Obama's Second Term Agenda

President Obama made things pretty clear to America in his second inaugural speech.



First, the president is foursquare behind the entitlements.

The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative, they strengthen us.  (Applause.)  They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.  (Applause.)

Nothing there about what we are actually going to do about the spiraling maelstrom of entitlement-fueled debt.



Then the president committed himself to battling climate change.

 We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.  (Applause.)  Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms.  

Not a whisper about the fact that the science is broken and the crony capitalists are cleaning up.



Finally, the president celebrated lefty activism.

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths –- that all of us are created equal –- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall...

It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began.  For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts.  (Applause.)  Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law  –- (applause) -- for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.  (Applause.)  Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.  (Applause.)  Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity -- (applause) -- until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country.  (Applause.)   Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia, to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm.  

Yes.  The non-stop liberal legislation of the past 50 years is merely the start.  We've got to chuck the women, the gays, the immigrants, the gun controllers under the chin.  There is still so much to do!



Back in 2009 I was really afraid.  I was afraid that the Democrats would capitalize on their political opportunity and move towards the center and co-opt the moderates and nail down a 30-year political majority coalition.  They might have oriented economic policy to appeal to the enterprising as well as to their base.  They might have done Obamacare to entice some Republicans into the deal.  They might have pushed through the Keystone pipeline.



But they didn't.  Instead, as Ron Brownstein has written, Obama and his people think they can now win elections just with their "coalition of the ascendant:" minorities, youth, and women, and without the old white centrists.



Maybe that strategy could work if it really delivered in economic prosperity.  But instead, with the huge costs coming up for Obamacare and the entitlements, we are going to see big-time economic stresses.



Obama is telling us that he proposes to do nothing about the government finances, not until disaster is staring us in the face.  In this, of course, he is a realist.  The entitlement beneficiaries--I am talking about you and me--are not going to agree to cuts until the crisis is upon us.  When it comes, we are going to see some kind of sovereign default: dollar inflation, debt "rescheduling", perhaps confiscation.  And we will see "cuts" in Medicare and Social Security, at least for the 401k classes who don't really "need" assistance.



It's all such a shame.  I just hope that what comes out at the other end is a better America and a better world.  Because otherwise the "coalition of the ascendant" is going to be royally screwed.

Three Liberal Injustices

Liberals are the ruling class in America, and that means liberal injustice.  Political power gives you the ability to lean on the scales of justice, and what's the point of power unless you abuse it?

The greatest injustice of the liberal era is probably the demolition of the low-income family.  There is no mystery about how this has happened.  It is an artifact of the administrative welfare state.  When you set out programs of free stuff, which people can get by qualifying as needy, then people will find a way to qualify.  The result, as Charles Murray has demonstrated in Coming Apart, is that in the bottom 30 percent work and marriage has collapsed.  He means that lower-income men don't work and lower-income women don't marry.  Lower-income children typically don't live with their fathers.  Higher income folks like you and me?  The top 20 percent are married, they work and typically don't get divorced.  There is a simple word for this: unjust.

Almost as bad is the sequestration of workers' savings.  It's hard for employees to see this, but easy to see if you are an employer.  About 20 to 30 percent of the cost of labor goes to the government for a range of programs ranging from Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, disability.  Of course all these monies are for the people.  But the people don't get to direct those monies; they are sequestered by the government and only available to people when they qualify, by age or by situation, for a disbursement.  This means that people are enrolled in a forced savings program but during most of their working life don't get the benefit of their savings.  Suppose people put that 20-30 percent of income in a savings account.  If they are prudent they would have enough money in 10 years to start a business, enough money in 20 years to send a kid to college, enough money in 30 years to retire.  Instead the money is given to politicians so they can buy votes.  There is a word for the sequester of the worker's savings: unjust.

The third great injustice is the nationalization of education.  It means that the culture of the ruling class is the only culture allowed in the education of our children.  When the First Amendment proscribes an "establishment of religion" it is demanding a separation between church and state, between the moral/cultural sector and the political sector. But the education of children is clearly a moral/cultural task.  The German ideal of education is "Bildung," an untranslatable word that means "form" or "image," the forming or development of a human being.  It stands to reason that any parent should have the freedom to direct the education of their children independently of the state and the views of the political ruling class.  It stands to reason also that a ruling class will abuse the power to educate our children, to mold them into mindless supporters of the regime, and that is what has happened.  Liberals like the current system because they are the ones that get to set the educational agenda.  But there is a simple word for the education system in America: unjust.

There are six ways of looking at the monstrosity of our modern ruling class: its cruelty, its corruption, its injustice, its waste, its ignorance, and its delusion.  Today we have dealt with injustice.  There will be more to come.

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.