Republicans Doing the Right Thing

Way back, 39 years ago, when President Nixon was impeached in the House of Representatives for lying about Watergate, three Republican senators went down Pennsylvania to tell the president that he had to resign rather than face trial in the US Senate.  The three senators were Jim Buckley (R-NY), Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), and Hugh Scott (R-PA).



By the way, Hillary Clinton was a young staffer on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate.



Were those three senators patriots,  asks F.H. Buckley?  Nah.  Patsies.



Because 20 years later, when President Clinton was impeached in the House of Representatives for lying about Monica Lewinsky, Vice-President Al Gore went down Pennsylvania Avenue to hold a pep rally for the impeached president and encourage him to fight on.



What was the point of Republicans doing the right thing and telling President Nixon to go if the Democrats won't to the right thing when a Democratic president breaks the rules



Now, of course, we have a new presidential scandal, about the Obama administration lying about the killing of a US Ambassador in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012.  So what should Republicans do?



They should do the right thing, even if the Democrats won't, and even if the "spectacle of the Dems on the Committee trying to save Hillary was sick-making."



Politics is a rough game, and the Clintons play it harder than most.  But there is no percentage for Republicans and conservatives to play the Clinton way, and here's why.

• The Clinton hardball and the Obama Chicago way require willing accomplices in the media to echo their statements and excuses and accusations.  Republicans can never get that kind of support.  So hardball doesn't work.


• Liberals and Democrats believe in politics like a religion.  The political game of Us against Them gets transformed into the religious battle of Good against Evil.  So politics for them is a battle of Good against Evil.  Conservatives and Republicans don't believe in the salvific effect of politics.  For us, the drama of good and evil takes place outside politics.


• Conservatives and Republicans are "People of the Responsible Self."  We believe that each of us, individually, is responsible to God, to our self, to our families, our neighbors, our country for our actions.  That means that it is difficult to justify questionable means to obtain a noble end.

Anyway, life and politics do not stand or fall on tactics.  There are bigger things in play than the way you throw a punch on the playground.



The bigger thing is that, however the Clintonistas and the Obamis play their games and coverups over Benghazi, the failure in Benghazi points up the bankruptcy of the see-no-evil foreign policy of the Democrats.  Obama bin Laden is dead, but Islamism is still a totalitarian ideology that a nation like the United States should name and oppose.  The question should be: what are the appropriate means to this end?



The bigger thing is that the Democrats are pursuing a disastrous economic policy that will end in tears --either in inflation or in financial crisis.



The bigger thing is that the Democrats' refusal to reform government entitlements and the rest of their creaking bureaucratic government programs is going to lead to real widespread hardship among Democratic voters when the government runs out of money.



So the right thing to do is to be formulating policies and messages to deal with the coming disasters, to solve them competently and with the least amount of hardship to the American people, including even the foolish Democratic voters that keep voting for the free stuff that, soon enough, will stop.



And if, in the future, a Republican president lies to the American people and covers it up, we can only hope that there will again be three Republican senators with enough honor and principle to go down Pennsylvania Avenue and tell the president it's time to go.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs and Politics

Conservatives are always worrying about being out-politicked by the liberals.  Here's Daniel Henninger at The Wall Street Journal noticing that liberals are at work trying to defuse the youth jobs issue while conservatives argue with each other over immigration.

In Campaign 2012, Barack Obama promised the youth vote a rose garden. What they've got instead, as far as the eye can see, is an employment wasteland. 

So what are liberals doing about it?  They are trying to defuse it.  But really, they don't have an answer.  There's a study from the Center for American Progress, "The High Cost of Youth Unemployment," that, well, throws up its hands.

While this problem won't go away soon, the Times piece [on the CAP report] suggests how it will be explained away. The problem is global (true), and the "root causes" include low educational achievement (true, just don't mention the teachers unions) and not enough retraining. To help, we also could ease those parts of "the regulatory thicket without societal benefits" (translation: hands off ObamaCare). Other than that, economists find all this youth unemployment "a very big puzzle." Hmm. 

This sounds as though the liberals are still in throat-clearing mode on jobs.  Meanwhile Sen. Ted Cruz is running this all-hat-and-no-cattle tweet about Obama and jobs.  How long can it be before the MSM is trying to sideline Cruz as an extremist "bomb-thrower"?



Look.  Conservatives don't get to talk directly to the "yoof."  Liberals have the kids' liberal teachers, liberal college professors, liberal script-writers, liberal musicians.


But there comes a time in the life of every young person when they have to wonder about the story that the adults have told them.  Then, and only then are they ready for a new narrative.  By 2016 every intelligent young person will surely be wondering what went wrong.



Another thing.  The remarkable Hillary Clinton will, apparently, be running for president in 2016.  She will celebrate her 69th birthday just days before the election.  Leading a Clinton machine that is now over 20 years old.  They say that a national political figure has a shelf life of about 20 years.



My guess is that the US voters in 2016 will be thinking that it is "time for a change."  I don't see the youth vote getting all excited by a figure from the past.  I don't see the minority vote getting all excited after the disappointments of 8 years of Obama.  But I do see the gun people being all riled up.  And I do see the beginnings of a sea-change on the abortion issue.  Here's a touching story about a man who was nearly aborted by his 17-year-old mother in 1975.  When mother and son talked about it here's what went down.

She asked if I could forgive her. I answered, “Yes, with all my heart.”

Yeah.  Think about it, young 'uns and old 'uns.  There is one remarkable thing about not being aborted.  You get to play Jesus and tell your mommy that you forgive her for thinking about abortion.



The coming years are going to be so serious that the usual liberal tactics just aren't going to do the job for them.  Because the American people are going to be face to face with the most awful problems.



But the main problem is pretty simple.  After a century of the welfare state western society is all gummed up with the great inflexible entitlements and privileges that rigidify everything from the economy to the individual working lives of people.  The only way forward is to dissolve these encrusted corrosions and privileges.



In practice this means that the next political genius has to figure out how to persuade the grannies not to do the Charlton Heston line: You can take my Medicare out of my cold dead hands.



The promise of capitalism is that it will shower us all with prosperity, but only if we surrender to its mandate of permanent economic revolution.  There is no sacred right to a lifetime job, no right to a permanent pension, no right to intimidate other people out of a job.  Everyone must surrender to the daily orders of the market.  This commandment is encoded in the idea of the "invisible hand" that we should all first work to serve others in order to obtain our sustenance.



But government is force, politics is division, and so political leaders have always tempted people with the idea that they have a right to demand their rights and impose them on the rest of the nation.  This always ends up as a bureaucratic system, and system is domination, so every government intervention ends up as coercion and domination, replacing an old injustice with a new one.



I don't think that the liberals will be able to finesse this problem with fancy footwork and a compliant media much longer.  By 2016 the US voters will be in a nasty mood, and they won't be dutifully singing in the choir like they did in 2008.



But you never know.

Capitalism is Not a System

A great irony of our modern era is that at exactly the same time that the Cartesian-Newtonian world-view was emerging the anti-systemic capitalist culture was emerging as well.

On the one hand you had the billiard ball determinism of Newtonian mechanics.  On the other hand you had the infinite complexity of the market process.

So why do we talk about the free-market "system", the price "system", the credit "system" when they aren't systems at all.  System is mechanical, system is an equal and opposite contest of rational Newtonian forces.  But the free market, prices and credit are the realization of human cooperation and competition between adaptable flexible people.  They are not systems at all.

Socialism and communism, on the other hand, are attempts to reduce human interaction to rigid systems.  They are attempts to universalize the taxing bureaucracies of the absolute monarchs and the articulated military machines those monarchs developed out of the undifferentiated feudal host.

When you wanted to fight an early modern battle, the undifferentiated feudal host didn't do the job.  You needed to articulate it into a uniform hierarchical system with interchangeable parts.  That's why the generals of the absolute monarchs developed the regiment, the battalion, the division, and why Napoleon developed the Army Corps.  The army commander needed a way to communicate his will down to the smallest subordinate unit and the individual soldier.  It takes a system to force everyone to obey the supreme commander.

After a century or two the Germans started to take a critical view of all this.  Chaps like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment concluded that applying reason to society resulted in system and domination, for what men want from reason is to dominate nature and other men, so domination is encoded in the very meaning of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason.  System is domination, I like to say.  And the reverse is true: domination implies a system to keep everyone in place.

Then we get to Jürgen Habermas and his effort in the Theory of Communicative Action to divide the world into two parts, the world of system and domination on the one hand and the world of communicative action on the other.  So Habermas sets up an opposition of System and Lifeworld (Lebenswelt).  Notice that the book's title in German, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, suggests that "Action" is a limiting translation that does not communicate the full meaning of Habermas' project.  "Handeln" in German means "action" but it also means to trade, deal, negotiate or haggle.  Itinerant Jewish peddlers are associated in German with "Handeln."

So the real meaning of Habermas title is "Theory of Communicative Negotiation."  And actually, that's what the book is all about.  How do we negotiate truth values and understanding and agreement about what the world looks like and what to do about it?

Now it is clear that the market, the process of buying and selling and pricing and borrowing and lending, is implied in the full meaning of "kommunikativen Handelns."  Every capitalist act is a communicative trade, deal, negotiation or haggling.  Every human act is a communicative trade, deal, or negotiation.

But government administration is a process of rule setting and enforcement, of system building and adjustment, of intimidation and coercion.

No doubt that's why Habermas picked up the word Lifeworld from Edmund Husserl.  It is a useful way of opposing the mechanical assumptions of "system" and foregrounding the idea that all human action in the world is connected with "life".

So perhaps we should talk about  the "price lifeworld," instead of price system, the "credit lifeworld" instead of credit system,  and maybe the "civil lifeworld" instead of civil society, because we want to emphasize the two-way communication, the essential "intersubjectivity" of human action in the world.

Alternatively, given the replacement of Newtonian physics by Einsteinian and quantum physics, perhaps we should pick up the language of the physicists.  The basic physics of sub-atomic "particles" is quantum field theory, and the basic mathematical formulation is called the probability function.

One of the basic methods of analysis in this new physics is through analysis of conserved qualities.  Mass, for example, is not conserved; that's what E = mc² is all about. But energy is conserved, angular momentum is conserved (so-called "spin"), electric charge is conserved, and so on.

It is clear that the interactions between humans could use the notions of "field" or "probability function" that were developed for the new physics.  Any particle exists in a probability function until it actually participates in an event.  Just as prices are just methods of communication until an actual exchange act at an agreed price takes place.

I don't know where all this should end up.  I just think we should lose the old Newtonian, Enlightenment words like "system."  Because they are not communicating the right message.

We humans live and work in a lifeworld, not a system or a matrix.

Horowitz's Foreign Policy Indictment

It was in the summer of 2003, David Horowitz writes in National Review, that Democrats broke the post 9/11 consensus and started the "Bush Lied" meme.

The moment when Republicans lost the national-security narrative — and abandoned their role as defenders of the homeland — came in June 2003, just six weeks after the Saddam regime fell. That month, the Democratic party launched a national television campaign claiming that Bush lied to the American people to lure them into a war that was “unnecessary,” “immoral,” and “illegal.”

It was a meme that carried Barack Obama into the White House and built the Democratic majorities in Congress that could pass Obamacare.  Only, of course, if Bush had "lied" then the Democrats had lied too, because they had access to the same intelligence.

Bush could not have lied to Kerry or the congressional Democrats about WMDs in Iraq, because Kerry and other Democrats sat on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees and had access to the same intelligence data that Bush relied on to make his case for the war. When the Democrats authorized and supported the war, they knew everything that Bush knew. The claim that he lied to get their support was itself the biggest lie of the war. Its only purpose was to hide the Democrats’ own perfidy in abandoning the nation’s mission for partisan gain, and to discredit the president and turn the country against him, at whatever cost, in the hope of winning the 2004 election.

In Horowitz's view Republicans lost their right to be taken seriously as defenders of the homeland when they failed to push back on the "Bush lied" meme.  So here we are ten years later and Republicans just lost an election where no Republican candidate made national security a big issue.  Indeed, when Michele Bachmann and others made an issue of Hilary Clinton aide Huma Abedin's family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, even Republicans sat on her.



Why won't the Republicans fight, asks Horowitz?



The answer is, because they don't want their army to get demolished.  For warriors like Horowitz it is always time to fight.  But Republicans understand that they must pick their fights.  They cannot, like the Democrats, inject their memes into the public square and expect them to find their way into the mind of every American.  In the summer of 2011 Republicans could not have won the hearts and minds of Americans with complaints about a "jobless recovery".  They just don't have the cultural power.  Sometimes they just have to retreat.



Let's look at the political cultural scene from 30,000 feet.  On the one hand there are the liberals, who don't really like capitalism and don't really like western cultural hegemony.  They see themselves as an educated elite with the moral right to rule America.  Their political power is based on identity politics and the distribution of free stuff by the welfare state.



On the other hand there are the conservatives, who believe in capitalism and believe in an aggressive defense of western culture, from the nation state as a solvent for tribal animosities to the idea of limited government, civil society, traditional religion, and traditional families.



But the American people are right in the middle.  They don't really like capitalism although they like personal achievement; and they like the free stuff from the welfare state.  They are patriotic, but also tribal.  They are traditional, but they like to kick over the cultural traces.  And they vacillate between isolationism and making the world safe for democracy.



In other words, liberals and conservatives have to dissemble.   Liberals have to pretend that they like a strong growth economy and the flag of the United States and "working families."  Conservatives have to pretend that they support Social Security and Medicare and "our teachers."



You can only win as Ronald Reagan when liberals have been messing things up royally for a few years.  You can only win as Barack Obama and bring the troops home when the American people get tired of war.



But if the facts of life are conservative, as Margaret Thatcher may have said, then the facts will eventually win.



Liberals had a chance to adopt the broad outlines of a new political consensus in the 1980s to replace the Keynesian administrative welfare state consensus of the post-WWII years.  But they didn't.  They didn't buy supply-side economics, they didn't buy the reduction of administrative regulation, and they didn't buy the idea that the US should oppose totalitarianism.



The Obama years are the full-dress trial of whether America can flourish with a return to Keynesianism in economics, regulation in government, and "leading from behind" in foreign policy.



In my view, given the liberal refusal to learn the lessons of the Reagan years, we are bound to learn the Reagan lessons the hard way, in economic distress, in cultural decay, and in an advance of Iranian-led Islamism.



When the American people have had enough they will tell us, and there will be plenty of Republican politicians ready, willing, and able to lead us to the sunny green uplands of conservative prosperity and civil society cooperation.



But until then, we must learn to wait.

Keynes is Still Get-out-of-a-jam Economics

Oh dear.  Niall Ferguson, author of numerous books on finance and banking, has received an offer he couldn't refuse from the gay mafia.

He made the mistake of attributing the Keynesian formula of borrow and spend and inflate to Keynes's gayness and childlessness.  Good lord, man.  You should know that you are not allowed to make silly remarks on gays in today's America.  Christians, black conservatives: open season.  But not gays.

Can't you read?  It says right there in the First Amendment that hate speech, as defined by liberal activists, is not a right.

OK.  So I'll retreat to the second line of defense.  Keynes thought the way he did because he was a Bloomsberry, and wanted to knock down everything that Victorians and Edwardians held dear.  All part of the left-wing attack on capitalism and individualism and Christianity.  Nothing personal, old chap.  I expect that Ferguson had something to say about this in The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization.

Because the whole point of cultural leftism is to oppose and marginalize the growth and achievement ethic of the capitalist entrepreneur.  When you do this you have to replace it with something else, and the Bloomsberries and lefties were happy to oblige.  That something else is the administrative welfare state.

But the administrative welfare state creates a problem.  It puts the credit system on the moral equivalent of a war footing.

In the old days, a nation's economy would only get into trouble as a result of a war.  War credits would upset the balance between debtor and creditor.  During the war debtors would benefit as inflation and government borrowing reduced the value of their debts.  After the war creditors would benefit as financial assets increased in value.  Deflation.

But in the welfare state the government inflates the economy even in peace time.  The result is credit booms that end in recession.

That's all very well, but the government still has to keep paying off its supporters through its welfare-state distribution programs.

Under the old gold standard, you took your lumps.  If the market crashed then bad debts got liquidated and people started over.  Of course, the central bank acted to prevent a liquidity crisis and the collapse of the whole credit system, including both sound and unsound borrowers.

But in the crisis of the Great Depression the political hacks at the Federal Reserve Board didn't understand their job.  They allowed banks to fail and allowed the money supply to contract through the knock-on effect of bank failures.  This was regarded as a failure of capitalism.

Also, the US government raised taxes and raised government spending during the collapse.

It was Keynes who had the genius to come up with a plausible economic doctrine to prevent a recurrence of the Great Crash.  Government would now do what came naturally, and borrow and inflate madly during a recession.  That would tide the economy over until business activity recovered.

Probably, Keynes was wrong.  Probably the only thing needful to do is to stop systemic bank failures until the panic is over.  In other words the government uses its credit to bail out the banks and guarantee deposits until the liquidity crisis passes.  Then it's back to business as usual.

It's salutary to look at the lessons of the Crash of 2008.  In that case, with the failure of Lehman Brothers, the government did not perform its proper function of preventing systemic bank failures.  So you could say that it failed to learn the lesson of the Great Depression.

The policy to prevent systemic bank failure is not a Keynesian innovation.  You can see it developed in the classic Lombard Street by Walter Bagehot.  That was back in the 19th century.

Really, the danger of Keynesianism is not that Keynes was gay, it is that it is causing on the wrong thing.  The problem is not a lack of stimulus.  The problem is to deal with the load of bad debt that appears in a market crash.  In the 1929 crash the problem was bad margin credit on stocks and bad farm loans.  In the 2008 crash the problem was bad mortgage loans.

So the task for the government during a credit crisis is to deal with the uncertainty --  the lack of "credit" -- caused by the bad debt, the debt that is secured by assets that are no longer worth enough to liquidate the debt without loss and the debt of non-performing debtors.  Keynes muddied the waters by focusing attention on the aftermath rather than the crisis itself.

(One of the ways of dealing with the aftermath is with a "bad bank," a government bank that picks up and sequesters all the bad debt so that the players in the credit market can now be confident that their counterparties can be trusted.)

But all that misses the basic point, that modern welfare state governments weaken the credit system because they are always gaming it to pay off their supporters.  Who knows when we will be able to deal with that problem?

Nobody Knows Nothing Except Cooperation

My whole life is about understanding the world in which we live: the world of the utterly unappreciated  social miracles like the "price system" and the "credit system" that are not really systems at all, but universes of humans cooperating together.



So here comes Kevin Williamson from National Review writing about the same thing.  He reminds us of Leonard Reed's great discovery: "Nobody knows how to make a pencil."  There are a few people, somewhere in this world, that know how to do bits of it.  But for the rest of us, all we need to know is how to use a pencil.

That is the paradox of social knowledge: Of course we know how to make a pencil, even though none of us knows how to make a pencil, and pencils get made with very little drama and no central authority, corporate or political, overseeing their creation.

But if everyone can enjoy the use of a pencil or an iPhone, how come the Obama daughters go to a better school that the offspring of immigrants?

The reason for that is politics: not liberal politics, not conservative politics, not bad politics, but politics per se... The useful knowledge in any modern society is distributed rather than centralized... Markets work for the same reason that the Internet works: They are not organizations, but disorganizations... pockets of organization, their internal structures and relationships to one another in a constant state of flux. Market propositions are experimental propositions.

So when you have centralized systems -- of education, for example -- you get the Obama daughters getting a good education and the poor getting a lousy education.  Because that's how politics works, always and everywhere.



And then we come to the central truth, the one we do not want to confront.

 Conservatives like to say “Markets work,” as though that were an explanation of anything. What we really are saying is: “Failure works.” Corporations are mortal. Failure is not only an important part of the market process, it is the most important part of the market process.

Failure means that every corporation goes to die, because in the end it fails to adapt, fails to anticipate the market, fails to serve the consumer.  Want to find an immortal corporation?  Try politics and the US Postal Service, or Amtrak, or your local education monopoly.  They are not really immortal, but living in an half-dead zombie existence, not really producing wealth and prosperity but sucking the blood out of the living to continue a twilight existence.  Being already half-dead they do not grow or evolve.  They merely suck the life out of others.



We do not have a market system or a profit system or a price system or a credit system, for these human cooperations we insult with the notion of "system" are anything but.  They are organisms, joinings, adaptation, trust, good-will, and hard-learned lessons.



The hardest thing for everyone is to surrender to the challenge of constant change.  Everyone longs for a reprieve from change.  The disappointed liberal longs for the certainties of the 1950s when everyone had a lifetime job -- except they didn't.  The conservative longs for the halcyon days of the nuclear family -- except that it never was.  The academic longs to implement his intellectual system -- except that no system survives the first day of implementation.  But reality is much bigger than that.  It is a triumph of not of dominating system, or frantic competition, but cooperation.  Williamson again.

But what is remarkable about human action is not its competitiveness but its almost limitless cooperativeness. Competition is one of the ways in which we learn how best to cooperate with one another and thereby deal with the problem of complexity — it is a means to the end of social cooperation. Cooperation exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom, but human beings cooperate on a species-wide, planetary level, which is a relatively new development in our evolution, the consequences of which we have not yet fully appreciated. If you consider the relationship of the organism to its constituent organs, the relationship of the organ to its cells, or the relationship of the single cell to its organelles, it would not be an overstatement to say that the division of labor is the essence of life itself: Birds do it, bees do it, but human beings do it better. 

But Marx, as we recently complained, wrote that the division of labor was an inhuman and destructive alienation.  What is wrong with these people?

Liberals on Koch

Years and years ago the culture king Richard Hofstadter wrote The Paranoid Style in American Politics.  That was in the glory days when liberals knew they were going to inherit the earth.  Here is Hofstadter stating his thesis.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years, we have seen angry minds at work, mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated, in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But, behind this, I believe, there is a style of mind that is far from new, and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style, simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

He goes on write about fear of Illuminism, Freemasonry, the Jesuits, ending up with the paranoia of McCarthyism and the John Birch Society.



Only, of course, there really were Communists in the State Department and they really were spying for the Soviet Union.



I like to say that, when people lose four presidential elections in a row, they start to get crazy, and they start to look for something under the bed.  That is what happened to the right in the late 1940s.  Also, of course, when things start to go wrong people are tempted to see the hand of Satan.



Things aren't going too well for liberals right now, and so they are inclined to look for the hand of Satan and hidden conspiracies.



Like the Koch Brothers, principal owners of Koch Industries, a private multinational corporation

involved in core industries such as the manufacturing, refining and distribution of petroleum, chemicals, energy, fiber, intermediates and polymers, minerals, fertilizers, pulp and paper, chemical technology equipment, ranching, finance, commodities trading, as well as other ventures and investments. The firm employs 50,000 people in the United States and another 20,000 in 59 other countries.

I don't know who first decided to gin the Kochs up as Principal Corporate Villains, but you can see the convenience of putting a human face on oil companies and conservative foundations.



Your average Exxon-Mobil is merely a public corporation led by faceless corporate bureaucrats.  The Koch brothers are libertarians that fund Reason magazine, the Cato Institute, have put a bit of money into climate skepticism, and also do things like fund a new science center at their New England prep school, Deerfield Academy.



Yes, the Koch brothers are libertarians not snaggle-toothed Christian conservatives.



Now the Koch brothers are thinking of buying the Tribune newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times that was once owned by the liberal Chandler family.  It turns out that the journalists at the Times are terrified.

The thought of the Koch brothers purchasing the Los Angeles Times so distressed staffers attending a recent in-house award ceremony that half of them raised their hands when asked if they would quit their jobs should the paper — which has come out of bankruptcy court and is very much for sale — fall into the two oil billionaires’ portfolio, the Huffington Post reported recently.

Oh please.



In my view liberals are shooting themselves in the foot by getting their knickers in a twist over the Koch brothers -- not to mention Christian conservatives, right-wing "hate groups" and corporate personhood.  It shows that liberals are worried.  And you don't want to let your enemy think that you are getting a case of the shivers.



If liberals had any sense they would be working night and day trying to figure out how to fix the mess in the economy and the train wreck that we call the welfare state.  If liberals could straighten that out it wouldn't matter what a couple of libertarian businessmen were doing or what the Christian conservatives were doing.  Liberals would be expanding their majority as Americans in their millions would come to experience the liberals as wise and sensible leaders.



But in fact the liberals are sitting in a circle complaining that the all-powerful Koch brothers aided by the wascally Wepublicans in Congress have spoiled the soup.  They have no ideas for jump-starting the economy except more government spending and more debt; they have no ideas for fixing the welfare state other than more of the same.  Oh and they think it would be a great idea to go back to the tax rates of the 1950s when everyone had a good job at good wages at a big corporation.



That's when people gravitate towards the paranoid style in American politics.  When they are flat out of ideas and flat out of get up and go.


I was talking to a liberal friend the other day.  She still thinks that Barack Obama is an intellectual.  And she is old enough to know that you cannot believe anything you read about presidents until people start to write the show-and-tell biographies long after the powerful have left the stage.



Really, the liberal obsession with the Koch brothers is the most encouraging political portent out there.  It shows that liberals have lost it.