The MSM Did It

After last night, there's a temptation to haul out the football and military metaphors.  As in: Is this a strategic breakout?  What did the Obamis lose last night?  A division?  An army corps?  The Sixth Army at Stalingrad?



Never mind.  The big takeaway is the MSM.  Do you understand what you have done, you nattering fools, chattering away to each other in your liberal bubble?  You have betrayed your own side.



If liberalism is to be worth anything, it should be the best it can be.  That means that it mustn't be protected and coddled by a mothering mainstream media.



(Now I find that there is a word for this coddling.  It's called the Taranto Principle.)



That means that when your side screws up you eat them for lunch.  You don't bury outrageous scandals like Fast and Furious on page A23.  You don't sit in silence while, e.g., Medicaid, flushes down the toilet.  You don't buy into the Democratic Party spin that it was greedy bankers that caused the Crash of 2008.



Of course, you do that not because of any partisan reason but because you want to be the best you can be.



Put it this way.  In the good old days, the hard-bitten, hard-drinking newspaperman may have been a ruin, but he believed with a passion in comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.  Sound familiar?



So get this.  In today's America there is no more comfortable person than a sinecure liberal.  You know who I am talking about.  I am talking about college professors with tenure.  I am talking about liberal trustafarians.  I am talking about tenured government employees.  I am talking about the not-for-profit sector.  I am talking about unionized media employees (yeah, don't forget that big-media journalists are all union members).



So any media worth its salt would be making life miserable for the sinecure liberals.  Only it doesn't.  The result is the Obama trainwreck last night when the president's bubble-tested bromides fell as flat as a ten-day-old Coke.  And did I tell you that the president is mean?



Well, too bad.  The result of media malfeasance is that Mitt Romney broke through the media blocking unit last night into open country and the American people got to see for the first time what a can-do All American problem solver he is.  Who knew?



Who knew was everyone that had taken the trouble to read half a page of biography about Mitt Romney.



Here's just a reminder.  When Mitt was turning around the Salt Lake Winter Olympics, which you could regard as a 24-7 job, he also had to deal at the same time with the nightmare of Ann Romney's developing MS disease.  The CEO of the Salt Lake Olympics was stopping by the grocery store on the way home so he could cook dinner.  What a guy.  What a preparation for the job of President of the United States.



That's the kind of guy who is going to be the next President of the United States.  And it's just as well, given the mess the country is in.



Some people say that Mitt Romney turned up at this moment in history because the United States is an exceptional nation, and that God takes care of children, drunks, and the United States of America.



Who knows?  They might be right.

October Surprise Bowl, 1st Quarter

Political partisans all live in fear of the October Surprise, the game-changing gotcha in a presidential race that always turns up in October.  It all started in 1972 with Henry Kissinger promising "peace is at hand" in Vietnam a few days before the election.  George W. Bush nearly lost the 2000 election after a story about his DUI surfaced in the week before the election.



Now, of course, political campaigns plan for it, on offense and defense.  In fact, I dare say they plan it out as a four-quarter bowl game, since there are four weeks in October.



I'm not sure that the weak-kneed AFSCME garbageman ad counts as an October surprise: more likely a JV busted play, because it turns out that, far from being a guy that doesn't have a clue what it's like to be a gargbageman, Mitt actually spent a day as a garbageman when he was running for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002.  And he made a mess of it.  It's in his book, No Apology.



But you'd have to assume that the 2007 tape of Barack Obama doing the jive-talk thing to a meeting of black ministers and made available to the Daily Caller is the real thing.  A real October Surprise, doubtless fed to the media by the Romney campaign.  The point that the video makes is the one that Republicans want to make about Barack Obama.  He is not the racial healer that ran for the presidency to heal the festering sore of race politics.  He is a full-blown black racist, riling up the brothers just like a Jackson, a Sharpton, or a Wright, and telling his black listeners that the Republican federal government doesn't care about them.



(Yeah.  If only.  That's what Frederick Douglass prayed for over a century ago.  Do nothing about the Negro, he said.  Let him alone. "Your doing with us has already played the mischief.")



Well, that's just the first play in the first quarter.  No doubt there is more to come, from both sides.



However, you really can't say that the collapse of the Obama foreign policy is an October Surprise.  We were supposed to get through the election before the roof fell in on that.



But for conservatives, the timely October Surprise from the Romney campaign is a good sign that the Romney team is out to win.  And there is always the chance that it is putting the Obama people off their game plan.

The Reverse Cloward-Piven Strategy

Back in the 1960s a couple of lefty sociologists came up with a grand plan.  Richard Cloward (1926–2001) and Frances Fox Piven (b. 1932) that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system.Their idea was to replace the welfare system with a guaranteed annual income.



The idea behind the Cloward-Piven strategy is that when the system gets overloaded the poor will take to the streets to demand change and the establishment will, in order to prevent riots and mayhem, accede to the just demands of the poor and the underprivileged.  Some people think that Barack Obama is implementing a Cloward-Piven strategy as he expands government and chokes the private sector.



When people worry that another four years of Obama would be the end of the United States, they are buying into the assumptions of the Cloward-Piven strategy.  They are thinking that once Obama overloads the system it will end up as a European social democracy with a wall-to-wall administrative state.



Don't foreget that conservatives have a kind of reverse Cloward-Piven strategy.  It is what I call the Irving Kristol rule.  Conservatives should not be green eyeshade accountants and try to balance the budget, wrote Kristol back in the 1980s.  They should just adhere to a rule of tax cuts.  Cut taxes as deeply and as broadly as politically possible.



Yes, but what if the government runs out of money?  What if we have to cut programs?



Exactly.  That is not a bug, but a feature.



The question is: what happens when the government runs out of money?  Do the streets run with blood?  Or does something else happen?  Does the underclass, what used to be called the "mob," set the city afire?  Does the middle class demand that the rich "pay a little more" or does the middle class demand that the government cuts the waste?



One thing to remember.  Back in the days of the Paris Commune it was possible for rebels to build street barricades and hold up in the dense "rookeries" in which the poor lived.  But the French government found an answer to that.  It built broad boulevards, according to the plan of Baron Haussmann, to make it easy for the army to march to any troublespot, and it demolished the rookeries.  Think 20th century slum clearance in the USA.



Obviously, if you look at the Euro economy in Europe and the Obama economy in the US you can say that the jury is still out.  The European ruling class is trying to kick the can down the road with bailouts and money printing.  But the current benefits cannot be paid, so something will change.



Probably in Europe the Latin countries will leave the Euro and devalue.  The Nordic countries will leave the Euro and continue to work and save. (Because the Germans fixed their labor market problems back in the 2000s.)



Here in the US I suspect that we will see something different.  First of all, the Cloward-Piven strategy actually got implemented without a crisis.  We now have, informally, a guaranteed income of about $30,000 a year for a single parent with a couple of children.  And it happened without riots.



We have had riots, of course.  There were the Watts riots and Detroit riots in the 1960s.  And the LA riots over the Rodney King verdict.  But the riots didn't topple the regime.  They just resulted in the destruction and demoralization of the black neighborhoods where the riots occurred.  In LA during the Rodney King riots the liberal Hollywood types stood guard with shotguns at the entrances to their winding upscale drives.



On the other hand, the middle class has had something to say whenever the government has screwed up the economy or society in the last half century, and every time it has had its way.  It turned against the Democrats in 1968 after the Sixties and elected Richard Nixon for law-and-order.  It turned against President Carter in the stagflation of the late 1970s.  It turned against President Clinton in 1994 when he lurched left.  The middle class lurched left when President Bush presided over the Crash of 2008 and then turned on a dime and lurched right when President Obama refused to prioritize the economy over the left-wing Obamacare.  The middle class always votes for stability.



So what do you think the middle class is thinking in 2012?  What would you do in the stagnant economy of 2012 if the presidential race were a contest between a Cloward-Piven community activist and a corporate and administrative turn-around expert?



Golly.  I just can't figure that one out.  It's too hard!

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.