Telling the Conservative Story

Everyone agrees that we need a better "story."  Yes, we are all postmodernists now, and we are all obsessing on the "narrative."



Over at NRO, Kevin Williamson wants a narrative that recognizes that the Democratic voters are not just people that want to live at the expense of other people.  They are also risk-averse people: women and minorities in particular.  And people do care about inequality--more at least than conservatives are willing to admit.



Over at RedState, Erick Erickson wants a focus on economic conservatism in a new 21st century way that focuses on the family.



All very good ideas, but we should forget the basic problem that conservatives face.  We do not have the hegemonic power over the culture that liberals have.  We don't get to choose the news stories; we don't get to educate the children; we don't get to write the TV shows and the movies.



What does that mean?  It means that conservatives are always on the strategic defensive.  The prime exception that proves the rule is the rise of Ronald Reagan.  He would never have got elected president but for the economic and cultural mess of the 1970s: the inflation, the hippies, the oil crisis, the wage and price controls.  The fact is that, by 1980, it was doable to persuade the moderates of America that liberalism wasn't working.



But conservatives in the Reagan years never obtained anything close to cultural hegemony.  The test of that was the Bork nomination.  Two minutes after regaining the majority in the Senate in 1986 (Reagan's second off-year election) the Democrats demagogued the nomination to the Supreme Court of distinguished jurist Robert Bork into a heap of rubble.  Because they could.



The same applies to the Obama years.  Obama demagogues on the rich paying a little more because he can.



Conservatives are at least a generation away from any hope of cultural hegemony.  At least!  That means that the broad middle of Americans will only vote for conservatism when liberalism, what they learn at school, what they learn from media, has failed, right before their very eyes.



There is a catchphrase for this from Ben Franklin: "Experience keeps a dear school, but they will learn in no other."



Yes, conservatives must speak to the risk averse, because the risk averse are going to learn pretty soon that relying on government is a pretty risky life plan.  It is like putting all your eggs in one basket.  If you think that relying on government to raise your kid or provide for your retirement will do the job for you, I have a bridge I want to sell you.



Yes, conservatives must speak about family, because family is the best insurance you can't buy.  The women and minorities that vote for big government are going to learn just what a bad idea trading the family for government benefits can be--not just for your children but for society in general and men in particular.  George Gilder wrote about this a generation ago in Visible Man. 



If conservatives had something close to cultural hegemony--or even something close to a real cultural voice--then we could persuade millions right now.  We could have persuaded them in 2012 because our cultural power would have ground the Obama campaign into dust.



But the fact is that we can't.  Any time a conservative talks about the culture s/he gets buried.  So the only way is the Ben Franklin school, the school of bitter experience.  We've got to get back to the "liberalism doesn't work" days of the late 1970s.



Conservatism is at bottom a faith about the way the world works.  It says that human society works best when we maximize voluntary cooperation through markets and through civil society, the "mediating institutions" between government and the individual.



Liberalism is a faith that you cannot trust the mediating institutions.  Here are Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their lefty manifesto Commonwealth.  Their vision is a re-creation of the "common."  They realize that socialism and communism, as practiced in the social democratic states and in the Soviet Union, are non-starters.  But so are the "most significant social institutions of capitalist society in which the common appears in corruption form... the family, the corporation, and the nation."(p160)



Oh goodie.  So again, our lefty revolutionaries are going to sweep away the imperfect socialization of today for what? A vision of "life in common" that has no real exemplars.  Not yet.



It's true that the family, the corporation, and the nation are the worst social institutions imaginable--except any and all of the alternatives that have been tried in the last century.  Lord knows they aren't perfect, but the fact is that the two-parent family is the best environment for raising children.  The corporation is the best way for creating products and services, and the nation is the best idea yet for enlarging human sympathy beyond the boundary of the kindred.



Government is force, politics is division, and reason is domination.  That's why humans are social animals, because social animals thrive when they find a gentler course than government, politics, and reason, and manage to avoid bumping into these hard and inhuman extremes.



And here is what conservatives were brought into the world to do: persuade their fellow humans to abjure the false gods of government, politics, and reason, and learn to live with each other in amity and comity.



In the next few years we are going to have a splendid opportunity to do just that.



Beyond that there is the Great Hope.  That one day in America we will be able to talk about family, business, and nation without ducking to avoid the brickbats from the liberal cultural hegemons.

Happy Conservative New Year

It's a gloomy time for conservatives, after the Obama reelection and all.  And it's doubly discouraging to experience his flat out meanness, expressed the other day when he bad-mouthed Congress.



Sorry, Mr. President, that's not how we do things here.  We the People, and our representatives in the commentariat, get to do the line about Congress being the only native American criminal class.  You are supposed to be working with Congress.



But think of this.  Things are not well in Liberal-land.  Evidence?  The bad-tempered op-ed by Louis Michael Seidman, a constitutional law prof, in The New York Times "Let's Give Up on the Constitution."  This worthy practitioner of deep thinking has come to consider that the constitution is "evil".

As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

What is the world has a liberal law prof got to complain about after the Supreme Court just passed on Obamacare and after Obama just won reelection?



Plenty.



Think about it.  Back in 2009 liberals had no notion that they would be where they are in 2013, with embarrassing fiscal cliffs and a Republican House.  They thought they would sweep all before them with their grand plans.  Recession?  Give it a whiff of stimulus!  Health care?  Implement the obvious specific, universal health care.  Global warming?  Green energy and cap and trade.



Yet here we are, with a sluggish economy, trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, and liberalism in such a mess that it must descend to faux crises every year to keep the spending spigot open.



No wonder liberals are annoyed.  Why, the problem can't be liberalism.  It must be the antiquated "system."  Why, did you know that the constitution requires that "the Constitution requires that revenue measures originate in the lower chamber. Why should anyone care?"  There is worse.  Imagine this:

Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

Oh the horror!  Mind you, I can't think of a worse way of deciding the affairs of a nation than just knuckling under to the "considered judgment" of a high "government official."



Then our worthy professor goes off on a riff showing that government officials have been ignoring the constitution since the founding.   So why shouldn't we do the same?



Think about this.  We conservatives are rightly outraged at the tax increase on wealthier Americans.  Because high-income Americans are not the idle rich, reposing in their Manhattan duplexes, but productive Americans building businesses that create jobs.  That's what the rich do these days, in case you haven't been paying attention (Manhattan duplex dwellers excepted).



Now look on the bright side.  Democrats are agreeing to lock in permanently the Bush tax rates for 99 percent of Americans.  But here we are still with our trillion dollar deficits.  Something has got to give, sooner or later.  And it will involve Democrats voting, this year or next year or some year, to raise taxes on the middle class.



Then there is spending, still out of control.  The fact is that something will have to give on entitlements, sooner or later.  Guess who gets screwed then.  Democratic voters.



I like to say that tactically, the Democrats of the 2000s have been brilliant.  They have kept Republicans on the back foot for ten years.  But what good has it done them?  The spending budget is out of control and there is now no way out except spending cuts and/or tax increases on the middle class.  They have created the Obamacare monster that women are going to hate as it cuts into their expectations for unlimited health care.  Strategically, the Democrats are strung out with vulnerable flanks everywhere.



Let's cut out the moaning, conservatives.  Liberals are in an impossible position, and it's only going to get worse.  The liberal prof's article on the constitution is merely an early "tell."  Look for liberals to be breaking away from President Obama by the 2014 midterms.  And then it is Katy bar the door.



And remember: the midterm in a president's second term is usually a real loser for the president's party.  By 2015 the Republicans could have both houses of Congress for the two years running up to the next presidential election.  Just like the Democrats in 2007.

Barefoot and Pregnant Dem Voters

Our liberal friends have dined out for decades on the proposition that conservatives are patriarchs that want to keep women barefoot and pregnant.  It's the usual mean-spirited insult, of course, that expresses the idea that conservatives don't bellieve women are the equal of men and don't want women out in the work force doing the things that men do.



But when I read President Obama on the fiscal cliff, reducing the entitlements crisis to the notion that:

it is very difficult for me to say to a senior citizen or a student or a mom with a disabled kid, ‘You are going to have to do with less but we're not going to ask millionaires and billionaires to do more.’

You see, what the president is cunningly omitting here is the context.  He is leaving out the $50-100 trillion unfunded mandate on entitlements, the difference between the government's promises on Social Security and Medicare and the funds available to deliver them.  There is not one word in his remarks, nor in any other Democrat's statements, to prepare the Democratic voters for their upcoming years of responsibility, years when the money just won't be there for Social Security and Medicare as we know it.



In other words, Democrats don't want their voters to get out in the world and get an education in public finance--which they could easily get at usspending-101.com for free.  No they just want them barefoot and pregnant, dependent on their government benefits until the next election.



Of course, politics is all about hypocrisy, projection and any pop-psych notion you can imagine.  But it is still galling.



There's a lesson here: conservatives need to understand that the overwhelming Democratic base is never going to "get" the idea of an entitlement crisis.



Thus when someone like Kevin Williamson urges conservatives to understand that, e.g., most Democrats are much more risk-averse than Republicans, he has a point.  Yes it's true that savings accounts and bonds and Social Security are attractive to the low-risk folks.  That's because they believe what authority figures have told them.



The problem is that government programs and benefits are a lot more risky that the average Democratic voter understands.  Bonds?  Superfragilistic as long as you have a government that will maintain the currency at par with gold.  Social Security?  Low risk, as long as the government doesn't default on its debt, and governments often do.



Let's just take a look at my situation, aged 66.  Social Security?  Yes, but what will happen down the road?  Bonds?  But what happens when the money supply expands to match the quadrupling of the monetary base since 2008?



My point is that relying on bonds and Social Security in 2013 is a risky bet.  It would be much lower risk, over the medium term, to rely on dividend stocks backstopped by a spot of gold.  Why?  Because in my view, it is harder for the government to loot people of their gold and their stocks than loot their bank accounts and their bonds denominated in dollars.



But when will people get that?  Only when the checks stop coming.



Back to Ben Franklin: Experience keeps a dear school, but they will learn in no other.  Risk-averse people won't warm to the Republican agenda until they have experienced for themselves the huge risks hidden in the supposed risk-free agenda of the Democrats.

Jonathan Rauch, Hypocrite

Comes now liberal writer Jonathan Rauch to argue that the one way of doing things is wrong. (H/T Dynamist).

Whenever anyone tells you, 'I've got it right. I've got the one true answer and everyone else is wrong and I'm going to enforce it,' that person is not only a menace to freedom but, more important, a menace to human thriving and human knowledge.

Golly.  Of course, Rauch doesn't mean it with respect to government programs.  He just means that in the university there should be a full and free discussion of ideas and that nobody should be allowed to get away with being "offended" by free speech.



Also, Rauch meanders on to say what a wonderful thing the conversation about gay marriage was, and how it "persuaded" the American people.  As if.  As if the "conversation" about gay issues, like the conversation about race, has not been at every moment about liberal bullying, liberals stigmatizing anyone that disagrees with them as bigots and racists and homophobes.



I wonder how many people in Washington State voted, like me, for gay marriage on the principle of Ben Franklin, that experience keeps a dear school, but they will learn in no other.



If you truly believe  that "the one true answer" is a problem then you have to believe that almost any government program is a disaster.  Because almost any government program says: Look chaps, we've been thrashing around with this problem, everyone going his own way.  Now we need to stop all that and force everyone to do it the same way, our way.



In Government's End, Rauch argued that government was stymied by special interest rent seekers which prevented government from being the flexible problem solver it could be.  But that completely misses the point.  It was 50 years ago that Buchanan and Tullock dissected government in The Calculus of Consent, and showed how the game of forcing others to pay for your pet projects works. Special interests are to government what eggs are to bacon.  As far as the system will allow, special interests will try to game the system to acquire rent.



The only political question, then, is how much do we limit government?  Within those limits, we should understand, it is a special interest feeding frenzy.



When you don't limit the government you get what we have right now, a government barreling to inflation and default.  Why?  Because there is no established limit to how much the government can take, and how much the government can give.



And that's because our ruling class, the educated elite, gets its power from cultivating the resentments and the envies of the average American into well manured, husbanded, and till'd government programs with lots of jobs and power for the ruling class.



So the ruling class, like Jonathan Rauch, can talk a good line about the horrors of the one way, but when it comes to the crunch, they are all in favor of more government, the one forced way for everything.

Getting Supporters to the Polls

Reporters and pollsters tend to talk about percentages when they talk about elections.  But real politicians talk about numbers.  They know that the name of the game is getting people enthusiastic enough to get out to the polls and vote.



Obviously there are two sides to this equation.  You want your supporters to be enthusiastic and you want their enthusiasm to rub off on the swing voters.  You also want the opposition to be demoralized so they won't bother to vote.



A look at the recent presidential elections in the US shows this enthusiasm at work.  Let's get the vote numbers from uspresidentelection.us.  First the Democratic vote.

	Presidential popular vote in millions
Election Year	1980	1984	1988	1992	1996	2000	2004	2008	2012
Dem Vote	35.5	37.6	41.8	44.9	45.6	51.0	59.0	69.5	65.6

Now let's look at the Republican presidential vote over the same period.

	Presidential popular vote in millions
Election Year	1980	1984	1988	1992	1996	2000	2004	2008	2012
Rep Vote	43.9	54.5	48.9	39.1	37.8	50.5	62.0	59.9	60.9

The politicians are right. It is the total vote count that is really interesting.  If you look at the Democratic vote, it has steadily increased every year since 1980, except for one.  The big years were the 2000s when the Dems went from 51 million in 2000 to 69.5 million in Obama's great year, 2008.  But then Obama lost 4 million votes in his reelection.



The Republican vote is different.  It has seesawed up and down.  It peaked at 54.5 million in Ronald Reagan's Morning in America year of 1984.  Then it dived down into the 30s, with the terrible elections in the 1990s when Ross Perot split the conservative vote.  But under George W. Bush and his "architect" Karl Rove the GOP vote almost doubled to 62 million in 2004.  Since then it has flatlined at about 60 million.



How did the Democrats manage their extraordinary climb from 35 million in 1980 to 70 million in 2008?  I'd say it has been mostly hard work, identifying supporters and building the infrastructure to get them out to vote, and also making it easier to vote, with Motor Voter and absentee voting.



What's the story with Republicans?  Is the flatline a temporary pause, or are Republicans just running out of white people?



Back before the election I estimated that the Dems would lose 5 million votes and the Republicans would gain 5 million.  Well I was half right.  The Dems lost most of the 5 million I prophesied.  But the campaign of Mitt Romney failed to pick up the 5 million it needed.



Maybe the only hope for Republicans is that Barack Obama is busily minting new Republicans as he fails to ignite the economy, year after year, with his redistributive economics.

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."