after the first $200,000 or after the first $400,000 the government took it all. The 91% tax wasn’t a tool to redistribute wealth, it was a tool to prevent individuals from earning million or multi million dollar salaries. The result was that everyone had more. Because upper management costs were low , more money went to capital investment, employees made more and everyone profited. From the 1940’s to the mid 1960’s the tax rate remained at 91% with a Republican President and a Democratic President and there was a healthy distribution of wealth. Movie stars didn’t ask for millions, nor did studio execs, producers etc and it didn’t cost $25 to see a movie. Athletes did ask for 20 million, managers weren’t paid millions etc and it was cheap to see a game.

This list goes on endlessly and every time someone demands and receives a disproportionate share of the money everyone else has to pay. The old networks can’t afford to show games. They go to cable where we pay for ESPN. The money goes from our pockets to ESPN to the Franchise and to the player. There’s an unbalance sheet, money keeps moving in one direction. The CEO of United Health is paid $36,000,000 a year. United Health doesn’t pay her salary they don’t have any money. We pay her, money out of our pocket, money into hers.

The explosive growth in salaries happened during Reagans terms in office. Rates were slashed controls were lifted and it was a fight to see who could be the highest paid exec, movie star, athlete, CEO etc. That was the beginning of class warfare in America. Not a shot was fired. No one showed up for the skins. That was the beginning of the end of the middle class in America. Who’s going to be the first trillionaire? Time magazines Woman of the Year.

There will be massive demonstrations, civil disobedience etc because the story is getting out. What’s going to happen is that tax on earnings over $5,000,000 will be again taxed in the 90% range, and even more draconian the Estate Tax will go through the roof. In making the justification case you are acting the Pied Piper and little good will come from that. What I don’t understand is why. Everyone doesn’t have good intentions maybe that’s the best answer.

Let's think about the answer to this narrative.  It's the answer, I suppose, that Mitt Romney dare not make.

• Yes, the immediate postwar period was a halcyon period in its way.  Except for Jim Crow in the South.  But it is also true that the economy was a kind of racket, run by big government, big corporations, and big unions.  In other words, if you were a little guy, you'd better keep out of the  way of the big bruisers.  As for the high tax rates, I recall that Ronald Reagan, a highly-paid Hollywood star just stopped working rather than pay the high taxes.  And as for the good jobs at good wages?  Let's not forget Michael Barone's comment:
  
  As it happens, I grew up in Detroit and for a time lived next door to factory workers. And I know something that has eluded the liberal nostalgiacs. Which is that people hated those jobs.
  
  
• There's a good argument to make that the "good jobs at good wages" era ended in the stagflation of the Carter era.  So Reagan didn't break a healthy system but tried to fix a broken one.  At any rate, according to the capitalist narrative, capitalism is "creative destruction."  Let us be clear what this means.  It means that the world is going to change, as old ways get demolished and get replaced by new ways.  Capitalism makes the offer that, if you submit to "creative destruction," then we will all prosper faster.  The liberal narrative about good jobs at good wages doesn't tell us what happens when things go wrong, when some brilliant government program or investment starts losing money year after year.  E.g., has the GM bailout really solved anything, or just kicked the ball down the road?  What do you do about Medicare and its $40 trillion unfunded liability?
  
  Thus the conservative narrative about the Reagan years is that the extraordinary profits came from extraordinary opportunities thrown up by the moribund economy at the end of the "good jobs at good wages" years.
• The question is: what comes next?  My emailer "Pete" looks to riots in the streets as people rise up against folks like the CEO of United Health that makes $36,000,000 a year. (But do you realize, Pete, that insurance companies are a peculiar product of the current crony capitalist health industry where we the people get to run around paying for our health care with the equivalent of someone else's credit card?)
  
  Frankly, I do expect riots in the streets.  The educated elite ruling class has promised benefits to its supporters that cannot possibly be paid.  Being expert politicians, they will probably succeed in creating scapegoats like Big Oil and Big Insurance.  No doubt, like the coal miners in Zola's Germinal, the rioters will burn down, in their rage, the very thing that provides them with work and life.

And then we have to figure out how to rebuild America out of the ruins.  There will be, of course, extraordinary profits to be made in the creative period immediately after the wholesale destruction.