Obama's Anecdotes

Classicist and farmer Victor David Hanson calls Obama's style "The Anecdotal Presidency" for the way that the president reduces our great national challenges to anecdotal fluff.  From deficits to immigration the president's response is a plausible but insufficient story: let the rich pay a little more; give the illegal-immigrant children of illegal immigrants a break.

The Obama presidency is one of anecdotes in lieu of solutions. It might be a comforting thought that jailing a reactionary filmmaker, or raising taxes on the suspect few, or providing amnesty to the college undergraduate, or taking away Ted Nugent’s guns will solve our mounting problems, but such anecdotes mean little in the real world of difficult choices that would offend friends as well as opponents.

We expect our politicians--or at least the politicians of the other party--to act responsibly to solve national problems, but I always come back to this.  Democracy is not the rule of the people, for the people cannot rule.  The only thing the people can do is to choose who will rule over them.  In our age these are elected politicians, experts in persuasion.  Their skill is not governing, it is running for election.



A chap like Barack Obama runs for election as someone who can get you free stuff, and it stands to reason to his supporters that if the rich paid a little more there would be enough for all.



A chap like Mitt Romney, or any Republican, runs as someone that will fix the profligate government, and it stands to reason to his supporters that if we just cut a little from all the waste, fraud, and abuse that there would be plenty of money for the government to discharge its proper responsibilities.



Which is right?



Well, neither.  The result of a chap like Barack Obama is that the government gets into real fiscal difficulty and confiscates the wealth of the people through inflation and debt default to try and pay its bills.  The result of a chap like Mitt Romney is that the government's affairs become so comfortable that people think we can safely increase government spending and subsidies.



And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

Merry Christmas, Suckers

The official liberal myth is that liberals, through selfless concern for the poor, have lifted the unfortunate out of misery, the brutality of the time clock and the speedup, the 12-hour day, the unsafe workplace.

Another way to tell the story is that the new ruling class of liberals gets its power by tempting the poor with free stuff.  Liberals don't care about the poor; they care about political power and comfortable sinecures that liberal politics delivers to them.

The latter story fits with the description of democracy in Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.  Democracy cannot be the rule of the people, Schumpeter writes, because the people cannot rule.  All they can do it vote to elect the people who will rule them, and it follows that the people competing for the right to rule will become experts, professionals, in the art of getting elected.  Thus it is that democracy is really the rule of the politicians, professionals whose lifework is getting elected to public office.

Conservatives like me profess to be puzzled that Democrats seem to be uninterested in "fixing" the entitlements.  After all, it is Democratic voters that have the most to lose if the government runs out of money.

But the Democratic disinterest in entitlement reform makes complete sense if you think of the Democrats as elected politicians.  All they are interested in doing is saying the right things to get elected.  What comes next is beside the point.  Now humans are beings that like the idea of getting "free stuff."  They are also beings that hate the idea of giving up "free stuff."   So you tell me what would happen to Democrats that told their supporters to cinch in their belts.

Now comes an article in The New York Times that worries about the poor and college.  It turns out that many poor students rack up a pile of student debt and then don't graduate.  Golly, who could have seen that coming!

And it all filters down to the dreaded problem of rising "inequality."

Thirty years ago, there was a 31 percentage point difference between the share of prosperous and poor Americans who earned bachelor’s degrees, according to Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski of the University of Michigan. Now the gap is 45 points.

While both groups improved their odds of finishing college, the affluent improved much more, widening their sizable lead.

 Golly.  Why could that be?

Likely reasons include soaring incomes at the top and changes in family structure, which have left fewer low-income students with the support of two-parent homes. Neighborhoods have grown more segregated by class, leaving lower-income students increasingly concentrated in lower-quality schools. And even after accounting for financial aid, the costs of attending a public university have risen 60 percent in the past two decades.

The charming innocence of these liberals.  Thank goodness they haven't read Coming Apart by Charles Murray.  Or they might cotton on to the idea that their administrative welfare state has done wonders for the income and prospects of well-born liberals.  But it has hammered the very people it is supposed to help.  As in:

Item: The poor, through the workings of the welfare system, experience extremely high and variable marginal tax rates.  That's because as you generate more wage income you lose your welfare benefits not gradually, but chunk by chunk.

Item: We now learn that the people that have been hurt the most in the real estate crash are African Americans.  And no wonder.  It was the "redlining" of minority neighborhoods that the Community Reinvestment Act and the subprime real-estate loans were supposed to fix.  The result was that many people got loans that didn't have a hope in hell of servicing them.

Item: The wonderful and compassionate entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment insurance have the perverse effect of sterilizing the savings of the poor and the near poor.  The money that normal people would save against a rainy day, or starting a business, or putting a big down-payment on a home, or sending a kid to college, is sequestered by liberal program administrators to be given back later.  Meanwhile, liberal politicians have the use of the money in bribing the voters with "free stuff."

It was well said by the neo-Marxist Jürgen Habermas that the administrative welfare state is a system of internal colonization.

One day an American politician will figure out how to explain all this to the suffering American people.  My guess is that we already know this politician; he is already beginning to be a household word.

Will he make his move in 2016?  Or 2020?  Who knows?

But never forget the Instapundit Rule: "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."

Obama the Great Divider

Just in time for Christmas, Hugh Hewitt has a piece on Obama the Great Divider.  Obama has successfully eliminated Speaker Boehner as a negotiating partner for his second term, he writes.

Having managed to lose 4 million votes between 2008 and 2012, the most partisan and relentlessly negative president of modern times doubled down on all of his least generous instincts and went "full Lee Atwater," embracing completely the advice that if your opponent is on the ground with a broken arm, step on it.



Atwater, of course, intended his counsel for the period before elections, but the permanent campaign requires permanent pummeling.

President Obama is the guy that sent the bust of Winston Churchill back to the British Embassy.  Perhaps the most famous apothegm attributed to Churchill is this:

In War: Resolution; In Defeat: Defiance; In Victory: Magnanimity; In Peace: Good Will.

Now why would the pugnacious Churchill propose such a dictum?  Because he was a good guy?  Because he had a weakness for a good turn of phrase?



I suggest that he proposed it because it is good practical advice for anyone in high politics.  When you are fighting you need courage and perseverance.  When you are victorious in war you want to co-opt the losers and discourage them from forming a new head of rebellion.



President Obama seems to think that he doesn't need the goodwill of the loyal opposition, and maybe he is right--for now.  And he has the advantage of a cultural elite that is completely in the tank for him.



But what happens down the road when things turn bad for him and his party?  When the politicians he has humiliated get their chance to stab him in the back?



The central idea in the politics of the left seems to be the act of protest.  It supposes that the left is a powerless group of the marginalized desperately reaching for a moment of publicity in which to announce their grievances to an uncaring world.  In other words, it is 1825 and the workers are working twelve hours a day underground in ill-ventilated mines.



In fact, of course, the left, in its liberal instantiation, is the ruling class of today, not a ragged band of the powerless.  It would, if it were sensible, try to co-opt its adversaries in order to reduce the effectiveness of the opposition.



My guess is that liberals are still reeling from the experience of the Reagan administration.  Here was something inconceivable: an amiable dunce that won the Cold War and ended the stagflation of the 1970s.  If it was real, it would mean that the administrative welfare state of the liberals was a mistake and a chimera, and the whole project was based on a delusion.  So liberals have closed their minds to the idea that Reagan was right, and have returned to their government expansion project like a dog to its vomit.



So now we have President Obama, determined to complete the liberal agenda against all odds and against all opposition.



Here is the problem for liberals in this policy.  It means that conservatives don't have a dog in the fight.  It means that there is nothing in the entire sweep of government policy that reflects conservative ideas and sentiments.  Given our druthers, conservatives would not continue Social Security: we would replace it with a genuine private-sector based savings program with maybe some sweeteners for the low-paid.  We would not continue Medicare and Medicaid, but move to a consumer-based rather than third-party-based healthcare insurance scheme.  We would not continue the government monopoly education system, and we would reform the welfare system at a minimum to reduce the high marginal tax rates on the poor.



Why then would conservatives consent to pay taxes for all these liberal programs?



When you are utterly shut out of the government spending racket and you don't have any dog in the fight then you start to rail at the injustice of it all.  You start to look for alternatives.  You start to gather a head of rebellion.



Churchill's dicta are the practical politician's way of preventing rage from breaking out in the opposition.  President Obama's way is the ideologue's clumsy way of riling up the opposition.



Most likely the near term result will be that the president will leave office in 2017 with the Democratic Party in ruins.



And don't forget the Instapundit Rule: "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."

Plan B Failure a Disaster? Or What?

The MSM consensus on the failure of Speaker Boehner's "Plan B" last night seems to be that Boehner was humiliated and the Republicans are in disarray.



So now the president and the Democrats can go to the country and crow that Republicans want to increase taxes on the middle class.



Who knows?



The basic correlation of forces is still what it was after the election in November.  The American people have chosen not to go for reform of the welfare state.  Not yet.



The logical result of that is to increase taxes, but not not too much, and keep all the rent-seeking spending going for now.



I was watching a Peter Robinson UncommonKnowledge interview of John O'Sullivan and Jonah Goldberg last night.  Someone said that you only get to curb the spending and the rent-seeking after a military defeat or a civil war.



It's obvious really.  The spending and rent-seeking in the modern administrative welfare state represents the real power balance in the western world.  If you want to change it you have to have the power to move the current power-holders and their supporters off dead center.  Realistically, you can only do that when the current power-holders are off their balance.



Maybe a financial meltdown would have the same effect as a war.



At any rate, if the economy isn't doing too well by the end of the Obama administration then you can expect the American people to be in a nasty mood.



And nobody will remember the details of Boehner's Plan B.

Robert Bork and Liberal Paranoia

The other day I mentioned to a liberal enthusiast for public transportation that, in my view, personal transportation is guaranteed in the Constitution.  Of course, I admitted, it's probably not right there in the text.  But I'm sure that I could find it in a "penumbra."



It was penumbras in the Constitution that empowered the US Supreme Court to find a right to privacy and thus a right to abortion, back in the day of Roe v. Wade.  The idea of penumbras comes from the dominant liberal approach to the Constitution, developed by the Progressives at the turn of the 20th century, that modern conditions required a "living constitution" that could adapt to the new world.



Conservatives have come to regard the "living constitution" doctrine in less flattering terms.  Conservatives regard it as giving liberals a free hand to interpret the Constitution any way they want.  So it stands to reason that some conservative would come up with an opposing doctrine, that the constitution means what the writers originally meant, and that if you want to change the Constitution you need to do it the hard way, by formal Constitutional Amendment.



The recently deceased Robert Bork was a principal architect of this "originalism."



Bork was a law professor at Yale for a couple of decades and then President Reagan appointed him, in 1981, to the US Court of Appeals.  In 1987, right after the Democrats had retaken the US Senate, Reagan nominated him to the US Supreme Court.  Democrats, led by Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden and liberal lion Ted Kennedy, saw their chance and they took it.  They successfully calumniated this mainstream conservative judge as a conservative extremist and defeated his nomination.  Thus the tactic of personal calumny became neologized as the verb: to Bork.



This week The New Republic has run a piece regretting the tactics of 1987 but condoning the result: keeping a very conservative judge off the Supreme Court.

It’s a good thing that the man who Bork became after his defeat wasn't confirmed to the Supreme Court: If he, instead of Anthony Kennedy, had been the swing vote between 1987 and 2012, America would indeed have been a more illiberal place.

Right on liberals.  Still, there is room for regret.

But it’s bad for the country that Bork was Borked in the way he was. American courts, judges, and constitutional law have been paying the price for the past twenty-five years, and the future looks even more bleak.

You will not be surprised to learn that the commenters at TNR were not so circumspect.  They parroted the sentiments taught to them over 30 years ago by Sen. Edward Kennedy and others, that Bork was a dangerous extremist that should never have been nominated to the Supreme Court.



But here's a more telling commentary on Robert Bork and conservative jurisprudence, from John O'Sullivan:

At one point in the 1960s, Bob Bork and the other conservative law professor in Yale Law School approached its director to argue for the appointment of a third conservative to the faculty. They were told that although their candidate had excellent credentials, the selection committee had decided with agonized regret not to appoint him. They were afraid that the 60-strong faculty might be “swamped” with conservatives.

So who, really, are the pathologically paranoid ones in America?



If liberal professors are going to get their knickers in a twist over the prospect of 3 conservative professors in a faculty of 60, you can begin to see the problems that America is going to have, when it is time to show its liberal ruling class the door some day between now and eternity.

Think Like a Democratic Voter

If you are a Republican or and independent voter, the current fiscal cliff negotiation seems like a exercise in futility.  We solid citizens understand that a deal must be done on entitlements--principally Medicare--and that "something must be done" about runaway spending.



So we say, like the Wall Street Journal edit page, that the "budget talks are drifting in a drearily familiar Washington direction: Tax and spending increases now, in return for the promise of spending cuts and tax and entitlement reform later."



Some conservatives think that this amounts to a monstrous betrayal by Speaker Boehner (R-OH), but I think that we are asking too much of the Speaker and his Republican colleagues.  They are trying to move the Democrats, and the Democrats know something that we ordinary middle-class folks don't know.  To understand where the Democrats are coming from you have to think like an ordinary Democratic voter.



The average Democratic voter reckons "we are owed."  I got into trouble with an African-American acquaintance over this.  Never heard anyone say that, he said.  Yeah, so those chaps muttering about reparations are just talking about nothing.



But really, that's what the average Democrat keeps getting told.  You are owed.  That's what egalitarianism and redistribution means, if it means anything.



You can tell, from the outrage of the public employees of Wisconsin last year and the outrage of the unions in Michigan this year that the average rank and file Democrat never thinks about where the money comes from.  They are just owed.  Rush Limbaugh had a running joke for months after the 2009 stimulus, riffing off an interview of African Americans lining up for some free stuff.  Where does the money come from, a reporter asked?  Obama's stash, came the answer.



Which confirms my argument that government is nothing more than a looting expedition.  That's what a stash is: a place to hide the proceeds of piracy and plunder.



Think of the average Democrat voter.  She or he lives off the government teat.  She has a government job, most likely, and is plugged into various liberal government scams from health care to housing.  Now the point to remember, which we ordinary middle-class folks don't get, is that a voter like that has all her eggs in one basket.  Suppose she is a teacher, a nurse's aide, a social worker.  What in the world will she do when the government has to cut spending by a trillion a year?  It is unthinkable.



Then there are the Social Security and Medicare recipients like me.  Better not touch our benefits: we earned them: We are owed!



So which Democratic politician is going to be the one that addresses the Democratic faithful in some high-school gym and says: sorry about all that, but there is no more money?



Now the irreducible truth about the first four years of the Obama administration is that the federal government was spending about $1 trillion more each year than it was collecting in taxes.  Thinking in terms of my looting metaphor, Obama was distributing $1 trillion more in benefits to his supporters from his "stash" that he was collecting in his predations upon the private economy.



And that's how he got reelected.  There could be more money available in his stash if only the rich would give a little more.



And don't forget, we are talking about people that have put all their eggs in the government basket.  If you are a private sector person you have probably moved around a bit from job to job: you understand your skills and your marketability.  But a woman with a government job would probably have to take a massive pay cut if she had to get a job in the private sector.  If you have retired you have Social Security plus your 401k plus your savings.  But the government worker has only her government pension.



If you are a Final Glide American you have carefully organized your life to land on the government aircraft carrier secure in the knowledge that you are owed.  It is unthinkable that your benefits could ever be cut.  After all, you are living on a fixed income.  You have nowhere else to turn.



When the money runs out and the government can no longer spend more than it collects in taxes, then there will be an almighty fight over the remaining spoils.  It might be a good idea for the prudent if they can afford to walk away from their government benefits.  If only to avoid stray bullets.



Meanwhile, I'm not sure that it matters what deal Speaker Boehner cooks up.  It will all end in tears, anyway, because the Democrats cannot afford to tell the truth to their supporters.

The Beautiful Dream of American Exceptionalism

President Obama taught us all a lesson a while back.  When asked about American exceptionalism in 2009 he replied:

"I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."

Yeah.  In other words, it's a nationalistic fantasy.

But, of course, the president is wrong: the United States is an exceptional nation.  It was founded upon an idea, the rising idea of its age, of republican self-government, on the Axial Age concept of the "responsible self."  From that idea came the whole exceptional package: limited government under law, separation of powers, the "Dutch finance" of Alexander Hamilton, the whole idea of civil society, of a middle ground of free association between the government and the individual.

But there is one brute fact about exceptions.  They are exceptions to the rule.  If the United States was born as an exceptional nation, then it stands to reason--and experience--that the United States will eventually become ordinary: "regression to the mean" is the official term.

Our liberal friends, of course, think that American exceptionalism is a bad thing: nationalism, anti-intellectualism, the gun culture, Babbitry, boosterism, the money culture.  They want to get back to being a normal nation, like the Europeans and their social democracy.

The libertarian "instapundit" Glenn Reynolds likes to quote the science-fiction author Robert Heinlein at this point:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck."

The point is, of course, that "extremely small minorities" are people like Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs; they appear for a moment, like a blinding flash of light, and then they are gone.  Sometimes they are revered; often times, as in the case of a Rockefeller or a Morgan, they are reviled.  Then the world reverts to the mean.

I like to say that the United States is founded upon the exceptional idea of "Dutch finance" in which the government bases its finance on promoting the health of the rest of the financial and credit system.  The normal way of government finance is "French finance" where the government games the financial system to ward off the consequence of its overspending.  Dutch finance builds a strong nation; French finance leads to sovereign default, hyper-inflation, riots and revolution.

Under President Obama the US is heading as fast as politically possible down the path of French finance. That is the meaning of unsustainable entitlements; that is the meaning of cheesy "fiscal cliffs;" that is the meaning of trillion dollar deficits.

And it will be the "little people" who will end up "eating the paint off the walls."

All exceptions come to an end.  But it is a bitter thing to be living through the end of one so glorious and luminous as the American Exception.