Today's the Day

Today's the day on which we Americans decide if Barack Obama's huge gamble pays off.



Back in 2006, if you remember, Democrats decided that they had learned from the Bush 2004 victory and they ran a lot of moderates for Congress.  It was a great success and the Dems picked up 30 seats in the House.



Then they ran the healer Barack Obama in 2008 and America voted for its first black president in the hope that he would end the centuries of race war.  The Democrats also picked up 25 seats in the House.



But President Obama did not govern as the healer.  He governed as a man in a hurry.  Galvanized by the almost filibuster-proof Senate, he decided to go for broke and pass every item on the liberal wish list while there was still time.  He passed a stimulus bill, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank.



The American people were outraged and in 2010 sent 63 more Republicans to the House of Representatives, including a Tim Scott, a black insurance agent to represent Charleston, SC, and Allen West to represent a district in SE Florida.



The question today is whether we return the president to office, in which case his signature Obamacare will probably endure, or whether we counterattack, and roll back his ambitious effort to "transform" America.



If the president gets reelected then he will go down in history as one of the most daring and successful politicians ever.  If he fails then he will be dismissed as just another reckless fool that tried to take a bridge too far.



Of course, beyond the issue of the president and his daring gamble for the laurels of history, there is this.



Politics is civil war by other means.  The idea is to take advantage of your opportunities, but not so that your opponents decide that their only option is civil war.  The way you do this is, as Noam Chomsky puts it, by manufacturing consent.



When you want to pass a great health care bill you figure that you have two options.  You could go for broke with a bare partisan majority and create a head of rebellion in the opposition.  Or you could broker a compromise and pass a "bipartisan consensus."  Then you can argue that your bill was a "bipartisan" bill and that only a rump of extremists voted against it.



President Obama went the bare partisan majority route and rammed his programs through in the teeth of opposition from the American people.  I suspect that his decision will echo down the decades to come in rancor and conflict.



The result, of course, is likely to be sovereign debt default and the collapse of the welfare state, and maybe worse.



Women and minorities will be hardest hit, as usual.



But then, that's what usually happens when transformative leaders start transforming.

At Election Time, Government is Force

I confess I was a little shocked last week scanning the links at RealClearPolitics.com.  The liberals were all extolling the wonders of government.  Yeah, they said.  You sure need big government when Nature comes calling.



Of course, everyone is in favor of big government where their pet project is concerned.  Conservatives think that, on the view that the job of government is to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic, that the armed forces and the police are a good thing.



Liberals disagree.  They are paranoid about Pentagon generals, and watch local police forces intensely for any sign that they are committing police brutality on the poor and the marginalized.  But they are all in favor of the enforcement of environmental laws.  Because that will save the planet.



So there's real agreement in America.  Everyone is paranoid about the use of government force for things they don't like.



The question is: to what extent are we willing to reduce the use of government force on our pet projects in order to accommodate the fears of our friends in the other party?



Conservatives say that's why we need limited government and the separation of powers.



And I say that's why we need to go beyond that to the Greater Separation of Powers, to keep a separation between the great power sectors of society, the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector.



We already agree that there should be a separation between church and state, between the political and moral/cultural sectors, except that we violate it every day with government schools instructing the young and government support for the arts.  Of course, the truth is that you cannot separate politics from morality and culture, because morality and culture inform the decisions we make in politics.  But we can at least try to get the politicians and the moralists from getting in bed together.



The next great challenge is to separate economy and state: the political and the economic sectors.  This is particularly a pressing issue for the modern age, because government and business have grown from cottage industries into great and powerful systems that threaten to dominate and run over everything in their path.



It was Marx who first made the power of business into a scandal.  He used the tools of the classical economists, their confused ideas of exchange value and use value, to contrast the difference between "social labor" and "abstract labor," of work performed face-to-face and work bought and sold on the labor market.



But it took a new generation of Marxists, the Frankfurt School, to realize that it wasn't just business that threatened the social nature of humans, it was instrumental reason and its systems.  We are talking here about both business systems and government systems and their universal tendency to domination.



Then Juergen Habermas developed the ideas of Husserl and Heidegger into his system-and-lifeworld model.  System is the mechanical world of businesses and governments, of rules and subordination.  In Husserl's conception "The ‘lifeworld’ is a grand theatre of objects variously arranged in space and time relative to perceiving subjects, is already-always there, and is the “ground” for all shared human experience."



The problem for humans is that, unless we restrain the big and powerful systems they will dominate and sterilize the lifeworld.  That's because the systems want to reduce everything to their system.  So we have government, the system of force, and economy, the system of money.  We also have organized religion, the system of faith.  And each of them threatens us with its power.



Conservatives have a parallel view to Habermas and his systems vs. lifeworld view.  We believe in the limitation of powers, that is the restraining of the systems.  And we believe in the protection of "civil society" which is pretty close to the German concept of lifeworld or Lebenswelt.



But here we are, with an momentous election, determining whether we go full tilt towards an uber-systems government with bigger and more powerful systems.  Or whether we start in a different direction, de-privileging the systems and trying to find a new balance between our powerful systems of government and business and our essential humanness?



The thing about systems, of  course, is that they work really well right up until the moment they break.

The Paradox of the Enlightenment

At the core of Immanuel Kant's great attack on his philosophical predecessors, from Descartes to Berkeley and Hume, is the great Paradox of the Enlightenment.

Here we had the most stunning development in human thought, Newtonian mechanics, that showed how us how the world worked.  Yet against that we have Descartes saying that "I" can't be sure of the external world, Berkeley saying that the exterior world is an illusion, and Hume saying we can't be sure about cause and effect.

Just when Newton has reduced the operation of the external world to a few equations that allowed, e.g., artillery officers to predict where artillery shells would land, the philosophers said: Don't get cocky, kid.

One of the places in in Critique of Pure Reason where Kant really concentrates his fire on his predecessors is in the "paralogisms," i.e. the logical mistakes of his predecessors.

In the Fourth Paralogism, Kant takes on the doubtful existence of outer reality, the real world.  In the first edition, Kant put the paralogism this way.  Things that can only be inferred from perceptions are doubtful.  All outer appearances are inferred.  Therefore "objects of outer sense" are doubtful.

In the second edition, Kant takes a different tack in a rather confused paragraph (B409) that already assumes the error.  He seems to be arguing against this syllogism:  I am distinguished from things outside me.  Other things are those that I think of as distinguished from me.  Therefore I exist as a thinking being.  Or maybe not.

But Kant drills a hole in this argument before he makes it, for by the second edition he can't be bothered too much about making the arguments of his predecessors.  His point is the Great Argument of his entire critique.  If I am confident that the "I" exists, then how could I know it without experience of the outside world?  For against Descartes, Kant argues that we cannot have any knowledge of ourselves apart from our moment to moment experience of self-consciousness as we deal with and process data given to our senses, and try to make sense of it.

Kant's "I" is a component in the human machinery that receives sense impressions, combines them with forms of intuition, gathers the sense impressions and intuitions with the categories of the understanding and creates, using the "I" of apperception (self-consciousness), a unified object of appearance, a judgment about the outside world.  And don't forget that this object in the outside world can only be known as an appearance, not as a thing-in-itself.

If you think about the world like Kant, then all the mind games about mental substances and material substances, the indubitable I and the dubitable outside world, all these things fall away, because they are all integrated together into what we would now call an OODA loop.

Notice that if you subtract the "I" of self-consciousness from Kant's machinery, then you still have a working model of existence in the real world, but one that applies to the "lower" animals.  As far as we know, they get their sense impressions and unify them with intuitions and categories of the understanding.  What they do not do is then apply reason to their unified understanding to get to judgment.  Their judgment is hard-wired rather than flexible.  So they operate in the real world without an I at all, but instead, as we highly advanced humans suppose, in an egoless flow of consciousness.

Since Kant's time, of course, the Paradox of the Enlightenment has increased and deepened.  For now we may know much more about the sensible world, and even in the interior mental world, yet we know less and less "what it's all about."

Obama: Breakthrough or Bridge Too Far?

Let us suppose that Mitt Romney wins by 3-5 percent next Tuesday and gets a Republican Senate.  For President Obama and his left-liberal supporters, will it all have been worth it?

As John Podhoretz opines, you have to hand it to the president.  When he had the power he rammed through as much of his left-wing agenda as he could cram through Congress.  And as we know, it is easy to create new spending, and almost impossible to roll it back.

In his first 16 months as president, from his inauguration through the signing into law of ObamaCare, Obama arguably altered the trajectory of the United States in a manner that neither Mitt Romney (should he become president) or the president who succeeds Obama after his second term concludes in 2017 will find easy to redirect — if he or she even wishes to.

It starts with the big numbers, the $700 billion of TARP.  After that, the $800 billion of stimulus and supposed $1 trillion of Obamacare is just more of the same.

That TARP program utterly changed the terms of the Washington debate about the economic crisis and the nature of the government’s role, especially since its colossal size barely slowed its rapid adoption into law. The voices raised against it were basically dismissed as being on the fringe. The system needed an expression of confidence and an explosion of liquidity.

 So the question is whether the Obama interlude is a replay of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society when liberals seized an opportunity to enlarge government power and reach by handing out "free stuff" in a way that could not be reversed.

My guess is both Yes and No.  Yes, Obama has put government deeper into health care, and that will not change.  Paradoxically, his Obamacare was designed in part to try to put a lid on Medicare, the government's biggest problem, by instituting back-door rationing.  So Obama would hasten the time when the whole government machine shudders to a halt.  If the Romneys roll back Obamacare and reform Medicare they might actually make the entitlement program last another ten extra years.

But the basic problem is that people will not give up on their entitlements until the whole system crashes, as I wrote about yesterday.  When it comes to their Medicare, people are like the members of the NRA.  Like the NRA member's proverbial gun, you can get my Medicare from my cold dead hand.

People will only give up on their entitlements when the government goes broke, wrecks the currency, and defaults on the debt.  And maybe not even then.

That is America's real problem.

The Medicare Amendment Conservatives

When do we fix Medicare?  If you ask today's seniors, people like me, it is after we are gone.



After all, we paid in all our lives, right?



If you listen to Americans, you can see that there is no way we will reform the entitlements until after we crash.



Here's a retiree in South Florida.  He doesn't like the idea that today's Medicare won't be available to his descendants.

"I've got four children and 12 grandchildren," said Mr. Yordon, who planned to vote for Mr. Obama. "I can't believe the one item of most consequence to me would become a voucher" for them.



Dealing with private insurance companies for cars and homes, he said, was tough enough. Navigating the private health-insurance market at his age would be impossible, he said: "I just can't believe that that would work."

Er, Mr. Yordon, here's an idea.  Why not get your kids to help you navigate the insurance market as you get older.  That's what most people do.



What about this 91-year-old senior?

"I would like them to leave Medicare alone," she said. She has been in the hospital four times in the past five years, twice for surgeries to remove cholesterol from arteries in her legs. "I was very satisfied" with Medicare, she said.

I've been reading a book about the four great price revolutions of the last millennium, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History by David Hackett Fischer.  The great price waves have always featured governments spending beyond their means and seeming helpless to "do anything" about it until history decided for them in famine and revolution.  Fischer pontificates about the selfish aristocrats of the 18th century that wouldn't surrender their privileges.  Well what would you expect a left-wing academic to say.



Today's inflationary prices are different, of course.  But you still have the aristocrats, the supporters of the regime, and their privileges.  Only this time it's the union government workers, the entitlement beneficiaries, the tenured professors who are sitting on their hands refusing to give up any of their benefits.  Yes, for the feudatories of the regime, you can talk about the douceur de la vie.



Really, why would we expect any of these chaps, from Medicare beneficiaries in their 80s or retired policemen in their 50s, to agree to a reduction in their loot?  Nobody in history ever did before, not until the tumbrils started to roll.



Today's entitlement beneficiaries are like Charlton Heston and the Second Amendment conservatives.  You can take my Medicare out of my cold, dead hand, they say.

Is America Ready?

For years before the epochal year of 2008 pompous MSMers would wonder out loud: "Is America ready for a black president?"



Still, it took me aback when a faculty-wife friend expressed her satisfaction at electing the first black president.  Really?  Aren't we educated people supposed to be above all that?



Of course, I voted for Obama too.  I voted for him to shut the Democrats up on the Bush-the-warmonger front.  Anyone can flatter their base with nonsense about warmongering and Bush lied and "the wrong war" and Guantanamo.  The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and most of the Bush-era protocols have survived the anti-war Obama's first four years.



So now we have the ultimate question: Is America ready to fire its first black president for cause?  It's a big issue, bigger than you might think.



My old pal, the Greek philosopher George Maroutsos, used to opine about Greek politics after the Greek colonels like this.  It's important, he would say, for the conservative party in Greece to get voted out and surrender power to the liberal party.  But what comes next is just as important.  It is important for the liberal party to get voted out and surrender power to the conservative party.  Only then will both parties begin to trust that the other party will not surrender to temptation and stage a coup to stay in power.



So the same principle must apply to America's first black president.  It's a wonderful thing to elect America's first black president.  But it is even more wonderful to evaluate the performance of America's first black president and come to the decision, without any consideration of his race, that his performance is below par, and that it is regretfully necessary to terminate his service to the nation.



Actually, the question of President Obama has nothing to do with his race, except that a white guy with his experience could never have been elected president.  No, the question about President Obama is his ideas.  And also the deep questions about his leadership qualities.



Today, in 2012, the great question is different.  It is this: Is America ready for a Mormon president?  Somehow I can't find any breathless articles from MSMers wondering about that.



I wonder why?  After all, back in the day, Mormons were on the receiving end of some pretty nasty discrimination and political violence.  And even today, nice liberal women wonder if it is "ethical" for them to visit Utah.

Are the President's Men Crazy?

The polls tell us that the independents are breaking strongly for Romney:

In the last three releases of the tracking poll conducted by The Washington Post and ABC News, Obama has trailed former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney among independent voters by between 16 and 20 percentage points.

So what are the Obamis doing?  They are doubling down on motivating their base:

Obama isn't just going for a win. He’s shooting for a “realignment.” Obama is trying to shape a new kind of electorate, creating a long-term Democratic majority that would allow him and his successors to stop catering to the center and finally govern decisively from the left.

Let us give them the respect they deserve.  They don't want to win with the center ground.  That would not give them a mandate for their left-wing vision.  They want to win a left-wing mandate or nothing at all.



Maybe that's a grand and visionary idea.  Or maybe it is delusional.  In our lifetimes, whenever a presidential candidate has tried to go for a purely ideological win he has lost big time: think Goldwater and McGovern.  And you would think that for liberals this would be especially foolish.  If 40 percent of Americans call themselves conservatives and 20 percent liberals, how in the world can liberals hope to win on a straight ideological pitch?



Especially when you consider that Romney is pitching himself directly at the non-ideological middle ground.



My guess right now, given the partisan move reported by Gallup and Rasmussen from the +7 Democratic advantage of 2008 to an even-steven alignment or even a +1 Republican score in the last month, is that you have to think we are heading for a landslide, a 10 point victory for Romney.  If the current Romney 49-46 lead improves in the next few days as the Benghazi cover-up gets more play the 3 point Romney lead could increase to 5 points, and if the undecideds break for challenger Romney, as you would expect, then you are close to 10 points, 55-45 Romney over Obama.



Suppose the key to the election is not what the Obamis imagine is the "'demographically ascendent' left" but the 78-year-old lady from Iowa that voted for Obama in 2008.

"Obama gave us this 'no red, no blue state' America," said McAreavy, 78.



"I was fooled, I kick myself everyday," she said. "I said: 'In four years I'll get you buddy -- and I'm going to.'"

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  How many people in America are thinking just like that this month?  There were millions of Americans that thought that, in voting for Obama, they had put the race thing to bed.



Today they are kicking themselves, and they are saying:  Hey, pal.  Don't call me a racist; I voted for Obama in 2008.  And just to prove I'm not a racist, I am voting against him in 2012.



The problem about making a big bet on anything is that if you lose you are really out of pocket.  And Obama is not just playing with his money.  He is playing with the hopes of every Democratic partisan and elected official up and down the ballot.  If he loses then he is not just going into the wilderness himself.  He is sending his entire coalition into the political wilderness.



Oh well.  Maybe the Dems will come back like the Republicans came back after 1964.