The Liberals' Discarded Mistresses

Why does a woman ever consent to become a mistress?  Is it because of love?  Anyway, the old saying,"hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" is presumably the epitaph on the grave of every discarded mistress.



But what about liberalism's discarded mistresses?  Or more exactly, what about that woman of a certain age, the white working class?



Who can forget how liberals pursued her back in her abundant youth.  Oh, the promises they made, the jewels they bestowed, the poems they penned to honest toil, the programs they created to minister to every need of the working class.



And then Barack Obama told us back in 2008 what liberals really felt about the working class.

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

So.  All along, liberals have looked down on the calloused hands and the simple verities of the working class.  Just votes to be harvested until other bright young things came along: blacks, Hispanics, women.



But there's a twist, of course.  Now that we've seen the numbers from the 2012 election the experts have realized that the Republicans are about 3 million votes short.  Who were those voters?  The white working class.



You've got to hand it to Obama's people.  They told us a year ago that they had given up on the white working class.  But it turns out they had a plan.  They would carpet-bomb the bitter clingers with negative ads, to remind them how the Republicans hated them, and keep them home on election day.



Oh didn't you know?  That's what negative ads are all about.  They are not about getting your side out to vote.  They are about demoralizing the weak supporters of the other side, so they decide that it's not really worth going out to vote.



So now we know.  After romancing the working class voters, and putting them in a little Social Security apartment complete with Medicare furniture and Unemployment electronics--all of which are now falling apart--there is one thing the liberals absolutely will not allow.



They don't want the favors of the white working class, but they are determined that nobody else will have her.



But hey girls, why don't you just give up and come join the Republican Party, even if we are a party of plutocrats and puritans?



Well, we know why.  The Republican Party is the party of people who believe in the central dogma of the middle class, the Invisible Hand.  We believe that you make a living by going out into the world and offering your skills.  You don't try to make it by piracy and plunder, by political intrigue and union muscle.  You thrive by offering yourself to the market, surrendering to the verdict of society on your usefulness and your talent.



The working class voters just aren't ready to do that.  Because they still believe all the beautiful lies the liberals told them all those years ago.  Girls are like that.



Don't laugh, "Julia".  You could be next.

Don't Panic on Demography!

Every time the GOP loses--and even when it almost loses--well meaning people urge it to do outreach to minorities.



And of course the chaps that wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, say that the Dems will bury the GOP with a coalition of minorities, the educated, and the young.



Maybe, but the fabulous Barack Obama won reelection by 2 percent, probably by suppressing the vote among the white working class.  And Megan McArdle wonders how well it is really working out in practice (H/T LI).

1. That majority sure isn’t emerging very fast.



2. Ethnic coalitions are inherently unstable.



3. We are heading for a showdown between public sector unions and taxpayers.



4. We’re heading for a showdown between the recipients of old-age benefits, and recipients of all the other kinds of benefits.



5. On social issues, Democrats are badly positioned for the future.



6. Mitt Romney was a uniquely bad candidate for 2012.



7. GOP tax cuts have enabled Democratic spending promises.

I'm more inclined to go with Michael Barone.  In his New Americans he compares the immigrant ethnics of a century ago with today: yesterday's Irish vs. today's blacks; yesterday's Italians vs. today's Hispanics; yesterday's Jews vs. today's Asians.  Notice that two of the three ethnics of yesteryear are moving pretty firmly into the Republican camp and the Jews are just beginning to move.



But back to McArdle.  I like to think about items 3, 4, and 5 on her list.



On public sector unions we have to remember that special interests do best when they operate below the radar.  When they get too successful they attract enemies and unwanted publicity.



On oldsters vs. young 'uns, I'd have to advise my fellow senior citizens to keep your finances in order.  At some point the average young working stiff is going to realize just how much he is paying for wealthy seniors--I don't mean the really rich but the elderly couple with a half-million dollar home and a nice income.



Then there are the social issues.  Democrats have done a bang-up job keeping the social issues at bay in the last decade.  But my prediction is that abortion will become the new slavery issue.  Why?  Well think about it.  Back in 1800 slavery was a great convenience for the textile consumers (cotton plantations) and the tea-and-coffee drinkers (sugar plantations).  Yet a century later plantation slavery had been abolished in the western world--only to stage a revival in the progressive socialist countries in the 20th century.



Abortion is all about the great convenience to a woman in controlling her fertility.  But is it?  Or is the convenience for the benefit of her casual sexual partner?  Despite all the talk of women's liberation, some of us troglodytes think that the real liberation in the sexual revolution was for unmarried young men.  Now we can argue that "if you love me" you should go to bed with me, and we often do.  What woman ever wants to deny love?



There's another, deeper reason to suspect that morality will rear its ugly head again.  The only deadly serious question for humans is to survive and reproduce.  We have seen that the modern dispensation, of prosperity, welfare state and fertility control, has occurred simultaneously with a precipitous decline in fertility among modern, educated women.  Something that can't go on forever, won't.



The scientists tell us that a universal genetic trait is always essential for survival.  Religion has been universal among humans, so it must have a survival value.  Maybe, just maybe that old doggerel is true, and the contribution of religion to humanity is to keep the human eye upon the donut, and not upon the hole.

Kuhnian Conservatism

Why don't the American people get it?  That's what conservatives ask themselves deep down.  Why don't the American people understand that the welfare state is doomed and that the only question is just when it goes over the cliff.

It helps to realize that nobody has the inside track on reality.  We are all, following Kant, looking at appearances.  Nobody gets to look behind the curtain at the really real, at the thing-in-itself.

If indeed there is such a thing as a thing in itself.

The guy that popularized this approach is Thomas S. Kuhn of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  He argued that most of the time scientists do "normal science;" they trog along taking their current "paradigm" of how-the-world-works for granted and solve the latest problems.  When they get a result that doesn't compute the ignore it as "anomalous."  But eventually the anomalous results start to pile up and the paradigm breaks down, at least to the satisfaction of the young-uns.  A period of revolution ensues with all its chaos and disappointment.  Eventually the old generation dies out and the new generation takes over doing normal science using the new paradigm.

For conservatives, the old paradigm of the administrative welfare state has broken down.  There are anomalous results as far as the eye can see.  Obviously, we argue, the Crash of 2008 was caused by decades of mortgage subsidies and liberal bullying of bankers.  Liberals, of course, don't agree; they think that the Crash was caused by greedy bankers and an out-of-control Wall Street.  If only the rich would pay a little more then everything would return to normal.  Taxes and regulation, that's the ticket.

The American people, of course, are stuck in the middle.  They are inclined to believe liberals that tell them that they deserve their entitlements and very likely free contraception.  But they sense that something is amiss.  But, like Scarlett, they will worry about that tomorrow.  But the main thing about the American people is that they don't really have a theory of how the world works.  Unlike conservatives, they don't passionately believe in the Invisible Hand and the power of the market to provide universal prosperity.  They are employees and their experience of hands is more the Visible Hand of the boss or the layoff notice.  But unlike liberals they don't have a deep and abiding faith in the power of large-minded liberals in rational programs to organize health, education, and welfare for other people.  To them, liberals are just another kind of boss.

Liberals got into trouble a generation ago when their economics and politics got the US into the Carter malaise with 10 percent inflation and 10 percent unemployment.  The result was that a conservative with radical ideas about cutting spending and tax rates could get elected president.

Now we are in another era where liberal ideas are failing miserably.  But they aren't yet failing miserably enough.

But obviously, the Kuhn approach speaks volumes to us.  In our era "normal politics" is the liberal approach of tax and spend and regulate.  But liberal politics ends up in inflation and debt default then people will experience that the old ways have broken down; it will be time for a new approach.

That is why I write about the era of the Welfare State Smashup.  People don't look for new ideas just for the fun of it.  They look for new ideas when the old ones don't seem to work any more.

The only way for conservative ideas to get a real tryout is for liberal ideas to demonstrably fail.

The Next Great Moral Movement

Everyone keeps telling Republicans to lose the social issues.  Which is great advice, until the next great moral movement arrives.  Then you'd better get with the movement or disappear from the public square.

What do I mean?  I mean that human society runs partly on self-interest and partly on morality.  You may think that everyone operates purely on self-interest, but they don't.  People want to believe that they are on the side of the angels, and they spend a lot of energy persuading themselves that their nasty little hypocrisies are just minor and temporary diversions from the straight and true.  That is why they say that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.

If we look back at the modern age, we have seen two great moral movements.

The first was the anti-slavery movement.  The argument was simple.  Here we western chappies were drinking our tea and coffee with sugar from slave plantations, and making a nice little packet of money out of it too.  We were treating the slaves that put the sugar on our tables as mere human resources, human machines that we could exploit and use up without regard to their humanity.  The philosopher Immanuel Kant put it this way.  We should treat people as "ends" not as "means."  The plantation slave is the ultimate in treating a human as a means, a mere resource to be used and burned up like coal or oil.

The second great moral movement was similar to the first.  It was the socialist movement.  The argument was almost exactly the same.  We were treating the people that worked in factories, in mines, and mills, as if they were machines, to be worked hard until they were used up.  Again, like the plantation slave system, the factory system treated the worker as purely a means, a mere resource, rather than a brother or sister human.  It was inhuman.

It is easy to describe and to oppose such crimes against humanity, but much harder to really do something about them.  The battle against slavery ended in a century of Jim Crow for the liberated slaves, and the liberation of the worker spawned the most cruel and oppressive political regimes imaginable.

There is a reason why these noble movements went so far astray.  They put their faith in government and government is always and everywhere a system of force.  So, the activists decided that the solution to a system of exploitation and force was to substitute another system of force.  Tell me another one.

The upshot is that we have our modern gigantic governments careening out of control and enslaving their peoples in the name of liberation.

Obviously this will not go on forever.  A moral movement will arise to fight the injustice and the hypocrisy of a system that professes sweetness and light and practices the arts of oppression and exploitation.

Reenter the social issues.  The modern conservative critique of the liberal culture is that it is a culture of pure selfishness and encourages its votaries to treat all other humans as a means to an end.

Sex?  You can couple and uncouple as the mood takes you, but No means No except when it doesn't.  Marriage?  Critical for gays but optional for everyone else.  And babies.

Yeah.  A woman has the right to control her body.  And that means she can terminate the life of her "fetus" or "unborn baby" as she chooses, treating the life within her purely as a means rather than a end.

My guess is that, sooner or later, we will see a great moral movement arise about the whole question of sex, marriage, and abortion.  Whatever liberals say, the sexual revolution has been a mixed blessing to women and children--and men too.  You can see the results in Charles Murray's Coming Apart.  Marriage and family is doing fine in the upper-income educated class.  It is collapsing in the underclass and seriously damaged in the middle class.  Social collapse is really hard on the kiddies.

Nobody can predict the timeline on the next great moral movement, any more than people can predict the stock market.  My guess is that it will really get going in the debris of government debt and default that is coming in the next few years.  Probably it has already started, but we boobs can't see it because we are looking in the wrong places.

But when it comes it will change everything.

The Indictment

Conservatives have only one real problem with the administrative welfare state. Our problem is that the welfare state is unjust. Of course, we don't like the fact that it is also cruel, corrupt, wasteful, and anti-human-welfare, but the extras are just penumbras on the basic indictment.  Don't agree?  Let me count the ways.

Force.  Government is force, and big government is big-time force.  The result is that many social functions become exercises in force.  We are forced to send our children to school, and for the overwhelming majority, that means a government school run by government supporters.  We are forced to contribute to a government pension scheme, and the government manages the scheme badly.  We are forced to contribute to a government health-care scheme for our retirement years, and the government has badly underestimated the resources it will take to deliver the promised services.  What is the solution?  For government, more force.

Division.  Government is the means to defend against enemies, foreign and domestic.  But government cannot fight the foe unless it unites the people against the enemy threat.  Thus politicians are experts in the art of uniting.  But that also means they are experts in the art of dividing.  If there is no foreign threat that politicians can use to unite us then they will unite one half of the nation, in a political party, to fight against the other half.  There is nothing sinister about this; that's just what politicians do.  Obviously the more the government does, and the more money it spends, the more scope there is for uniting and dividing.  You can do it with class, you can do it with race.  You can set employees against business owners, and health-care consumers against insurance companies.  The more division you can create, the more that you can mobilize your supporters against the evil greedy ones.  There has to be a better way.

Freeloading.  Freeloading is the great issue for social animals.  We derive enormous benefit from our social engagement with each other, but every society has to deal with the freeloaders, the people that want to get their share without contributing their share.  In the past, societies have developed ingenious ways of dealing with freeloaders short of force, including naming and shaming and divine justice.  Of course, societies have long accepted that some people just cannot contribute, for no fault of their own.  But now we have developed the cult of the victim, in which people are encouraged to define themselves as indigent and unable to contribute their fair share.  Politicians use the cult of the victim to build support.  Where once leaders frankly offered loot and plunder to the warriors in their feudal host, now they offer loot and plunder to people that vote for them and define themselves as victims.

Patronage and Clientage.  In the agricultural era the food producers lived under a peculiar disadvantage.  They needed to store food against the next harvest, but any pirate or plunderer could come by and steal their store.  So the food producers ended up as clients of feudal patrons; they became serfs to warriors that could keep the plunderers at bay.  Since the warrior lords were predatory as well as the pirates, you might say that the cure was often worse than the disease.  Now the bourgeois revolution in the early modern era proposed to ditch this patron-client social relationship with the national state model.  The monarch got an army to defend against marauders, and the people were free to produce and consume in a market economy without having to truckle to a powerful patron.

It is clear, from the history of the last 200 years, that when people first arrive in the city from the country they bring their old patron-client culture with them from the countryside.  All immigrants to the US have begun by joining some sort of patronage machine, from Tammany Hall to the modern Democratic Party.  That is what they understand.  It is only when they get confident and competent in the world of the city that they come to embrace the individualist creed, which asserts the notion of the responsible self that confidently offers services to the community based on the faith that the money will follow.

But really, do we need a patron-client relationship to govern government employment?  Do we want basic social services to be delivered by powerful bosses?  Do we want favors distributed to grateful clients on the basis of race or class?  That way lies injustice.

Impossibility of reform.  The market economy is a process of constant adjustment.  No job, no fortune is guaranteed.  Every participant must consider, every day, how to serve the consumer.  That is why so many of us look to government to guarantee our jobs with labor legislation and preserve our fortunes with crony capitalism; we just don't have confidence in our ability to serve the consumers.  But the result is that government makes impossible promises to its supporters that cannot be withdrawn without a fight.  That is what is happening in Europe right now as people riot in the streets to protest the cuts in social services.

Any system that cannot reform itself short of riots in the streets is a failed system.  The welfare state system is a process of political warfare, a battle to divide the spoils of taxation and borrowing and regulation.  But the winners in each battle seem to think that they have won for all time, and are willing to fight to assert that right of victory.  There has to be a better way.

There is a better way.  Conservatives have recommended a limited government since the dawn of the modern era.  But Marxists have come a close second.  It was Marx that wanted to free the workers from the alienation of wage labor in factories so they could develop their human capacity to the fullest.  It was the Marxists of the Frankfurt School that argued that government and business both had dominatory tendencies, reducing everything to the mechanics of rules and system.  There had to be another way, a social way, that resolved issues of social cooperation in communication and persuasion rather than rules and penalties.

Everybody wants a better way.  Liberals call it "peace and justice."  Conservatives call it "limited government and peaceful cooperation."  The question is how do we get there from here?

Why Romney Lost

Leaving aside all the usual stuff about Republicans losing the black vote, the Latino vote, the youth vote, the single women vote, there is this.



Romney lost the working class vote.  Here's what happened, according to Fred Bauer.

However, for those households making between $30,000 and $49,999, he underperformed: McCain lost those voters by twelve points, while Romney lost them by 15. Moreover, because of the economic travails of the past four years, members of those working-class/lower-middle-class households rose from 19 percent of the electorate in 2008 to 21 percent in 2012.

So the Obamis were smart after all.  They spent the whole summer on negative ads demonizing Mitt Romney as an uncaring capitalist, and it worked.



It's funny really, if it weren't so sad.  The whole prosperity of the working class depends on the ability of entrepreneurs to create jobs out of nothing.  But the Democrats have made a political empire out of demonizing those same entrepreneurs.



Meanwhile the Democrats destroy the economy with their credit subsidies and their interventions and succeed in blaming the greedy bankers.



Well, that may be so.  Look, nobody really understands the modern economy.  We all pontificate, conservatives about the wonders of markets and liberals about the wonders of regulation, but nobody really knows what they are doing.



And really, the voters are right in voting for Democrats.  Those folks who have lost out in the aftermath of the Great Recession are probably never going to rise again.  Many of them, we know, are settling for a disability pension, and are getting ready to live out the rest of their lives on the dole.  So they are voting for the dole.  That's a good idea as long as the checks keep coming.



So what happens next?



You can choose the Marxist prophecy, which says that the change in the economy changes the relations between people and prompts the creation of new "classes" mobilized to fight against injustices visited upon society by the old regime.



Or you can choose the moral movement notion, that politics is moved by moral movements, such as Great Awakenings, that work their way into politics and change the rules of governing.



When you think of it, they are saying the same thing.  Look out for new "classes" or moral movements to arise in the future as people respond to the stresses and the injustices of the age.



What will these movements look like and what will they want?



Nobody knows.  But they will surprise us and surprise the political experts.

The New EERA

My point is that, whatever we are fighting about on the front lines of politics, the real issues can be found by stepping back a bit.



In my weekly oped, I announce the new era of the welfare state smashup.  The welfare state smashup will occur because, the promises that have been made cannot be delivered.  What is more, they should not be delivered.



It's a new EERA, and I think that the defining issues will be Entitlements, Economy, Race, and Abortion.



On Entitlements, we must realize that, not only are entitlements eating up the budget, they are eating up our society.  The great issue of any society, from a family to a nation state, is freeloading.  The benefits of society are enormous, there is no such thing as an "independent" human.  We would all perish without society.  But equally, for each of us there is an eternal temptation to ride on the labor of others.  One of the central tasks of religion, according to Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct, is to control freeloading, by naming and shaming and, if that doesn't work, with divine justice.  But the welfare state creates a springtime for freeloaders, encouraging people to define themselves as victims that cannot be expected to contribute.  It dissolves the notion that we should all try to contribute as much as we can, rather that try to get away with as little as we can. or as beneficiaries who deserve to get back what they put in.  Then there is the systems aspect of entitlements, the idea that you can set up an administrative system that defines for all time what people should contribute and what they should receive.  Such a mechanical system is bound to fail.



On Economy, we must stop the government trying to game the economy.  No doubt there is a place for the government's system of force, but if we have learned one thing over the last two centuries of the industrial age it is that the government's attempts to second guess the market has almost always failed.  On the credit system, governments have again and again debauched the currency and stolen the savings of ordinary people.  On the market system, governments have again and again favored special interests and economic chimeras over the natural discovery process of the market.  And while the government is tending its cronies, the wind farmers and the government employee unions, the ordinary fraudsters and bunco artists thrive.  Why on earth did Bernie Madoff not get shut down by the regulators?



On Race, we must stop the monstrous betrayal of the civil rights revolution.  I can understand that the Democrats may have thought, after the civil rights acts, that they deserved to hand out some goodies to their supporters, but the hypocrisy of quotas and "diversity" 50 years later is an outrage, and the way that Democrats have ghettoized blacks into voting 90-10 for Democrats can only have been achieved by naked appeals to race.  What the civil rights revolution was supposed to curb in the racist South.



On Abortion, liberals need to rethink.  My prediction is that abortion is going to become the great moral issue of the age.  Think back to slavery.  Back in the 18th century, Europeans were doing a fine business in the slave plantation business.  It brought sugar to the breakfast tables of Europe, and built great mansions in the country.  But then the Quakers decided that it was wrong.  A century later, slavery was dead.  Today, we can agree that abortion is, after a fashion, tremendously liberating for women.  They do not have to be a slave to their reproductive role.  That's the good side.  But there is a cost to the convenience of abortion.  It cheapens the central business of life, which is reproduction.  There is a reason why women and children have been made sacred and set apart.  It is because we forget the central importance of reproduction at our peril.  When we see the child per woman rate down at 1.3 in Western Europe, when 2.1 is replacement rate, we know that something is wrong.  That something is the marginalization of sex, marriage, childbearing and childraising.  We talk about careers for women as more important than children for women.



We humans are social animals, but we are also easily distracted from any tasks and run off at tangents.  Instead of concentrating on the job at hand we run off into the weeds.  It is the job of the great social institutions to turn us back to our tasks.  On Entitlements it is to realize that the great social engagements of health care, education, and welfare cannot be shoved aside as mechanical administrative programs.  On the Economy it is to realize that the economy is something to which we must all contribute before we can get our reward.  On Race it is to refocus on what unites us rather than what divides us.  On Abortion it is to realize that our central creative task is to produce children not great products, great cities, or great works of art.



We can either re-channel ourselves to our central human task, or we can drain away into the sand, like every other civilization in history.  Our choice.