Life After Liberalism

There are two pieces out today on the topic of "An American Manifesto:" the question of life after liberalism.

Walter Russell Mead expands on his "end of the blue social model" notion with a discussion of "Liberalism 5.0."  He sees a continuation of the past, with increased order and increased liberty.  But his vision seems to call for more government.  He writes about the increase in laws that would accompany an end to the "drug war."

The 21st century, if we get things right, won’t see either the triumph of an all-powerful government or the return of the Articles of Confederation. The government will do more than it does now, and regulate activities that are unheard of today, but individuals will have more choices than they currently do and their rights and their property will be better protected.

Really?  But this will mean a continuation of the disciplining of the état policier, the government that sees its project as the aesthetic task of making society elegant, disciplined, and legible.

Or there is Charles Kesler.  In his view President Obama thinks his reelection means

that liberalism has returned to its natural role as modern America’s public philosophy or established religion... Reaganism was a blip, an anomaly.

But the Democrats’ very successes are intensifying liberalism’s contradictions, both fiscal and philosophical. And so "American liberals are coming to the end of their rope."  The old liberalism believe in progress as "something scientifically and rationally certain, benign, and steerable."  But the advent of postmodernism has made politics not a discovery process but just a dance of power, "more a matter of will than of reason."

So we may say that liberalism is reducing to a matter of power, of enticing people with enough "free stuff" for the ruling class to win elections, and that all the talk about "fairness" is just an apology for power.

The question then becomes, as I have argued, what the "religion" will be on the other side, after liberalism runs out of money with which to deliver "free stuff?"

One of the key roles of religion, according to Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct, is to deal with the freeloading problem, that in any society, it "pays" to work less and consume more, because the whole point of society is to share out the risks of life.  Thus every society needs to socialize people to feel good about making and feel guilty about taking.  Otherwise you have to restrain the takers with government, and government means force rather than persuasion.

Obviously modern liberalism has inverted this idea.  It encourages people to think that other people are freeloaders; it does not ask people to worry about their own freeloading.  Or "sin" as we used to call it.

I argue in "An American Manifesto" from recent left-wing scholarship that the way to the future is to reduce the amount of government and "system", and increasing the amount of face-to-face civil society.  Government is force, politics is division, system is domination, and all these things reduce society to a regiment of compulsion.

We need to reduce the incidence of government programs and get people to interact with each other to obtain their daily bread and spread the risks of life around.  When people interact together they are more sensitive to their contribution and the contribution of others.  The freeloader is not just "the rich" or "welfare moms" but a real person in their acquaintance.

But when people are stuck in a system they experience the helplessness of a mechanical existence and just go along to get along, taking advantage of the system as the system takes advantage of them.

There's nothing mysterious about this.  It goes back to Adam Smith and the "invisible hand."  The idea is that, for most people, they cannot get what they want in this world without doing things for other people.  Thus they can only satisfy their selfish wants by satisfying the wants of others.

Some people insist that this notion is invalidated by the inequality of power: exploitation.  People give a lot but get little in return.  There's no doubt that inequalities exist; the question is when these inequalities require the intervention of force.  And how likely is it that force will make things any better?

The Octopus Left Reviews ObamaCare and Cap-and-Trade

We all know Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol as a leading light in the Defenestration of Cambridge.  That was the Harvard faculty campaign to toss Harvard President Larry Summers out of his office--ostensibly for the thoughtcrime of saying in a public forum that women were different than men.



She's also written an analysis (pdf) of two signature Obama initiatives: the successful Obamacare campaign and the failed "cap and trade" campaign. (H/T Powerline)



Skocpol is a lefty-liberal, and her analysis of politics is drenched in anti-right pejoratives.  But when you read between the lines you learn a thing or two.



You learn that the left is broad and deep in money and institutional muscle.  Skocpol's description of the money and the resources assembled to push Obamacare and cap-and-trade is a recipe of activist groups and foundations pledging millions here and millions there, and activists and staff resources all over the place, all in the campaign to punch their agendas through Congress.



But when she turns to describing right-wing efforts it's pretty thin gruel.  There are think tanks and then there are the Koch brothers.  And there is the Tea Party.



There is interesting stuff in her report.  First, that Republican elected officials turned sharply against the environmentalist agenda in the early 1990s.  What happened?  Skocpol says they were pushed by conservatives.

They used non-profit, right-wing think tanks to sponsor and promote a cascade of books questioning the validity of climate science; and they pounced on occasional dissenters in the academic world, promoting them as beleaguered experts.

There were "long-standing general-purpose conservative organizations" and "ideological funders" behind it all.  When you think about it, that's how politics is supposed to work.  People with an ideological ax to grind get books and ideas out there and push!



But there is no real identification of the supposed greedy corporations pushing against the sweetness and light of cap-and-tax.  Indeed, there were a number of large corporations that got co-opted into the pro cap-and-tax campaign.



There is no mention of Climategate and the anti-global-warming blogs.



Is it possible to get climate-change legislation through Congress ever again, Skocpol wonders?

The political tide can be turned over the next decade only by the creation of a climate-change politics that includes broad popular mobilization on the center left. That is what it will take to counter the recently jelled combination of free-market elite opposition and right-wing popular mobilization against global warming remedies.

But the problem is, as Skocpol recognizes, that it's difficult to get rank-and-file Democrats mobilized for something that doesn't provide them with "free stuff" in their pockets.  Anyway "liberals and friendly moderates need to build a populist anti-global warming movement on their own side of the political spectrum."



As if. As if liberals haven't been doing this flat out for decades.  But Skocpol is clear that carbon-capping legislation cannot be an inside deal in Washington.  It has to have popular support.  So she thinks that the CLEAR Act from Sens. Cantwell and Collins might do the trick.  Its "cap and dividend" approach taxes energy and then distributes dividend checks to voters.



So there is hope.  If the global warming movement is based on bad science that gets publicized and critiqued every day by chaps like wattsupwiththat.com and climateaudit.org, it will be very difficult for the ruling elite to advance its climate control agenda.



Skocpol presents an intriguing story of how elite interest combine to push big government.  But what interests me is how we can develop a politics to unwind the disaster of the administrative welfare state.  How can you get people to give up their "free stuff" even as it's the free stuff that is pushing the nation into bankruptcy?



I have a feeling that politics-as-usual won't do the job.  You can only take the free stuff out of our cold dead--or at the very least trembling, terrified--hands.  And that would take a revolution.

The Political Situation in Context

Should they or shouldn't they?

Should Republicans fight President Obama tooth and nail over debt ceilings, fiscal cliffs, and spending sequesters, or should they let them through?

Because the fights are really minor skirmishes on the march to sovereign default.  The federal deficit is about six to seven percent of GDP, and that can't go on forever.

And even though everyone is dumping on the Republicans for their intransigence (President Obama) or their timidity (conservatives) the fact is that Republicans have the whip hand.

When we hit default day then Democrats are going to have to call for tax increases on the middle class and/or spending cuts.  The American people won't like that.  Republicans?  We say cut spending, so nothing will change for us.

But what do the scholars and the experts tell us about all this?  I'm glad you asked, Senator.

In The Calculus of Consent, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock argue that the government should use unanimous consent, not majority voting, as its default voting system.  Why?  Because that would minimize the ability of some people, even a majority, to force costs on other people.  Under unanimous consent, the supporters of a government measure would have to pay off the opponents in order to get their consent.

Shocked?  Appalled?  Well, the system of "logrolling" where solons vote for the other guy's measure in return for the other guy's vote for their own measure is already the way that politics is done.  What Buchanan and Tullock call unlimited "side payments" is just a formalization of this system.

But let's roll out a key quote from the end of the book:

[N]o social organization in which men (some men or all men) are allowed freedom of choice can prevent the exploitation of man by man and group by group... The relevant choice among alternative institutions reduces to that of selecting that set which effectively minimizes the costs (maximizes the benefits) of living in association.  The shift from market organization to political organization does not, in any way, eliminate the opportunity for specific individuals and groups to impose external costs on others...

This is central.  In any situation, where a decision-maker has the power of choice, he can use it to exploit someone else.  Let us stipulate Marx's notion that capitalism is exploitation.  As Chuck says:

In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, [capitalism] has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The same applies to socialism and communism, in spades.  That's what Buchanan and Tullock show in their analysis of political voting.  Any system of deciding social and political issues will impose costs on the losers.  In one word: exploitation.

People are selfish; the rules of capitalism as encoded in economics recognize this.  Thus:

[Its] organizational norms are based on the view that [selfish] behavior can be channeled in such a direction that it becomes beneficial rather than detrimental to the interests of all members of the community.

That is the means of Adam Smith's "invisible hand."  The question that Buchanan and Tullock ask is this:

Can the pursuit of individual self-interest be turned to good account in politics as well as in economics?

Buchanan and Tullock answer that we can do better, and one way to do this is to empower the minority to demand compensation when society wants to do something they don't like.

That's something that President Obama and the ruling class, the executive committee of the educated elite need to remember as they send the whole economy into the toilet. 

Is Obama Crazy Like A Fox?

Conservatives are rightly outraged that President Obama is choosing to govern not as the president of all of us but as the partisan enforcer of his liberal faction.



Didn't the liberals excoriate Bush for being just that (even when that noble and honorable man was never the divider they accused him of being)?



Never mind.  Liberals are the cultural hegemons; they get to set the rules and they get to break the rules.



But old war-horse Pat Buchanan has a warning.  He argues that the last two successful presidential dynasties featured a sharp denunciation of the other side.  First FDR:

"They hate me, and I welcome their hatred," said FDR in the 1936 campaign. He believed that if a slice of the electorate was incorrigibly hostile, one ought not appease or court them, but use them as a whipping boy to rally the majority. With FDR, the foil was Wall Street, the "money-changers in the temple of our civilization."

Then Richard Nixon.  His divisiveness set up Ronald Reagan:

With Nixon it was urban rioters and campus anarchists and their academic apologists and elite enablers, and the demonstrators who blocked troop trains and carried Viet Cong flags as they chanted: "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! The NLF Is Going to Win!"

Pat is arguing that Obamian intransigence can work if he can get a majority on your side, and you have to agree that he has a point.



But let us remember that things had to come together for FDR and for Nixon/Reagan in special ways for his theory to work.



FDR may have won a resounding reelection in 1936 with his divisiveness, but his party lost 72 seats in the 1938 midterms.  It was World War II that made FDR into the father of his people and, incidentally, the great unifier.



Nixon so infuriated the opposition that they ran him out of office in his second term.  It was only the manifest incompetence of Carter and his stagflationary economic policy that got Republicans back in the game in 1980.



It maybe that President Obama is smarter than we think and that his display of partisan scorn is a master stroke.  But I'd say that partisan behavior is best for reelectioneering.  In 2014, with ObamaCare coming onstream and people finding just how much money and aggravation it is going to cost them, President Obama may find that his divisive politics unites a majority of the nation against him.



But maybe we'll get a war that will make President Obama into a national hero and elect Vice-President Biden as president.  Though that route didn't work too well for Bush.

How to Do Division

Everybody knows that a majority of white people vote Republican and overwhelming majorities of minorities vote Democrat.  This is known as politics.



In the good old days, politics, such as it was, was clan-based.  People didn't actually vote in elections, but they supported their family, or their tribe, or their local lord.



Then they invented the nation state, and people supported their language-in-common nation state.



All this is merely to say that politics is division.  The politician makes his living by dividing people. In the old days, they did it by uniting "us" in the family or the tribe against "them," the foreigners.



But the industrial revolution started mixing families and tribes and nationalities something new was needed, and it was Marx who developed the basis of modern politics.  The educated elite would divide the nation state up by class, pitting the working class against the middle class, the workers against the employers.



In the natural development of things, it happened in the United States that by the 1970s the division of workers vs. employers was starting to fray.  An old Democratic friend reminded me how it had worked.   Now that the worker had become a homeowner, thanks to an FHA loan, he told me, that ungrateful worker had become a Republican.



A generation before the machine politician had railed in similar terms against the civil service.  The bureaucrat with civil service protection stopped making his grateful contribution to the machine.



With the old working class ascending into the middle class a new method of division was required.



We all know what that is.  You only have to know that in America any Republican or conservative is a racist, sexist, homophobe unless proven innocent.



In Commonwealth the lefty manifestist duo Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri develop the intellectual apology for the new politics of identity by race, by sex, and by sexual orientation that has revised and extended the old politics of class.  They talk about the "violence and hierarchy of identity."  In their view "identity maintains hierarchy primarily through social structures and institutions."



Get it?  Identity is manufactured by the ruling class in order to create a hierarchy of oppression against the colored, the female, the LGBT.  Thus the lefty politics of race hatred, of anti-religious bigotry, of anti-family bigotry, of gay sequestration is represented as the fight against racism, sexism, fundamentalism, homophobia.  It really is brilliant.



When people demand that conservatives and Republicans reach out to blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, they are asking the impossible.  It is impossible to fight the left-wing politics of hatred by saying, hey, we are nice guys and we will propose a politics of quotas and free stuff, only not so much.



And I don't think that the implicit conservative/Republican program will work.  The idea of waiting until it's obvious to the black or Hispanic in the street that the Dems have betrayed them just won't cut it.  The Dem-voting minorities are like soldiers in an army.  It is very difficult to desert from an army, short of an absolute rout where discipline breaks down, because there is usually no place to hide.



No.  Politics is division.  That is inescapable.  Conservatives and Republicans have to find different ways to divide the American people, ways that cut against the Democrats.  But what?  Obviously, it's not that obvious, or someone would already have done it.



Let's look back to Ronald Reagan for some tips.  The big deal in the 1970s, when Reagan was beginning his rise, was the cultural backlash against the Sixties culture.  The "silent majority" was frightened and disgusted by the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.  The so-called Reagan Democrats were mostly people offended by the cultural liberalism of that era.  Reagan divided the voters by neutralizing the New Deal economic divide in favor of a cultural divide.



In fact, Reagan was so successful in dividing America that the Democrats were forced to amp up their race identity program and encourage massive Mexican immigration.  Their cunning plan created a whole new immigrant cohort that they could woo with class and ethnic identity politics.  As we know from Judis and Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority the Dems think they have a generation-long winner with their politics of identity.  And maybe they do.



But there is almost more than one way to cut a cake, and the profession of politics is finding new ways to do it.  Here are some ideas.

• Liberal war on the poor.  Liberals have demolished lower-class culture and the family.  There has to be a way to appeal to lower-class women on this, to show them that there is a better way than government dependency.  We are talking about the children.


• Liberal war on science.  Liberals advertise themselves as pro-science.  Except they don't believe in modern economics (other than the convenient Keynesian idea that more spending is good); they don't believe in climate science, as we are finding out; they don't believe in a crony-free economy, as in Solyndra, biofuels, wind energy.


• Liberal war on prosperity.  Liberals have convinced the middle class that they care about the middle class.  Then they go and pass a tax-cliff bill with $62 billion in tax loopholes for big business.  Come on fellahs; surely someone can figure out how to wage war on liberal crony capitalism.


• Liberal war on women.  One fine day women are going to wake up and realize that a culture of sexual license is anti-woman.  Look, I'm a guy; I appreciate that sexual license is great for guys, and forces women into bed.  The argument for female chastity is not just moralistic; it is practical.  The more things a women allows inside her body the bigger chance that she will get diseased and unable to bear children.  We've just experienced a generation when science could mostly kill the nasties.  But it looks like that era is coming to an end.  Look for a sudden change in the culture.

But really, I don't know anything.  All I have is faith.  Somehow in the next few years, a politician will rise to power on the right on the strength of some politics of division that cuts against the current Democratic advantage that boxes Republicans in on race and sex.  That's just the way the world works.

Dems to Retake House in 2014?

When I first read a piece connecting President Obama's take-no-prisoners tactics with Nancy Pelosi's plan to retake the House in 2014 I did a double-take.



Taking back the House in the sixth-year of a presidential term?  Are they serious?  But maybe what they are saying between the lines is that they are going to pull out all the stops to limit the damage.



Now there's a lefty report from Mother Jones on the fabuloso meeting of all the progressive groups to work out a "massive new liberal plan to remake American politics."



What might that be?  Well, it's nothing more than a three-part program to push Democratic advantages at the polls:

1. getting big money out of politics, 


2. expanding the voting rolls while fighting voter ID laws, 


3. rewriting Senate rules to curb the use of the filibuster to block legislation.

Oh.  Is that all?

What is really interesting in the article by Andy Kroll--all these lefties seem to write under nicknames--is the absurdity of their demonization of Big Oil and the Koch brothers.  Really.  Here we have all the progressive institutions, "labor officials, environmentalists, civil rights activists, immigration reformers, and a panoply of other progressive leaders" all planning a campaign in a "the kind of meeting that conspiratorial conservative bloggers dream about."  Ya think?

We are talking about this sort of thing:

"It was so exciting," says Michael Brune, the Sierra Club's executive director. "We weren't just wringing our hands about the Koch brothers. We were saying, 'I'll put in this amount of dollars and this many organizers.'"

Really.  And just what have the Koch brothers with their millions achieved recently against the Sierra Club and its billions?  And this:

 Greenpeace's Phil Radford notes that for decades conservatives have aimed to shrink local, state, and federal governments [in a] "a 40-plus-year strategy by the Scaifes, Exxons, Coors, and Kochs of the world…to take over the country."

There is a profound misunderstanding of what conservatism is all about in remarks like that, particularly where Exxon is concerned.  Exxon, dear liberal friends, is just a big corporation that knows it must pay protection money to keep the feds off its back.



But of course, that's what the left is all about.  It believes in a profound division between supposed "haves" and "have-nots" epitomized by "capitalists" that represent the modern incarnation of the feudal lords of the feudal era.



I realized, while writing a chapter in "An American Manifesto" a week or so ago that this is a complete fantasy.  It is just not true that capitalists sit astride modern society like feudal lords.  Capitalists are not and never have been a ruling class, except in the thousand years of the Serene Republic of Venice.



Oh, and by the way, the ruling merchant aristocracy in Venice was a pretty good governing elite.  You could check it out.



Today's ruling class is the ruling class of the educated elite.  Ours is an aristocracy of politicians and publicists, not a plutocracy of businessmen.



But the idea that businessmen rule the world is essential to the rule of the educated elite.  That is why The Communist Manifesto remains modern and vital.  Its message is the means by which the modern ruling class divides employers from employees.  And politics, let us never forget, is division.



That is why the progressives descant endlessly on "the Scaifes, Exxons, Coors, and Kochs of the world."  Their rule depends on workers mistrusting their employers.



I am reading right now the Hardt and Negri Commonwealth.  Today, the Marxists want their revolution to transcend both the capitalists and the welfare state, because they see a life in common among the multitude of "biopolitical production" meaning the modern creative economy in cities of individuals creating a spontaneous combustion of creative work and "affect."  These people will not submit to the control of the capitalists, that only slow them down, or the state either.



The trouble is that the common man has never been either a helpless proletarian or a creative singularity in the multitude of various lefty narratives.  Most people are social animals that go along to get along in the society and the economy of the day.  They work for employers because it is easier than working for themselves.  They take a fixed wage instead of the uncertainty of the market and its risks: what's not to like?  They resent the income and the power of their employer, well, just because.  Some people are creative; some people want to build a business.  But most people just want to fit in and stay out of trouble.



The saving grace, for conservatives, is that each progressive lurch ends in disillusion as the folks inspired by the New Deal or the New Frontier or the First Black President eventually realize that the incandescent hope of the great political hero isn't really going to make a difference in their lives.



In the rhythm of American politics that disillusion seems to set in about the sixth year of a presidential term.  The only exception seem to be when the disillusion sets in in the first presidential midterm.  And the rule seems to work whatever cunning plan the president's partisans may have to persuade themselves that this time is different.

The Second Amendment March on Washington

Obviously it will be a while before Republicans get a chance to enact good conservative legislation for America.  Even if they wanted to.  It is clear with his appointments that President Obama is going flat out to enact the most liberal agenda he can before time runs out.



Although I wonder about the idea that the Dems can retake the House in 2014.  Do they really think that or is it just bluster?



Meanwhile here is something we can do.  We can march on Washington to celebrate the Second Amendment.  Based on news reports that Americans are descending on gun shops in their tens of thousands and buying all the guns available, you have to think there is gold in them thar hills.



But I don't think we should have just the regular "march" where people gather on the Mall to hear speeches.  That is so lefty.



What I have in mind is a real march.  Men (and women) marching in companies.  In step.  Maybe they should be singing the "Song of Angry Men" from Les Mis.  They should be marching in companies because the company of 150 men is the natural size of a face-to-face body of men.



And there should be flags.  Usually your average regiment will have two flags, so I suggest a US flag and a "2" flag.  You know what the "2" is for.



Now I don't know Washington DC so I don't know how you'd do this march.  But I see the companies marching past a viewing stand somewhere on the Mall, at which huge articulated puppets, as in War Horse, representing the three great presidents, would review the marchers.



I see the three puppets representing Presidents Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan.



When the marchers pass the reviewing stand they would recite, from memory, the Second Amendment to the US Constitution:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Then the marchers would head home.



I think a march like this would be a good morale booster for all conservative Americans.



And it would utterly flummox our liberal friends.