The Canon of Limited Government

The foundation of the human condition is simple.  Humans are social animals.  We are groupish; we do things together.  In that we are like the chimpanzees where, according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, the males work together to defend a food-bearing territory, and we are unlike the orangutans, where males are solitary except during the mating season.

It is said that if you put a group of Americans into a room to solve a problem they will do so, and they will solve the problem by trying to take care of everyone's concerns.  My own experience bears this out.  When I was sent into a room years ago with eleven other Americans to try a man for first-degree murder the question turned on two female teachers that weren't quite ready to go "beyond a reasonable doubt."  It took gentle persuasion to get to unanimity, helping the two holdouts to agree with the rest of the jury by satisfying their own doubts about the defendant's guilt.

But there is a serpent in the garden.  "Men like power and will seize it if they can," writes Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct.  Humans are not just social animals, from the Latin "socius" or companion.  Humans are political animals that like power.  So it is that politicians are dividers.  You can put a group of Americans into a room together, and they will likely work out a solution to their problem.  It follows that it takes a politician to keep Americans divided and get them to fight.  That is what an election is all about, to reduce the seizure of power from a real civil war into a civil war by other means, a vigorous exchange of insults and anathemas between two political armies arranged on the field of battle.  But of course a political election has winners and losers, unlike the consensual persuasion of Americans-in-a-room, and the winners get to occupy the seat of government and impose their will on the losers.

Which reminds us that government is force.  The word comes from the Latin "gubernare," to steer.  It is not true, as a video at the 2012 Democratic National Convention proposed, that "government's the only thing we all belong to."  We all belong to the human race; we all belong to society; we all belong on the Earth.  We belong to the government in the same way as soldiers belong to the army: both have the power to force us to do things.  Is that the best that we can hope for?  To belong to an organization with power over us?  Of course not.  We have another name for the "thing we all belong to" when you remove the force: we call it society: from the Latin "socius."  Thus David Cameron's catchphrase: "There is such a thing as society; it's just not the same thing as the state."

Let us return to Nicholas Wade and complete his maxim about men and power: "But if they can't rule, their next preference is that no one rule over them."  That is the calculus of power.  It's great to rule, and men like it when they can get it.  But if they can't rule, nobody else should either.

But how can you decide: between power and the absence of power?  The answer is that government should be limited.  There's nothing remarkable about that.  If we don't like other people seizing power over us, the solution is to go into a room together and hammer out a social contract that limits everyone's power over others, and limits the power of every group over other groups.

And as we know, humans are social animals; we are groupish.  If you put humans into a room together to solve a problem...

Internal Colonialism in America

No, I am not talking about slavery or the Trail of Tears.  I am talking about the colonial regime of today's liberals, ruling class of the administrative welfare state.

Nor am I channeling some way-out right-wing whacko.  I am amplifying what Jürgen Habermas and James C. Scott have written.  And they are good card-carrying global lefty academicians.

The idea of "internal colonialism" is that the modern administrative welfare state acts towards its native citizens the way that colonial regimes once acted towards their "natives."  It treats them like children that aren't really competent to decide their own affairs.  It organizes the education of the nation's real children, because what about the children of illiterate parents that can't make the right decision for them?  It organizes unemployment relief because who can expect the workers to do it for themselves?  It organizes health care for grannie and pensions for grandpa--after all, who can trust their health care to insurance companies or their money to the Wall Street casino?

The reality, of course, is that nobody looks after other peoples' money--or anything else--better than they look after their own.  So the administrative welfare state is in the process of degenerating from a paternalistic welfare state into a naked grab for loot.

But how does the welfare state really compare with a real colonial regime, like the British in India?

The British started by establishing trading posts in the early 18th century, and then started meddling in local politics, because, after all, commerce may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in commerce.  By about 1800 Britain was a real power in India and Edmund Burke had made a scandal of Governor Warren Hastings and his looting of various Indian princes.  So we may say that 1800 marked the transition from a buccaneering era into a more avuncular era.  But then came the Great Mutiny of the Indian Army in 1857 that was experienced by the Indians as the Great Uprising.

The Great Uprising failed, let us say, because India was not yet a nation.  It hated the British, but it was not unified and organized.  But 1857 marked the beginning of the end, as the British became simply imperial overlords, expert in keeping India divided and subservient--for a while.

At the turn of the 20th century the Indian National Movement started to become a real power.  It was led by men like Mohandas Gandhi, a man from Gujarat who traveled to London to become a British barrister.  Then there was Jawaharlal Nehru; he went to Harrow, the same British public school as Winston Churchill, and then university at Cambridge.  When these men returned to India they understood the British through and through and they led the Indian National Movement to victory; they knew how to make British power in India into a worldwide scandal and an embarrassment to the British.   It was political idealism at its very best: that is why Gandhi's brilliant non-violence tactics have been emulated across the world.

When you look at liberal colonialism in America, it is clearly a horse of a different color.  It begins not in the messy buccaneering of Clive and Hastings but in a political ideal: to reform political corruption and make US politics more rational.  That is how the Progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century experienced itself.  America should have a proper central bank, progressive income taxes, and a social safety net, they said.  Ordinary Americans just couldn't do that on their own.

But then came the 1930s in which the Progressives utterly failed to make the central bank mitigate the Crash of 1929.  And then they administered the US into a ten year Slough of Despond by waging war on business.  A disaster like that requires a world-class coverup, and the Progressives became liberals, converting the failures of Franklin Delano Roosevelt into wonderful successes, and cementing their dynastic power by combining their movement with the big-city machines into a nation patronage operation.  So now the Progressives had graduated from being rational reformers into a ruling class with an agenda of maintaining their power.

The 1970s were a serious reverse for the liberal ruling class.  Their civil rights agenda ended in urban riots, their adventures in Vietnam into an unpopular war, and their social revolution into serious backlash.  So Ronald Reagan got to be president and show that it didn't need to be that way.  Anyone with eyes to see could tell that there were unintended consequences of administrative liberalism that even the liberals didn't see coming.  Liberals might think of themselves as the evolved, the educated people.  Others weren't so sure.

So liberalism entered its third phase.  The first Progressive phase was one of idealism and high-minded reform, the second New Deal phase one of benevolent dictatorship.  But in 1990, after the Reagan revolution, liberals opted for trench warfare and would do anything to keep their cultural and political power.  The party that passed the civil rights acts in the 1960s became the party that whipped the black vote into a monolithic bloc.  The party of the working man became the party of universal entitlements.  The party that urged us to rise above small-town narrowness cynically divided America any which way to win the next election.

Obviously, when a political class has descended to trench warfare to hold onto its power then it is entering a period of strategic retreat.  The only question that remains is whether its retreat is accompanied by scorched earth, whether it wrecks the nation in the process of losing its power.  In the Anglosphere the last two transitions of power have been benign: the landowners gave up power without a fight, and the bourgeoisie surrendered power to the working class even as it mucked up the economy.

But will liberals do the same?  Will they give up their internal colonial empire without a knockdown drag-out fight?  That is the great question as we head past the current "fiscal cliff" to the badlands of sovereign default and economic ruin.

Cliffhanger Budgeting

Back in 1995 Bill Clinton discovered the advantages of cliff-hanger budget battles.  He shut down the government rather than agree to the evil Republican appropriations of the newly elected first-Republican-Congress-in-40-years.



And he won!  He got the American people to agree that it was Congress that shut down the government, not his veto.



So it is not surprising that President Obama has used and perfected the same tactic.  He got himself a cliff-hanger debt crisis in the summer of 2011 and now we have the "fiscal cliff" crisis of December 2012.



Part of the game plan is to have some poor victim group that will suffer if the crisis isn't resolved.  This time it's the folks on long-term unemployment benefits.  Wouldn't you know that they are scheduled to expire four days after Christmas!



For years and years people used to complain about the venal process of Congressional appropriations, the deals, the log-rolling, the Iron Triangles.



But now it seems that we have got to a worse place, a world in which Democrats in Congress don't bother to obey the law (the Budget law that Democrats passed in the 1970s to put a curb on President Nixon) and all appropriations are rolled into a single continuing resolution and a crisis between Congress and the president.



You have to wonder: is this really the world that Democrats want?



Who knows?  Like I wrote in my American Thinker piece this week: despite appearances, the Democrats are hurting. They are no longer the confident ruling class they used to be.  That is why they have to cheat.  And that is why they have to resort to transparent shenanigans to get elected, dishing out more and more entitlements and benefits to keep their support.  That is why they have to stage big publicity crises to panic the American people into more spending.



Now even liberals like Nicholas Kristof are discovering the rotting culture that the administrative welfare state promotes.



But really, liberals are not going to stop doing the Obama, dancing to get the biggest state with the biggest entitlements that the politics of the moment can obtain.  That's what they know; that's what they do.



And that's why big government never goes quietly into the good night.  It always end in default, riot, and mayhem, when all of a sudden the game is up.



But the Obama years do the impossible.  They make the old Congress of powerful committee chairmen and old bulls seem like a kinder, gentler age.

Queen Hillary?

I suppose that it's to be expected.  That the media would be doing a boomlet for Hillary Clinton for President in 2016 in the lame-duck days of December.



Don't even bother, you Rubios and you Ryans, because Hillary has it all sewn up.  First woman president, and all that.



But let us not forget the head winds facing a three-in-a-row for the Democrats.



First there is corruption.  The modern Democratic Party is built on a coalition between the 19th century big-city political machines, the chaps that organized the Irish immigrants into US politics, and the goo-goo Progressive reformers.  It was a match made in heaven.  The Progressives would come up with the ideas for big government and spending other peoples' money, and the machines would deliver the votes.  But it is horribly corrupt.  People on the outside looking in really don't like that.



Then there is cruelty.  The Progressive-machine coalition exists by promoting a soft form of civil war: class war and race war, and the war on religion.  The result is that the Democratic Party has been busily making enemies of whites, middle-class achievers, and Christians for the last couple of generations.  That is how you get social conservatives and Reagan Democrats turning up, unannounced, in the Republican Party.



Let's talk about injustice.  The fact is that government is always and everywhere a system of power and domination.  What moderns want with enlightenment reason is to dominate nature and other men.  It was a couple of lefties that wrote that.  Big government means big injustice, and it's getting worse all the time.  We don't get to see it that clearly because the mainstream media is running interference for the Democrats and the liberals, but sooner or later it is going to pop onto the national radar.



Then there is waste.  Everything the government does, from the Pentagon down to the littlest program, to kill barred owls in order to save the spotted owl, is pure waste.  Now there is no question that we need the Pentagon and the police, because all human societies need protection from enemies foreign and domestic.  Otherwise you get the modern equivalent of the Vikings sailing up the rivers in the fall, just after the harvest.  But everything else is something that we ought to be doing for ourselves or for each other without the government forcing us to do it.



Finally there is delusion.  Yes, our liberal friends busily tell each other that they are the reality-based community.  But every ruling class sustains itself by telling itself lies.  The Brits told themselves that they were really bringing India into the modern age.  Liberals tell themselves that they are the most evolved, educated Americans, and that only they know to do the right thing for anti-intellectual America.



Underneath all the propaganda and the hoopla these irreducible facts are working away.  Just like the Soviet Union, our Democratic friends look unbeatable right now.  They have the best propaganda that money can buy and Chicago bullies can intimidate.  But then one day the whole thing collapses.



That is the faith that sustains us, and that is the reason that 2016 may be too late for Hillary Clinton.

"Internal Colonization"

Marxists may be terminally annoying, but they continue to produce compelling critiques of modern society.

Whereas liberals are totally useless.  Being the ruling class, liberals produce nothing but shoddy apology.

So let us look at Jürgen Habermas, a neo-Marxist who has brought the old Marxist idea of alienation to fruition.  The old Marxist idea was that modern labor under capitalism was alienating because labor was no longer social labor, working to create use value, but abstract labor, working to produce exchange value.

On top of that, Marx claimed, the actors in the capitalist market "reified" their activities.  They did not think of their relations as person-to-person, but thought of their activities in terms of thing-to-thing, an exchange of commodity for money.  That is what he meant by "commodity fetishism."

Habermas restates all this in terms that make sense to the average bear like me, by dividing the world up into "system" and "lifeworld."  Instead of abstract labor we have System.  Instead of social labor we have Lifeworld.  System is the market, and Lifeworld is the person-to-person relation.  More than that, System is the world of rational and strategic action.  You do almost everything in the market for gain, and it is very rational: sell, buy; make, create; up, down.  But the Lifeworld is not like that.  It is social, cooperative; it is language based, not reason based.  It is not up or down, but tries to create a consensus, a sharing.

Following Horkheimer and Adorno in A Dialectic of Enlightenment Habermas makes another important step.  He understands that the state, just as much as capitalism, is a rational system.  Both systems are based on "instrumental reason," trying to make things happen in the world by rational means.  And that means that government and business are both trying to "dominate nature and other men."  This means that government's project is the "internal colonization" of society.  Just as the European nations of the 18th and 19th century went around the world colonizing less powerful societies, so the modern state attempts to colonize its people with its experts and its bureaucrats, its regulation and its spending.

This is a punishing critique of the modern state, and a warning about its power.  We should be just as careful about government power as about business power.  Conservatives tend to worry about government power; liberals worry about corporate power.  But Habermas warns about all system power.

There is a difference between the two systems, beyond the analysis of Habermas.  It is that government is all about war.  When we say that government's primary job is to defend against enemies foreign and domestic we really mean that it is government's job to wage war on enemies foreign and domestic.  In other words, government is at loose ends unless it has an enemy to fight.  William James famously articulated this truth just before World War I when he advised that, since war was now unlikely, we would have to gussie up the "moral equivalent of war" to mobilize people to do important things.  We can see the truth of this in the periodic campaigns that government comes up with: War on Want, War on Poverty, War on Drugs, Whip Inflation Now.

But this gives conservatives and limited government advocates an opening.  When deciding whether to start a new government program we should ask ourselves: is war the best way to do this?  Because every government program is about force.  It does not say, wow, saving for retirement is really a good thing, why don't we all save from our wages!  It says you must pay 15 percent of your wages to the government in return for a pension, or else.

So then you ask: if saving against a rainy day is a natural human thing to do, why do we force everyone to save?  If insuring against sickness is a natural thing to do, why do we force everyone into Obamacare?  If everyone can see the importance of getting an education, why force everyone into a compulsory government plan?

The answer comes easily from Habermas' idea of "internal colonization."  Because we, the ruling class, want to rule.  We don't want you running off and saving your own money; we want to force you to bank the money with us.  We don't want you running off educating your kid according to your crazy ideas; we want your kid indoctrinated with ruling class ideas.

But why do people put up with this?  Simple: there is an obvious attraction to colonialism.  If you go with the colonial masters you get to enjoy the free stuff, and maybe sup at the master's table--below the salt, of course.

But for some reason the colonized peoples of the 19th century didn't like the overall package.  They preferred to rule themselves according to their own way rather than truckle to their European colonizers.

The question for us is whether we continue to truckle to our native-born internal colonizers in return for all the free stuff.  Or whether we rise up and declare that we would rather live in our own way, backward and flawed, rather than ape the ways of our colonial masters.

Of course, today the question is moot, as President Obama takes us into the miasma of internal colonization on steroids.

But when the Obama years, "the years the locusts have eaten" are over, we will visit the internal colonization question again.

Nobody knows what answer the American people will give.

Republicans' Only Hope?

Everyone is full of advice to Republicans on how to enlarge the coalition.  "Be nice" seems to be the consensus, especially "be nice" to Hispanics.



But really, can Republicans ever compete with Democrats when it comes to sharing out the loot?



The irreducible fact of the US two party system is that, at least since the Civil War, the Republican Party has been the party of the "typical American" and the Democratic Party the party of the hyphenated American.  Typical Americans think that the system works pretty well; hyphenated Americans have a beef with the system.



This plays into the two basic narratives of the modern era: the Invisible Hand narrative and the Exploitation narrative.



As Michael Barone writes in The New Americans Americans tend to start out as embattled, exploited immigrant communities; as they begin to succeed they feel less embattled and thus become less likely to "fight" for their rights.  But some groups--think Jews and blacks--retain their sense of apartness longer than most.



The fact is that blacks and Hispanics are the latest additions to the American stew and they typically feel that the deck is stacked against them, and reckon their chances better with the share-out-the-loot party.  That is likely to continue for a while.



But history tells us that, despite everything, immigrants get fed up with the loot party.  It happened with the Reagan Democrats in 1980.  No doubt it will happen again when the "blue social model" starts to run out of other peoples' money.  For instance, what happens when the money starts to run out for state government pension systems?  Is is a "blue civil war," as Walter Russell Mead suggests, as Democratic Party supporters fight over the disappearing spoils?



Probably the more likely near-term outlook is denial.  After all, it's what liberals famously accuse everyone else of.  As amateur observers of liberal psychology, we should think of this as "projection."  And it is clear that President Obama's "rich pay a little more" policy is nothing but denial.



But nobody should expect the Democrats' blue coalition to cry "uncle" and back off on its loot philosophy until long after disaster is staring it in the face.



Meanwhile we should expect some groups to peel off from the Democratic coalition: perhaps the upper-income professionals, social liberal and economically conservative, that will overlook the down-market social conservatism of the Republican Party as the Obama taxes start to bite.



And let us not forget the big takeaway from the 2012 election: white voters that didn't turn out.  Who were they?  The likeliest argument is that they were working-class whites demoralized by the Romney-is-an-uncaring-plutocrat Obama ads.



So thank goodness that the GOP's leading contenders for 2016, Rep. Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Rubio (R-FL), are lifetime professional politicians that never went near the planet Pluto or ever learned how to run a business.



Still, it's a shame.  Businessmen are the people that converted the $3 per day economy of 1800 into the $120 per day economy of today.



Why in the world would the average person be afraid of chaps like that?

Poor Having Fewer Babies

Few things have worried the bourgeoisie more than the excess birthrate among the poor.  It probably started with worry about all those starving children, but by the turn of the 20th century and Margaret Sanger and all it reduced down to the problem of the unfit.  That's what Planned Parenthood was all about, remember.  And it worked.  To this day Planned Parenthood maintains a heavy presence in lower-income neighborhoods.

The interesting backstory to this is told by Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms.  It turns out that before 1800 in England the poor had less surviving children than the rich, for obvious reasons.  Since the Gerald O'Hara rule then applied, that "land is the only thing that lasts," primogeniture dictated that the younger children of the rich, the landed warrior class, were kicked downwards into the professions.  And the younger children of the professions were downwardly mobile too.  And so on until we get to the landless laborer.

But that all changed with the industrial revolution.  The poor started having more children than the rich and the children of the poor moved up in the social scale: an upwardly mobile society.  Hence the Sangerite panic a century later.

But now, according to Ross Douthat in The New York Times, the poor and the immigrants are having less children:

American fertility plunged with the stock market in 2008, and it hasn’t recovered...

This time, the birthrate has fallen fastest among foreign-born Americans, and particularly among Hispanics, who saw huge amounts of wealth evaporate with the housing bust.

But here's the clincher:

Among the native-born working class, meanwhile, there was a retreat from child rearing even before the Great Recession hit. For Americans without college degrees, economic instability and a shortage of marriageable men seem to be furthering two trends in tandem: more women are having children out of wedlock, and fewer are raising families at all.

 So all the worriers about the survival of the unfit can go home.  The unfit are having less unfit babies.  Back to the good old days of the pre-1800 downwardly mobile society.  But I don't think this will end well.

You only have to read Charles Murray's latest book, Coming Apart, to see why.  Life is peachy-keen among the educated class: that's you and me.  We get married, we have children, we get divorced less than average.  But in the lower orders, things are not good.  Fifty percent of children are living with one parent, and working-class men are leaving the workforce.  All the statistics show that children of single parents present more pathologies than children of two-parent families.  My favorite is that children of single parents suffer six to 30 times more from physical abuse than the children living with their married biological parents.  And then there are the men.  Single men do worse than married man, much worse.

Says Instapundit: "Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money. Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be. Promises that can’t be kept, won’t be."

But that misses the main point.  If the lower orders are doing worse then that amounts to the failure of the welfare state.  The whole point of the welfare state was to tax the rich in order to help the poor.

It goes deeper than that.  It means that the welfare state has turned out to be profoundly unjust.  Sooner or later the lower orders will bust out of their welfare-state ghetto with rage.  You'd like to think that they would focus their rage on the people that tempted them with welfare state goodies and in the process wrecked their families, their work ethic, and their prosperity.  But they probably won't.  They will probably go after the Mitt Romneys of the world, the uncaring capitalists that create the jobs in this world, on the prompting of some latter-day community organizer.

That would be a shame.  For all of us.