How Much Freedom Do We Want?

We humans are social animals.  So far so good.  But in our modern era we preen ourselves on our emergence from the Dark Ages into the Light, from superstition into Enlightenment.  Today we are free, whereas people used to live under oppression: feudalism, patriarchy and all that.

But the curious fact about our modern era is the discipline.  Never mind the discipline of the old slave plantations.  What about the discipline of the factory?  Or the discipline of the schools, the government child-custodial facilities?  Or the modern office, with its ranks of dutiful drones sitting in front of their computers?   Construction: everything according to the charts and scratching of the project management plan.  Or the one-size-fits-all entitlement programs.

Do we moderns really want to be free, as the right proposes?  Or liberated, as the left proposes?  Or do we just want to be told what to do in return for our free stuff?

Here I am in this blog, busily damning to hell the injustice, the cruelty of the modern administrative welfare state: government is force, I say; politics is division; system is domination.

Here we have our liberal friends damning to hell the injustice, the cruelty of the modern corporation and the dastardly Koch brothers.

Could both be right?  If so, it could be that our modern society is the most oppressive, exploitative that there ever was.

Think about it.  In the bad old days of the feudal system at least the average peasant could run his day-to-day life without the constant interference from his lord.  Of course, if he didn't show up to do his share of the work on the lord's demesne, or pay his annual share of the crop, he'd be in a whole heap of trouble.  But otherwise, it seems to me, the lord left him alone.

Today the government is intensely interested in the details of our lives.  It makes us "legible."  It taxes us beyond the dreams of the old patriarchs; it wants to tell us what to eat, what to think.  It tells us how to save for retirement; it organizes our health care.  And of course it takes our children away from us to confine them in those government child-custodial facilities.  No exceptions.

Do we moderns really want freedom?  Or do we just want our modicum of free stuff and the luxury of complaining about our rulers as they order us about?

Maybe we just want to go with the flow until our rulers throw us over the cliff.  But then, by golly, we will show them!

What Women Want, Pt 37

Yes, what do women want?  It's the eternal complaint of men, because our lives are much simpler than women.



First we want a job, the kind of job that means that women will give you a second glance.  Then we want to get laid.



Women are more complicated because they want to be able to conceive, raise, and launch children.



So what about President Obama's universal pre-K proposal?  Is that what women want?  To get their children off their hands so they can get back to work and continue their careers?



Not exactly, writes Penelope Trunk.  Never mind that "Universal pre-K is bad for everyone."  And she has the links to prove it.

• Preschool does not help most kids.   The children of educated parents don't need pre-school; they are better off playing.  Boys especially.


• We do need good childcare. "Parents who are home with their kids want to have a break from their kids."  Of course, that's what the schools do for us.


• Universal pre-K is 1950s feminism.  It assumes that women want careers.  But actually most women want to raise their children and work part-time.


• Schools are a waste of time.  Middle-class parents are waking up to this.  After all, universal schooling was intended to train up the children to be factory workers.


• What about dead-beat dads?  Promote marriage and go after dead-beat dads.  So more women can stay home and raise their kids.

In other words, writes Trunk:

In light of the overwhelming evidence that kids and parents are better off without preschool, let’s use the funding for universal pre-K to help parents create safe, stable environments where they stay home with their four-year-old kids.

Hey!  Why stop there?  Why not end the hugely expensive programs paying seniors like me huge pensions and healthcare bills and return the money to the workers so that they can work less and spend more time with their children?

The Welfare State is Here to Stay?

Get a grip conservatives, writes Heather Wilhelm in her review of Peter Berkowitz's Constitutional Conservatism.  The welfare state is here to stay.  What conservatives -- libertarians and social conservatives -- need to do is propose how to reform it.



The easy response to that is Peggy Lee's.  Is that all there is?  All we can hope for is a little fiddling at the margins of big government?



But that pessimistic outlook ignores the difference between morality and politics.



Politics is the art of the possible, and right now politics is a contest of voting for free stuff.  And who can ignore the lure of the free stuff?  Not conservatives.  Conservative Carrie Lukas recalls the temptation of subsidized pre-school:

I lived in one of those celebrated European cities, Vienna, Austria, for two years, during which time they created a city-wide subsidy for  “preschools”...  When I no longer had to pay almost anything for my 4-year-old daughter, I signed her up for a longer day to make it easier on me.  I also enrolled my 2-year-old for the mornings.

So now the Obama administration is proposing not just universal pre-school but a jump in the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 per hour.  Who  couldn't benefit dropping the kids off or from more money at an entry level job?



The RedState guys propose that conservatives act like a wrecking crew, by proposing an even higher minimum wage--especially for fast-food and nail-salon workers--to teach those suburban moms a lesson.



But they only show that right now, "free stuff" rules, and so conservative politics must continue to dance around the disaster that is welfare state politics, trying to limit the damage.



"Real change," requires more than politics.  It requires a moral revolution, the kind of revolution that led to the American Revolution and the end of slavery.  That is what it would take to enroll the folks that I call "people of the marginalized self" into the ranks of the People of the Responsible Self.



In other words, welfare moms have to believe that having a child out of wedlock is a damning sin, because it ruins their child's life.  Middle-class Americans have to believe that breaking up is a damning sin because it utterly demoralizes their children.  Laid-off middle-aged workers have to believe that it is a damning sin to come up with a back ailment and get on Social Security's disability program instead of sucking it in and taking a job with less status or accepting a cut in pay.



People don't think that stuff up and change their lives on their own.  Instead they get swept up in the hysteria of a great moral movement, like the Great Awakening of the 1740s, and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s.  Think about gays all suddenly deciding that the most important thing in the world is gay marriage.  Where did that come from?



The thing about moral movements is that, although they are led by leaders, you can't turn them on and off like a light switch.  They answer the demands of the age, the inchoate feelings of the multitude that something is wrong with their lives.



But once you've got a moral movement on the march, then the politics is easy.  But that time is not yet, so that's why Peter Berkowitz is probably right.  Conservatives need to do the right thing, for now, and nibble around the edges of the welfare state.



But some day, come the revolution...

The People of the Responsible Self

We conservatives are the People of the Responsible Self.  The responsible self was invented back in the Axial Age in Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity.  And I suppose, Islam.

That's what Robert Bellah suggested in his "Evolution of Religion."  I blogged about this back on 9/11/2012.  Bellah argues that the Axial Age of "historical religions"

highlights the conception of a responsible self, a core self or a true self, deeper than the flux of everyday experience, facing a reality over against itself, a reality which has a consistency belied by the fluctuations of mere sensory impressions... [T]he historic religions promise man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.  The opportunity is far greater than before but so is the risk of failure. (my italics)

In his Sources of the Self Charles Taylor talks about the culture of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life. That is the culture of the People of the Responsible Self.

You can see that conservatives are the people of the responsible self by passing in review Ken Blackwell's sixfold typology of conservatism.

The social conservatives, according to Ken, are people that care about things like judges.  In other words, they are concerned, let us say, with the organization of civil society.  People that act in civil society are people that think they have a responsibility to serve their community.

The Christian conservatives are the "the pro-life and traditional marriage crowd, and are also passionate about religious freedom, home schooling, and raising their children with their beliefs."  If you don't think that approach to life is reeking with the idea of the responsible self, I gotta bridge I want to sell you.

The Second Amendment conservatives are the folks that think people should be allowed to possess the means of defense against the bad guys.  They think that when seconds count, the police are minutes away.  So there is no substitute for the responsible armed citizen that is ready to subdue a breaker of the peace.

The economic conservatives are people that have a  problem with taxes and government spending.  They think that people acting as producers and consumers in the market are the best people to make responsible decisions about economic matters.

The philosophical conservatives are committed to the idea of limited government.  Not much difference with the economic conservatives, except that they are thinking about how to implement and protect the institutions and the processes of limited government.  If the government is limited, then people need to be responsible.

The national security conservatives think that we should be serious about defending our nation in a dangerous world.  They just feel a responsibility to make sure that the US maintains a strong defense.

What unites our liberal friends is the marginalization of the responsible self.  Liberal elitists believe in the educated self, the creative self, the expressive self, the critical self, the compassionate self, but rather sneer at the bourgeois responsible self.

The clients of the liberals, the folks getting all the "free stuff" from the administrative welfare state are what I would call the People of the Pre-responsible Self.  They are people that would be responsible selves by now if only liberals hadn't enticed them into the liberal plantation with promises of loot and narratives of marginalization and victimization.  Liberals encourage their clients to abdicate responsibility and blame someone else.  The one big thing we need to do in America is to introduce the people of the pre-rational self from out of the sleep of ages to the idea that they could be responsible selves.  And transform their lives.

It's not earth shattering, this business of the responsible self, but it explains a lot.

The Kids are All Right. But...

What's the matter with kids today?  Why are they just sitting there taking it from the old 'uns like me?  If you ask me, they should be in the streets digging up cobblestones.

Instead, they are out voting for Obama and they are all in favor of bigger government.  That's what The New York Times's Sheryl Gay Stolberg found out when she went to the liberal college town of Missoula, Montana.

Sam Thompson, a 22-year-old environmental studies major at the University of Montana here, considers himself “fiscally conservative” but opposes cuts to Medicare; he expects to need health coverage when he grows old. Aaron Curtis, 27, a graduate student, admired Jon Huntsman, a moderate Republican, but could not stomach Mitt Romney’s opposition to same-sex marriage.

But really, what do you expect?  Here's a kid who's presumably spent his entire youth incarcerated in a government child-custodial facility, and about the only adults he's known have been the unionized, tenured, government functionaries we call "teachers." What else would he think?

The whole point of the Gramscian "long march through the institutions" is to get first crack at the young 'uns and "form their minds" as they used to do in Jane Austen novels.

But there is one thing to remember.  It's one thing to ram your ideology down the throats of the young.  The ultimate question is: will it work?  When the young heads full of mush get out in the world will they find that the ideas and the ideology that the tenured government functionaries have dished out actually work in their lives?

That's where we are with the millennials.  Their liberal teachers have taught them all the liberal PC stuff about the wonders of big government and the horrors of the patriarchy.  They have made girls into enthusiastic rowers and degreed them to a fare-thee-well.

And they have filled them full of propaganda about saving the planet and honoring traditionally marginalized minority communities.

But what's the point if there are no jobs for people with degrees in environmental studies?  What if the heavy lifting on the environment was done 40 years ago?

What if the government runs out of money for education and health care?  Do those millennials have a backup plan?

The point is that the ruling class of educated liberals have socialized the young generation to be nice obedient liberal drones, to be perpetual teenagers, in the words of Mark Steyn.

They have also socialized the young 'uns in "expressive individualism."  That's a fancy word for creative artist, and the notion goes back to the Romantic movement at the turn of the 19th century.

Expressive individualism is a fine thing, except that it's not very social, and humans are social animals.  The creative artist presents his--or latterly her--artistic vision to the world and then stands back waiting for the hosannas.

Only the world doesn't give a damn for his or her artistic vision.  In the classic Romantic narrative, the Romantic hero thereupon commits suicide, as in Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.

Obviously, to take a Kantian approach, this is nonsense.  If everybody gave up and committed suicide where would we be?

There is worse.  The whole cult of the creative artist is a canard.  The most creative thing that almost anyone can do is to marry and create children and then create healthy, useful adults out of those children.  One in a million gets to be a famous artist or a famous scientist or a famous politician.  For those lucky few, immortality is obtained by individual creative endeavor.  But for the rest of us, immortality is our children.

The Big Lie of liberalism is the idea that the mainstream of courting, marriage, career, children is a boring cop-out for the conformist people of the racist, sexist, homophobe 1950s.

Of course, if you plan to be a supernova, then the conformist mainstream is nothing but a red dwarf.  But what if you are not cut out to be a supernova?  Then the only way for your life to mean something is to marry, have children, and leave this world with a goodly clutch of grandchildren.

That's something that the millennials will shortly be learning, good and hard.  Writer Sarah Hoyt's son already understands how hard things are going to be.  She writes:

I was talking to my son the other day and he said “Everyone in my generation has flat given up.  The height of our ambition is to someday have a job that actually allows us to live independently.  There’s no grand dreams for us.”

It's a pity that decades of liberal big government are going to make it really hard to live a mainstream life of career, children, and family.

I'd say that if the millennials have any grit in them at all, they will be really angry when they finally figure things out.

Rile up the Base for 2014

OK.  I get it.  The president's strategy for the next two years is to rile up his base for the 2014 mid-term elections.  So that's why his State of the Union speech was all about the Paycheck Fairness Act, the Violence Against Women Act, the minimum wage, more crony climatism, and more government planning, as in "manufacturing hubs."



Oh, and maybe some minor tweaks on Medicare, paid for by the wealthiest seniors.



If you wanted to enrage the rank-and-file opposition you couldn't do better than President Obama last night.  Just about everything he said goes against every sentiment that throbs in the heart of a conservative.



Oh, and by the way, Mr. President, what about your anti-science policies on climate change and wages?  We know, and the science is in on this, that the crude notion of carbon dioxide as the main driver of runaway climate change is questionable.  And we also know that the minimum wage creates unemployment.  I'm shocked, shocked at the blithe way in which you ignore settled science.



I listened to Thomas Hayes-Morrison on the radio yesterday.  He teaches business at his local college in Gainesville, Florida, and said simply that the folks he teaches, who are all trying to better their lives, voted for Obama because they wanted to keep their benefits.  Really, you can't blame them.  The economic outlook is cloudy and there is a big storm over the horizon.  Who wouldn't want a bit of insurance with a government benefit?



So when will those good folks be ready to say that it is time for a change?   that is the great political question.  And the answer is simple: When they are even more afraid.  When that government benefit doesn't seem like insurance at all, but a bus shelter about to be carried away by hurricane-force winds.



The president seems to be betting all his cards on getting his base out in 2014.  Really, that seems like a long shot, because in second midterms the incumbent president's party almost always loses seats.  I'd say that the best strategy would be to try to limit losses.



But what do I know.  Maybe the president in a genius and Nancy Pelosi will storm to victory in the House in 2014.



But the lesson from military history is that when you make a big gamble--like the Germans on the Western Front in early 1918--then the cost of failure in incalculable.

The Progressive Era End-game

Probably there was no way for America but the Federal Reserve and the income tax.  "Everyone" was for it back in 1913.  It's what a modern country had to have.  Good central banking and a solid base of taxation to fund the social insurance programs invented in Germany by Bismarck.



But now we are approaching the end-game, according to Jay Zawatsky, natural gas guy and econ. professor.  It's either back to capitalism or the neo-fascism of Venezuela.

Given the power of the media and the inability of the current generation of Americans to withstand even minimal pain, the more likely new order will be one of increasing financial repression. 

He means that the Fed will keep printing money and maintain its zero-interest rate policy.  The ensuing inflation will hit "those who spend significant amounts of their income on food and energy."  Minorities and women hardest hit.



Zawatsky divides the nation into two opposing coalitions thus.  The Democrat coalition includes:

1. The 1 percent financial elite.


2. The 50 percent on the government dole.

The Republican side includes:

1. The top 24 percent (after the 1 percent) business owners and non-union employers.


2. The second 25 percent, the middle class with aspirations to the 24 percent.

Zawatsky sees the top 1 percent, the financial elite as the villains that "control the political elite through billions in direct and indirect campaign contributions," but I think he is naive.  He is buying into the left's "robber baron" narrative.



The financial elite and the crony capitalists are people paying tribute to the political elite.  It's important to understand this.  The modern ruling class is the class of educated progressives.  They rule through their ideas and through the free stuff with which they buy the votes of the bottom 50 percent.  They offer the 1 percent riches and influence in return for their contributions and their ideological support.  Ask yourself the question.  Can the 1 percent make and unmake careers in the political elite?  Not really.  Can the political elite make and unmake reputations and careers in the top 1 percent?  You betcha.



But the top 1 percent lives high on the hog, because they are very useful to the ruling political elite.



Here's another argument.  Over the past 100 years and more, the government has from time to time used the anti-trust laws to read the riot act to the rising big corporation of the time.  In the 1900s it was Standard Oil.  In the 1930s it was electric utilities and a nice union bill to tame the auto companies.  In the 1970s it was the anti-trust case against IBM.  In the 1990s it was anti-trust against Microsoft.  Now the target is Google.



What is the common thread through these actions?  These were powerful businesses growing to enormous size that were not much interested in government.  They made their money just by being first and best.  



But, as these corporations all learned, to paraphrase Trotsky:  "You may not be interested in government, but government is interested in you."  Government is force; politics is power.  When politicians see a potential rival they act to cut the rival off at the knees.



But back to the future of America.



The key to the future is what happens after the crash, what happens the day after the entitlement programs fail and the "increasing financial repression" fails.



On that day conservatives better be ready with an answer that will appeal to the broad majority of the frightened and desperate American people.  Or it's Argentina/Venezuela time.