What End of Entitlement?

Now he tells us.  The age of entitlement is over; the promises are worthless.  That's the word from the Washington Post's sensible Robert Samuelson.

We had a grand vision. We didn't merely expect things to get better. We expected all social problems to be solved. We expected business cycles, economic insecurity, poverty, and racism to end. We expected almost limitless personal freedom and self-fulfillment. For those who couldn't live life to its fullest (as a result of old age, disability, or bad luck), we expected a generous social safety net to guarantee decent lives. We blurred the distinction between progress and perfection.

There were four big assumptions at the heart of this, according to Samuelson: first, that we could control the business cycle; second, that we could enjoy lifetime jobs at big corporations; third, that improving productivity could pay for bigger government; and fourth, that lifestyle choices came free.



All wrong.  So now what do we do?



No answer, of course.



Let's put it this way.  There is no way we can avoid a crack-up, because people have been told, and believe, that all you need to do, as Samuelson quotes Bill Clinton, is "work hard and play by the rules, [and] you’ll have the freedom and opportunity to pursue your own dreams."



People interpret that to mean that all they have to do is sit on their butts, doing whatever they are doing, and they deserve to get supported by government.  The system will take care of them.



But life's not like that; it never has been.  The idea that hard work and following the rules is necessary and sufficient for the good life is a political chimera.  Yeah!  I put in my time.  I got my benefits coming.  I earned them.



It is not true that all we have to do is design and build a system, whether a corporate system at General Motors or a government system for Social Security and Medicare.  That's not how the world works.  And the neo-Marxists at the Frankfurt School understood that when they said that reason was domination.  Reason is always trying to impose a system on the world, whether it is a system to understand the world, a system to dominate the world, or a system to make the world go away.



You can't reduce the world to a system.  The world changes and adapts and surprises every moment.  To live in the world you have to be willing to change, adapt, and get surprised every moment.  If you don't submit to that then you are setting yourself up to be slapped upside the head.



Like right now.



So now we must start again.  We must wipe away the tears of disappointment, and cool the rage of ill-usage.  We must clear our minds and start to deal with the world as it is, not as we were taught.  Almost all religions call on their adherents to surrender to the world.  You can see why.  You can hope for salvation and for enlightenment, but first you have to live in the world as it is.



Now, of course, we already have remarkable adaptations that humans have developed to cope with the world as it is.  One of them is the family.  Another is the division of labor.  Another is the price system. Another is the credit system.  There is the tapestry of voluntary associations and civil society.  All of these are human social constructs that fall short of rigid system, but wonderfully facilitate human cooperation and sociability.



Think of it.  People care most for those nearest and dearest by blood.  So all societies down the ages have encouraged healthy families.  All except our modern progressives.  People prefer to become master of one rather than a jack of all trades.  But Marx said that the division of labor caused alienation of the worker from his species-essence.  The price system and the credit system are wonderful devices for channeling human labor into the ways that get people what they want and need.  So liberals do everything they can to attack the price system and subvert the credit system.  And civil society is much kinder and more compassionate to human needs and suffering than the force matrix of government.  So liberals destroyed the safety net of fraternal associations that grew up in the 19th century.



Why don't we go there and embrace the social adaptations from family to civil society?  Because the serpent tempted me, and I did eat.  Everyone is a sucker for a shortcut; everyone is convinced of his own virtue and his own right to the good things of life.  Everyone likes a birthday gift, a cadeau, a regalo: free stuff.  Hey, we're owed, we're entitled.



Well, now the god of system has failed.  Now we have to pick up the pieces and start again.



The only question is whether we will suck it in or continue to squabble over the fast disappearing spoils of the administrative welfare state up to the very day that the last goodie, the last benefit, the last chunk of free stuff is gone.  Cue the Fram oil filter guy.



Nobody knows how it will all turn out.  But we can work, and we can hope.

The Age of the Scrounger

If you are a conservative or Republican, chances are that you are a member in good standing of the People of the Responsible Self.

Nothing remarkable here.  The Responsible Self was invented during the Axial Age, according to Robert Bellah.  The idea developed that humans were not simply the helpless chattels of the gods but individuals, responsible before God for their lives.  It's the difference between the world of the Iliad in which the Greek warriors win or lose battles according to the politics on Mount Olympus and the world of the Hebrew prophets in which the Jews are urgently advised to get themselves straight with God.

But what about the rank-and-file Democratic voter?  I've been cudgeling my brain for weeks on this, just like dear old Alger Hiss back in the glory days of liberalism.  The key thing about a Democratic voter in the administrative welfare state is that she is not responsible.  She is marginalized, oppressed: a victim, so how could she be blamed for anything?

But what is the word, the one word, for someone like that.  Indignant? Malingering? Childish? Shameless? A day or so I came up with "subordinate," but that doesn't quite do it, because subordinates can be loyal and devoted, and the person I am thinking about is someone that doesn't think of themselves as part of a team but as an ill-used wife.

Wait!  That's it.  We are talking about the People of the Ill-used Self.  She is someone just sitting there, expecting to be taken care of.  Because she has been so ill-used.  Meanwhile she is scrounging off society for whatever is out there going for free.

I am not proposing this lightly, but as part of a comprehensive world view.

You see, back in the old days, humans were all happy campers living a cooperative collective life in the agricultural village.  Life was hard, but the risks and the perils were shared in the primitive communism of e.g. the Russian mir.

OK, in reality it wasn't like that at all because at all times some peasants had a fairly strong title to the land they farmed and others were practically slaves.  But the average agricultural village did pay its taxes in common and did reapportion land periodically in accordance with family size.

Enter the "enclosure" movement.  Our lefty friends like to represent this as the murrain of 1760 to 1850 but it is clear that it started hundreds of years before, as landowners started to acquire exclusive rights to land that had previously been held in common.

What was enclosure all about?  I suspect it had to do with an evolution in agricultural technique so that fewer hands were needed to farm and produce the crops.  But the downside was that people who lived on the margins of a village found themselves unable to access the land they were used to and were thrown on the scrapheap.

You'd expect that people like that would feel ill-used.  And they would be reduced to the life of a scrounger.  The fabled working class and the proletariat were, of course, the people that were thrown off the land in the late 18th and early 19th century and ended up working in textile manufactories and coal mines.  They felt ill-used.  They were right.

Right about then a great social revolution occurred in which the old landed ruling class got replaced by a new ruling class.  People like Karl Marx maintained with great fanfare that the new ruling class was the bourgeoisie, but really, he got it wrong.  The new ruling class was the rising intelligentsia of the 18th century, the coffee-house crowd like Samuel Johnson in England and the Encyclopedists in France.  The new ruling class was a class of educated publicists.  I call them the People of the Creative Self, or the Romantic Self, or the Educated Self.

This new class saw its opportunity and it took it.  It put itself at the head of the great mass of the ill-used, and declared them to be the salt of the earth.

There is no doubt that the folks getting pitched out of the agricultural world during the industrial revolution had a pretty hard time, although just how hard is difficult to determine through the fog of special pleading.  After all, it was in 1800 in Britain that all of a sudden the children of the poor started doing better than their parents in a world of rising expectations.

But the new class turned the worthy People of the Ill-Used Self into the deracinated People of the Scrounger Self, as they transformed the natural fear and rage of a people dispossessed into the institutionalized scrounging of the dependents of the administrative welfare state.

And that is the world in which we live:  the Age of the Scrounger.

Bush's Legacy

As the good and the great attend the opening of President Bush's presidential library people are suddenly discovering that Bush wasn't so bad after all. No kidding!  You mean he wasn't a complete failure and extremist as we have all been ordered to believe?



I suppose that President Bush's biggest failure is that this decent and cooperative president didn't do enough to counter the Democratic campaign to make him into a crazed warmongering extremist.



Because the fact is that the overwhelming majority of his policies were mainstream and bipartisan.  He pushed No Child Left Behind, a centralization and federalization of education that Democrats had to love.  He passed the Medicare Part D drug bill, that had been a Democratic issue for years.



He pushed back on 9/11 to spank the mullahs in Afghanistan, and did regime change in Iraq, which you may recall was Clinton administration policy.  What he did not do was cut and run in 2006 when his Iraq policy was in ruins.



If we turn to the financial crisis, that wasn't about "fighting two wars on a credit card. "



Earth to Democrats: all wars are fought on a credit card.  Ever heard of the National Debt?  What is really bad is running the whole welfare state on a credit card.  As in trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.



No, the big problem was the easy credit policy that had obtained ever since the Plaza Accord of 1985 ended the hard money policy of the Paul Volker Fed and ended in the Fannie Freddie sub-prime mortgage orgy of the mid 2000s.  What should Bush have done about that?  Hard to say, because the rest of the political establishment was pushing cheap credit right up to the last minute, from Nancy Pelosi complaining about a "jobless recovery" in 2002 to Barney Frank calling for another roll of the Fannie dice in 2004 as the Bushies pushed for reform.



Many conservatives fault Bush for not being conservative enough.  They forget that the country wasn't in a mood for conservatism when Bush ran.  That's why he called himself a "compassionate conservative."  People were all jazzed about the federal budget surplus in 1998 and were ready to loosen the budget strings a little.  So Bush went with the consensus.  After 9/11 Bush felt that he should work on unifying the country for a long twilight war against Islamic extremism, and didn't want to create division.  That's what he meant with his line that he was a uniter not a divider.  Pity that Democrats had other ideas.



The fact is that Bush was a mainstream president, pushing a little to the right, and that is what the nation wanted at the time.  What it needed is something else.



What the nation needs is to get off the death-ride of the administrative welfare state.  What conservatives need to do is persuade the American people that the conservative prescription of limited government and unlimited civil society is a good thing that will both be good for them as individuals and families and good for the nation as a whole.



The problem is liberals.  They own the culture, and they will demonize anything that conservatives propose to "do something" about the mess we are in.  They are the ruling class and that's what ruling classes do.



When we talk about a "pre-revolutionary" situation we mean a situation in which the authority of the ruling class is coming into question.  It means that ordinary people are beginning to question whether the ruling class knows what it is doing.



Think France in the decades coming up to 1789.  The old ruling class of the monarchy and the Church and the nobility went from disaster to disaster and people started to coalesce under the leadership of a new class of thinkers and publicists.  It was the "new class" that is still today the ruling class in the West.



Nothing can change until the present ruling class has staggered from disaster to disaster for a decade or so and had lost its "mandate of heaven."  Then we shall see.



By then, of course, President George W. Bush will be remembered practically as a saint.

People of the Subordinate Self

You and I, we are the People of the Responsible Self.  We think that we are responsible for who we are, what we do, and what we accomplish in life.

But this kind of human is fairly new on the world stage.  According to chaps like Robert Bellah, the Responsible Self appeared during the Axial Age when the great world religions were founded. Notoriously, this movement is exemplified by the Hebrew prophets, who told the Jews over and over again that each one of them stood responsible for their lives before God.

I've been having an email conversation over the past week with a person who doesn't believe that.  I've been toying with ways of describing such people, to contrast with the notion of the People of the Responsible Self.  I've tried People of the Victim Self, People of the Marginalized Self.  But I don't really want to make the name for "other" guy into too much of an insult.

So for today, I am coming up with "People of the Subordinate Self."  Such a person does not think of adversity as his own fault, or even his bad luck.  He thinks of it as society's fault.  It's because of exploitation or inequality.  Or robber barons, or Koch Brothers.

Do we as a nation want to take care or our elderly and disadvantaged and sick and poor or start more wars and continue to allow our nation to deteriorate in education, in infrastructure, in healthcare and in income disparity de[c]imating the middle class even more. 

Of course, my correspondent is not proposing that he should do anything about that.  He thinks that the nation should do something about it.  And the main problem is that the rich don't pay enough.

As I see it, America should be having a revolution to equalize the income disparity and the tax code so the top 1% does pay its fair share!  You ask how much is enough and I told you that the Eisenhower tax rate was 91%, and that is about right.

So I think that the right word for my liberal friend is People of the Subordinate Self.  You have seen people like him where you work.  "Why don't 'they' fix the pot holes around here?" Why doesn't management fix things?  Why don't the rich pay their fair share?  Why do they "continue to allow our nation to deteriorate in education, in infrastructure, in healthcare and in income disparity"?

In a parallel world, one Penelope Trunk is pushing the latest idea that you shouldn't go to college.  Here are the bulleted tips:

1. Skip college
2. Internships instead of school
3. Start a company, not a resume
4. Don't be linear

Most people react with enthusiasm, but some complain that not everyone can be a self-starting entrepreneur.  For, to make her idea work, you have to have a Churchillian obstinacy, and never, never, never, never give up.  Like her.

But that's the difference between the People of the Responsible Self and the People of the Subordinate Self.  It is between people that think that they are responsible for getting on the world, and people that think that the other "they" are responsible.

Mind you, I've always lived curiously in the middle of all this.  I'm not a hard-charging entrepreneur that works, works, works, until something works.  But I've never been someone to sit in a cubicle and whine about the management.  After all, management is human too, and muddling through like me.  

And I've always accepted the basic idea of "employment at will."  Because who would want to work for someone forced to keep you on the payroll by government force.

One thing the People of the Subordinate Self don't seem to get their minds around.  Suppose the political party or the political vision you have adopted fails.  As in: runs out of money for pensions, healthcare, education.  You got a backup plan?

But that is the whole point of the Subordinate Self.  You wait around for the boss to move.  And then you complain when he gets it wrong.

Watching Obama Fail

It's been a grueling 10 years, since the Dems went on the Bush offensive.  It has seemed as though nothing conservatives could do would stop the onslaught.



And the worst of it is that Democratic failures are all put on President Bush.  You can blame Bush all you want for Iraq, but everything else is bad Democratic ideas, from No Child Left Behind to cheap mortgages to stupid stimulus to cheap money and gargantuan deficits.



So conservatives can view the end of the Big Push with relief.  Now, maybe, as the Obamis fumble and bumble, the American people will be willing to listen to a conservative message.



The trouble is that it's not enough.  It is not enough for the American people to give up on liberals about once a generation and vote, sadder and wiser, for a Reagan or the Great White Hope of 2016.  We have seen what ended up after the rebirth of the Reagan Revolution.  It ended up with the locust years of Obama.  The American people voted twice for the most left-wing president since Roosevelt, twice.  And they are getting the same economy as the Roosevelt economy.  Twice.



We know what the problem is.  It's the culture.  No matter what conservatives put forward, it gets buried by the cultural hegemony of the ruling class, the educated class.



It's said that if you have to explain your position you have already lost.  Yes.  No doubt.  But it's important to realize that the Democrats have the media and the schools and Hollywood to do their explaining for them.  The only thing they need to add are the talking points.



Can conservatives ever hope even to an equality in the culture wars?  Probably not.  That is why people like me are reduced to predicting a moral revolution.  It is our only hope.



A moral revolution means that a critical mass of people in America make a moral turn in their lives and coalesce in a religious movement that starts to carry the rest of America with them.  It would not necessarily be a church-based movement, but something more like the civil-rights movement or the pro-life movement.



You can see right away the problem such a movement would have.  It would have to bulldoze through all the attacks from the liberal ruling class.  It would have to be Churchillian, and never, never, never, never give up.  In my view it would have to be a movement of young-to-middle-aged women.  They would have to be insisting on a woman's right to live a woman's life: a life based on love, devotion, chastity, and family.  Why?  Because anything else ends up brutalizing and objectifying and marginalizing women.  Or emptying woman's life of meaning.  I mean life as a career, sex as recreation, life without children.



As we see Obama fail, as he must, because of the poverty of his ideas and the emptiness of the liberal ruling class, we hope for better days.  But until women -- who usually do what they are told until it is too late -- rise up and demand a modern world that respects the life of women and things that have meaning for women, the years after Obama will only be a respite from the reduction of social life to an administrative life, and from association to domination, from society to state.



Until the revolution, then.

Just Say the Word

Foreign policy analyst Michael Ledeen has a good piece on our ruling class and its inability to face the fact of Islamic terrorism.  It just can't say that Islamic terror is a problem.  Take Iran, he writes.  We don't really need to deal with Iran militarily.  We just need to say the right words.

We can do a lot just by pronouncing the right words, like “we want a free Iran,” and “we support the Iranian people,” or “the Iranian regime is our enemy.” Those words would give hope to the regime’s opponents, and it would–as it would have in Boston–improve the quality of our own government’s investigators, analysts, and strategists.

The right words are important not just because truth-telling is important, but because it sends the right message to the bureaucratic functionaries.   Why?  Well look what happens when you discourage thinking about the "I" word.

The people who do counterterrorism shy away from seeing such terrorists, or potential terrorists, because if they point to such people, several bad things (from the investigators' and analysts' standpoint) happen.  First, the policy makers aren't going to do anything; second, the investigators and analysts aren't going to get promoted, or rewarded with bonuses; third, they may get sued or sent to the bureaucratic equivalent of Siberia.

Yeah.  Why stop there?  The problem is that the whole nation is being strangled by a kind of liberal cultural totalitarianism.

Young Suzy Lee Weiss writes a funny article in The Wall Street Journal about the hypocrisy of the college application process, and the Today Show has her on to sneer at her and marshal experts to say that she's spoilt. (And read the comments: most of them have drunk the liberal KoolAid.)

Instawife Dr. Helen Smith writes about the war on men at the university.  She points out that men have only themselves to blame:

The discrimination will continue because there is no push back. If 5-10 percent of men fought back, stood up and started realizing that men’s rights are human rights and that they are not victims for daring to believe that their voices in gender and reproductive equality are just as important as a woman’s is, then maybe things will start to change. Until then, the kangaroo courts and angry feminists will have their day.

Yeah.  Aren't men supposed to have the courage to face up to the bullies and tell truth to power?

As I write in my American Thinker piece this week, we are coming to the end of the current liberal Big Push.  Liberals are intellectually exhausted after the big offensive that got President Obama elected, Obamacare passed, and the president reelected.  And all the pretty stories that they wrote are starting to fray at the edges: Osama dead, guns bad, immigration vital, health care just a matter of the right system.

Not to mention the bigger stories: getting a look at the seedy side of abortion in the Gosnell case, what you might call the Age of the Liberal Coathanger.  Who knew?

There are lots of other liberal narratives that are coming apart at the seams.  Only the truth struggles to get out, because liberals don't want to talk about it.

Someone has written that the Marxists tell the best stories.  Well, maybe.  I've just been reading a book on Marxism, leavened by a look at sociologists Emile Durkheim and Max Weber.

And what is coming through to me is the Marxist insistence on turning everything into a mud-hole.  The division of labor is held out to be a monstrous culture of alienation, the separation of mankind from its true nature.  But Durkheim points out that a division of labor is the most natural thing in the world, for it issues from natural human sociability.  If humans are gathered together, it is natural that Bill will go off into one corner and concentrate on one part of the problem, while Suzy will work on another problem.  At the end of the day, people will gather together and discuss what has been accomplished.  That is supposed to be alienation?

The end of the recent liberal Big Push will provide conservatives with a new chance to bring the tawdry liberal lies into disrepute and, more important get our own glorious story out there in the public square.

Of course that is what I do every hour of every day.

The Injustice of the Administrative State

So sad.  The administrative barbed wire entanglement of the Senate's gun control bill, offered by Senators Manchin (D-WV) and Toomey R-PA), has gone down in flames.  It was a bill made up in administrative secret and bounced on the Senate in all its 800 page glory.  Next up is Sen. Schumer's Gang of Eight immigration bill, another administrative monster full of plans and guidelines and timetables.  How many pages does it have?

But don't forget the granddaddy of them all, the Affordable Care Act, with its veritable northern forest of administrative provisions stretching to the far horizon.  The 2800 page Act itself is merely a demonstration forest compared to the vast bureaucratic continent that will be planted to implement it.

Some of the wisest minds have recognized that the legalistic politics that we now practice is problematic.  It's wonderful to use science in our political deliberations, but what about the human factor?  Here we have our ruling class setting out rigid rules to solve all kinds of problems, from gun violence to immigration to health care.  But has anyone seriously thought about whether an administrative system is a suitable approach to these issues?

Karl Marx worried that the naked exploitation of the capitalist economy inevitably alienated mankind from its natural culture.  Max Weber saw the modern age as an age of rationalization, in capitalism and in government.  But haven't we created an "iron cage" with this rationalization?  The Frankfurt School chappies noted that man uses reason to dominate, both nature and other men.

And so we come to my mantra: government is force; politics is division; administration is domination.

You can see this in the way that our liberal friends exempt themselves from administrative oversight.  Michelle Malkin has a piece on how this works in the abortion industry.

The Pennsylvania Department of State was “repeatedly confronted with evidence about Gosnell” — including the clinic’s unclean, unsterile conditions, unlicensed workers, unsupervised sedation, underage abortion patients and over-prescribing of pain pills with high resale value on the street — “and repeatedly chose to do nothing.”

Or this:

And an inspector for the National Abortion Federation, the leading association of abortion providers that is supposed to uphold strict health and legal standards, determined that Gosnell’s chamber of horrors was “the worst abortion clinic she had ever inspected” — but did nothing. 

It's the same as regulation of the finance industry.  How could we get a financial crash like 2008 with all those regulatory agencies?

Or immigration.  How come that liberal cities are allowed to declare themselves "sanctuary cities?"  How come I can't declare myself a "tax sanctuary" and refuse to abide by the tax laws?

The answer is pretty simple.  Everyone is equal, but some people are more equal that others.  Some people are the favorites of the ruling class and they get a pass from the regulatory enforcers.  In the case of abortion providers, they get cover from the pro-choice activist community.  In the case of the finance industry, its distortions and vulnerabilities are baked right in by the government, which likes a loosey-goosie credit system for its own convenience.  In the case of illegal immigration, Democrats are the national political home of recent immigrants, legal or illegal.

The problem is that the administrative state always has and always will play favorites.  As soon as you have administrative boards and committees and a collapse of the market into bureaucratic ukase then you are going to get arbitrary decisions based upon political power.

That's not a bug, it's a feature.

The magic of capitalism is that it dissolves this injustice; it combines reason with sentiment.  It forces its practitioners to think about the other guy, about how its customers might be inconvenienced by its arbitrary decisions, and how it might pay in losses for a foolish decision.

That doesn't apply to bureaucratic administrators.  They only have to think of what might prevent them from collecting their pensions.

The good thing is that the administrative state is grinding to a halt.  It just can't adjudicate the complexities of the modern world.  That is why its bills must be drafted in secret and then sprung upon the legislature with a full court press of lobbying and bullying.

But we believe in a better America.  An America that has climbed past the administrative state to the sunny green uplands of freedom and responsibility.