Wile E. Coyote Politics

The great faith at the heart of modern conservatism is that it can't go on like this.



Of course, we've been saying that for decades, and yet liberalism seems to go on from triumph to triumph.



Well, maybe it doesn't triumph, but it still manages to keep handing out the free stuff and win votes.



When and how does the music stop?  In bus fare riots in Brazil, where the government is now rescinding a 7 percent increase in mass transit fares.  Or food riots in Egypt, where food has been price-controlled since the days of Abdul Nasser in the 1950s.



No doubt we'll see the same thing here in the US when they start curbing EBT use.



The trouble with free stuff is that eventually you run out of other peoples' money; but the people on the receiving end of the free stuff have come to take it for granted.  So they take to the streets.



I'm wondering how the twentysomethings are going to take to the gigantic increases in health insurance this coming year as Obamacare comes on stream and they find out that they are the guys that are going to pay for it.  Do you think they will take to the streets?



David Hogberg has a telling article about this.  It's about the impact of Obamacare on the twentysomethings of Portland, Oregon.  Think about it.  The whole idea of moving to Portland is to live a low-geared life, without the cost of a car or a home or a spouse, and just hang out for a few years in the single-friendly culture of liberal Portland.



But just think what the Democrats are doing to the young singles.  First of all there is the repayment of those student loans.  Yes, we all know how Democrats care about students, but we also know that the main effect of student loans has been to rack up college fees.  One fine day the Susie Goodgirls are going to wake up and realize they've been had.



Now the Democrats are proposing to make young singles pay for Obamacare.  You think that somewhere along the line the young singles are going to get it?  That they are being played for patsies? That all the stuff about wars on women and Republican bigotry on abortion and gay marriage means nothing compared to the fiscal burden of student loans and mandatory health insurance?



I know.  Don't hold your breath.



And then there's education in general.  George Will has a retrospective on inequality where he reminds us that education is not really an equalizer.  He reminds us of Edward Banfield's 1970 comment in The Unheavenly City:

All education favors the middle- and upper-class child, because to be middle or upper class is to have qualities that make one particularly educable.

Yet liberals chunter along, secure in the faith that education is a good thing for everyone.  They mean, of course, that education is real good for liberals so it stands to reason that it is real good for everyone.



Meanwhile the middle- and upper-classes are taking their children out of government education and home-schooling them or sending them to private schools.



And meanwhile liberals are pushing an immigration bill that will generate more competition for the low-paid workers.



Now we hear that President Obama is going to do a big push on climate change, starting with regulations to retire coal-fired electric plants.  Golly gee, I wonder what effect that will have.  I guess it will create lots of jobs for young women with degrees in environmental science, but not much for the low-paid worker that needs cheap energy to create jobs.



For conservatives, "these are the times that try men's souls."  Everything that we know and feel tells us that the nation is being propelled to disaster by a cruel and unjust ruling class.  Subsidy is piled on subsidy, administrative folly on folly, the government bureaucracy is swung into action to intimidate the ruling party's opponents.  The divisive words of election campaigns are extended into the "permanent campaign."



We know that at the end of the Obama era is not just a change of administration but something far more daunting.  The future prosperity of America will only begin when the twentysomethings of Portland, Oregon get a life.  When the folks that gave up in the Great Recession and got themselves on Social Security Disability get back in the game.  When the folks gaming the welfare system get a job.  When the single mother gets a husband.  When the green energy cronies get into an honest business.  When the education system gets a Hercules.  When people start to pay for their own health care.  When people save for their own retirement.



But the fact is that under the rule of the liberal ruling class every one of these sensible, practical ideas, in which people direct their lives towards responsibility and service, has been shredded to pieces.  The fact is that as the money runs out tens of millions of folks are going to be consumed with rage, starting with the twentysomethings in Portland.  Just like the folks in Brazil and Egypt.  And they'll probably blame the insurance companies and the bankers, and whoever else the liberals set up as a scapegoat.



There's a piece of Wile E. Coyote in every politician.  He fearlessly chases after some Roadrunner, confident in the knowledge that he'll catch the little feller around the next bend.



Problem is, when the politician rams into a rock wall or runs off the edge of a western mesa, it's not the politician that ends up in red ruin.  It is the political supporters that suddenly find their free stuff snatched away, forever.

Are Student Loans Really Debt Slavery?

Our liberal friends are constitutionally unable to critique their own programs.  Whatever liberals have done, it must be good.

So that means one thing.  Conservatives must do the critique for the liberals.

Look, every ruling class thinks like God.  It looks at its creation and decides that it is good.  Then it takes a day of rest.  You could look it up: Genesis 1:31.

But ruling classes come and go.  Why is that?  Don't they see how their rule and their corruption enrages the people they order about?  No.  They don't.  As the dancer says in Shall We Dance? when he warns the sensible salaryman that's just taken up dancing: You'll be the last to know -- that everything has changed about you and it sticks out like a sore thumb.

So I was a bit shocked when I read a while back that you can't discharge a student loan in bankruptcy.  Used to be that you could get rid of a private student loan in bankruptcy, but not any more.

The standard student loan repayment is ten years from the time that you quit school.  But if your income doesn't quite measure up you can usually qualify for the Income-Based Repayment Plan. "Income-based plans provide for payment of 15% of disposable income for up to 25 years, then the loan is forgiven."

Just between you and me: A "payment of 15% of disposable income for up to 25 years" is a tax, a rather substantial income tax.  Nice, isn't it?  You get that nice student loan from Uncle Sam and then he slaps you with a 15% income tax for the next quarter century.  Of course, there are ways of getting out of paying, like disability.  And I should think that if you are a loyal Democratic voter known to powerful people there must be a way...

What should we call this insidious system of taxation?  I have an idea.  Let's call it "debt slavery."  Although the current term used by liberal experts when applied to third world nations is now "debt bondage."

Debt slavery is particularly notorious in India, where it has been practiced since time immemorial -- or at least Vedic times, which amounts to the same thing.

Bonded labor involves the exploitive interlinking of credit and labor agreements that devolve into slave-like exploitation due to severe power imbalances between the lender and the borrower.

Hmm.  "[S]evere power imbalances between the lender and the borrower."  Couldn't happen here.

But think about it.  Student load up with debt at a time when they have no idea what kind of money they are likely to make, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences.  But debt is quite simply the anticipation of future income.  You say: look, I can expect to earn $67,000 a year for the next ten years if I get a college education instead of $47,000 a year if I don't so my monthly payment will be worth it.
But what student can make a judgement like that?  Maybe an engineering student or a computer science student.

What actually happens is that high-school graduates like Susie Goodgirl go to college because it is expected of them and they load up on loans because everyone else is doing it.  And being a good girl, Susie assumes that everything will come out right.  That's what women have been doing since the dawn of time.  When things don't go right -- well that's when you get Angry Woman Syndrome.

You can see why government has gotten into the act.  It makes no sense for a lender to make a student loan, not unless it has nice government subsidies or the coercive power of government to turn the loan into a tax.  And taxes, you know, can't be discharged in bankruptcy.

Of course, there's every reason for the government to cook up a system that shovels money at government schools.  That's because the people that work at government schools and government-grant consuming research universities, from president to janitor, are good loyal pro-government voters.  They live in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, where something like 85 percent of people vote the Democratic ticket. Is "debt slavery" too harsh a term to use for our kindly student loan system?  You make the call.

The Shame of the Liberals

In my American Thinker piece, "The Consequences of Liberalism" I championed the individualism of the conservatives against the tribalism of liberalism.

I presented individualism as the new collectivism of the city, inaugurated by the Axial Age.  The point of individualism was not to free the individual from his ties to society, to encourage uncontrolled rugged individuals.  It was to make each person responsible individually to society and to God for his behavior.

The point of individualism is that it provides a means of socialization and fraternal ties in the city to replace the old system of clan loyalty and blood brotherhood.

Obviously, in the new city culture, the old ties of blood and kin are problematic.  Max Weber argues that the relative decline of India and China during the great world conquests of the West in the last 500 years issued from their failure to ditch caste and clan loyalties in favor of the new individualist social ethos of the western city.

Suppose you are a ruling elite.  Having read your histories and your philosophies and your theologies you would appreciate that the secret to a healthy wealthy society in the modern age was now to help people, as they move to the city, to transcend the old ties of blood and develop the new ties of individual responsibility, the ethos of the "responsible self."

If you were a wise and compassionate ruling class you would realize that the people coming to the city -- and they are coming to the city in China at the rate of over 10 million a year -- needed to hang on to their old blood and clan ties, but that they needed help, a "nudge" in fashionable argot, to transition to the new individualist "responsible ego" rather than hide in the collective mass or blame scapegoats for their problems.

This is what our liberal friends have failed to do.  First they bid for the support of the working class by appealing to class tribalism.  Now they have extended that, with their "identity politics," to race tribalism and gender tribalism.

There is only one word for this failure of nerve and failure of responsibility.  It is shameful.

Here we have a Reuters report of the great and the good gathering for a TED conference in Scotland.  There was George Papandreou of Greece.

He admitted that hardship had been imposed on people who were “in the main, not to blame for the crisis” and accused the European establishment of uncritically, and at great cost, clinging to “the orthodoxy of austerity.”

Small Greece, he argued, had been made the scapegoat for a larger political and economic failure.

Then "Didier Sornette, a professor of risk at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, took the world’s financiers to task for being so bad at anticipating asset bubbles."  Followed by a foundation director taking the ratings agencies to the woodshed.

Then there was the economics professor who argued that far from thinking of the "state sector as a Kafkaesque world of inefficiency, bureaucracy and frustration", we should remember its contribution to the Internet and the iPhone.

Then Chrystia Freeland, the Reuters reporter, talked about her "chief obsession, soaring global income inequality" and finishes up with a Russian speaker on neo-liberalism in retreat.

But of course all this is rubbish, a superficial review of the symptoms of the problem, a picture of the ruling elite thrashing around in abject failure.

The mess of the last decade is the consequence of the ruling class failing to lead and instead using its power instead to entice voters into surrendering their birthright for a mess of pottage.  And the tactics it has used, over and over again, are the tactics of tribalism.  Don't trust those bankers.  Don't trust those conservatives.  Don't trust the corporations.  Trust government to deliver pensions.  Trust government to relieve the poor.  Trust government to lean on the credit markets to get you a mortgage.

But, of course, government promises things it just cannot deliver, starting with the problem that it cannot, because nobody can, predict when and how people will be able to retire and stop working in 30 years from now.

The result has been endless disaster, starting with the German inflations of the 1920s.  Government had promised all kinds of benefits before WWI, and after the war they couldn't be met.  So the government inflated and destroyed the savings of the middle class.  Way to go, Klaus.

Then we had the central bank follies of the 1920s followed by the Great Depression.  Then after WWII we had financial repression as nations got out from the burden of WWII war debt.  Another euthanasia of the rentiers.  Then we got the Great Society, a huge increase in entitlement spending followed by the inflation of the 1970s.

While getting out of the inflation mess, we ended up bankrupting the political darlings of the Savings and Loans, at a cost of about $150 billion.  Then the government started a huge boom in housing with its government sponsored mortgage giants, Fannie and Freddie.  When they came down 2008 they nearly wrecked the global economy and required the printing presses to be sent into orbit to clean up the credit mess.  Yes, the bankers were bad, but they were just putting lipstick on the GSE pigs.

So what we are seeing is the ruling class continually trying to pitch out of a jam.  But they were the guys that got into the jam by promising things that they couldn't deliver on, that nobody could deliver on.  They were the guys offering free stuff, and who can resist free stuff.

That is the shame of the liberals.  They came offering gifts to the working stiff, and the working stiffs believed them.  When things got sticky they resorted to crude race cards and class warfare, the tricks of the tribal leader, to rally their base and keep the votes coming in.

Well, now the lies and the deceits are rebounding on the liberals.  Their vaunted Keynesian economics has delivered 1-2 percent growth.  Their comprehensive and mandatory health care plan is looking more and more like a train wreck.  Their schools are failing, and their college graduates, the ones that voted so enthusiastically for Barack Obama, are being sold into a revival of the old injustice of debt slavery, the ancient trick of the ruling class to keep the peasants down.

Yeah.  "I owe my soul to the company store" ain't got nothing on the student debt lark.

Liberals have had a great advantage over the recent decades of being able to say anything and have the mainstream media just go along.  But is it really an advantage?  It tempts them into saying things that just aren't true.  Eventually, that stuff catches up with you, as we are finding out right now.

Imagine if the media had held Barack Obama to a higher standard than the one they set for wascally Wepublicans.  Then Obama wouldn't have tried his intimidation tactics and the folks at the IRS wouldn't have thought it was their job to go after tea party groups.

And we wouldn't be looking at the Obamapaloosa scandals.  And we wouldn't be looking at a likely eruption in the 2014 elections.

Personal Note for Ruth Bader Ginsburg:  It I were you I would resign my seat on the Supreme Court next month to make sure that President Obama could get a nice liberal through the Senate before the 2014 campaign and the 2014 election.  Just a thought.

What Laws? Liberals Get a Pass

If there is one single thing that makes me angry in Obama America it is that the laws don't apply to liberals.



Let me be more specific.  When liberals themselves break the law they get special kid-glove treatment.  Think Timmy Geithner and his unpaid taxes back in 2009.  It's always nothing to see here, move along.



I remember the first liberal non-scandal that really annoyed me.  It was the Clinton Travel Office scandal in 1993.  The Clintons fired the head of the White House Travel Office, Billy Dale, on a trumped up charge, and nobody in the mainstream media blinked an eye.  Billy Dale was an institution, but the Clintons wanted the job for a crony.



But there is another side to this.  It is the passing of laws that don't get enforced on liberal clients.  Think welfare.  Think Earned Income Tax Credit.  Think voter ID.  Think illegal immigration.  Here's Edwin Meese, President Reagan's aide and Attorney General talking about the last time we had a comprehensive immigration reform bill.

The '86 reform bill also had supposedly "rigorous" border security and immigration law enforcement provisions. So how did that pan out? On the day Reagan signed "comprehensive" reform into law, only one thing changed: Millions of unlawful immigrants gained "legal" status. The promised crackdowns on security and enforcement never happened. Only amnesty prevailed.

Look.  I'm not naive.  I understand that illegal immigrants that want to stay are in a horrible situation.  And I understand that for Democrats the immigration issue is electoral gold, as it shows they care about Hispanics, and it provides a supply of future Democratic voters.   But there is the other side to this.  That high levels of immigration, legal and illegal, generate huge competition for low-wage jobs.  Does nobody care about the low-paid Americans and their needs unless it's giving them benefits and handouts.



But there's another side to this.  It's the over-enforcement of the laws where conservatives are concerned.



Now we learn that little Lois Lerner at the IRS was all over conservative groups applying for 501(c)4 status, making them jump through hoops that went way beyond the spirit of the law.  Now we read that the NSA is all over our cellphone "metadata." Now we are told that government terrorist training videos feature right-wing white militias, and that the FBI has been kept out of radical mosques, including the one attended by the Boston bombers.



Guess what's coming up next.  Under Obamacare there will be tax subsidies for people below a certain income, and it will be administered by the IRS on a claim now, check later basis.



There seems to be three systems of law in the United States.



There's the one that applies to the liberal elite.  For liberals, there's a pass.  Violate the law, and we'll go easy on you.  Don't worry about not paying taxes, about the head of the EPA hiding her operations with phony email IDs.  Don't worry about raising money from insurance companies to fund Obamacare roll-out if you are the Secretary of Health and Human Services.  Don't worry about paying for documents in a FOIA application, if you are a liberal group.



There's the system that applies to liberal clients.  This system of law seems designed to encourage liberal clients to find a scam and feed off it.  Whether it's EBT, SS disability, EITC, voter registration.  There seems to be an established nod-nod-wink-wink culture that tolerates 20-30 percent of benefits going to ineligible beneficiaries.  Then there is the vast off-the-books economy that is partly driven by the enormous payroll taxes and partly driven by the huge illegal population.



Then there's the system that applies to the broad middle class and conservatives in particular.  Don't you dare cross the line, buddy!  Tarring and feathering as a racist, sexist, homophobe will be the least of your problems.



There is, of course, a word for this three-level system.  Injustice.  You'd think that somehow, some way, some conservative politician would have found a way to turn this injustice into electoral gold.  But it hasn't happened, not yet.



And I don't understand why not.

Can You Trust a Liberal?

Now that America's Aunt Peggy has weighed in on the subject of trust in government, we know that trust is a real issue -- and not just partisan bleating from conservatives and Republicans.



It curious that this is even an issue.  Trust government?  Come on!  Government is force, politics is division.  You should trust government as far as you can throw it.



But in practice we trust government when our guys are in charge.  And the whole thrust of partisan politics is to teach the moderates and the uncommitted voters not to trust the present government.



For liberals things are a bit different.  They have unbounded faith in their ability to create a world of peace and justice through government.



In the 2000s the Democrats did a superb job of teaching ordinary Americans not to trust George W. Bush and whipping Democrats into a partisan lather about Bush and his lies.



Please.  If you are a Republican president you dare not lie the way that a President Obama can lie, because if you do every liberal from the New York Times to the left-wing foundations and activist groups and liberal professors will eat your lunch.  That's why President Bush had to gussy up stuff on WMD before going into Iraq.  He put together some credible intelligence and sent Secretary Powell up to the UN to publicize it.  In the end, of course, it turned out that there were no WMDs in Iraq.  So Bush lied.



Back in the late 1960s the big question was the "credibility" of President Johnson on Vietnam.  He had been assuring everyone that things were going fine in Vietnam but we, the media, knew better.



President Obama's trust crisis is a bit different.  The scandals of the lasts six months have a different patina than the "Bush Lies!" era or LBJ's "credibility."  The Obama scandals show that Obama people will do anything to harass and intimidate the other side.  The setup is that Obama stigmatizes conservatives or Tea Party people or Fox News in his speeches as extremists or obstructionists and the media and the folks is the bureaucracy merely follow his rhetorical lead.  It doesn't hurt that their college professors years ago taught them that conservatives are wicked.



At this point, what difference does it make?



The point is that Rule One in politics is: Don't rile up the opposition.  That's probably why the winning side usually dials down the partisan heat after an election and says that we are all Americans and now we should pull together.  Then the winning side tries to structure its policy to get some of the opposition party to vote for their legislation.



The Obama scandals demonstrate to every non-liberal American that for the Obamis, the war never ends.  The Obama scandals demonstrate that the Obamis don't just use their own campaign assets in the political battle but the assets of the IRS.  This is not surprising, if you listen to the progressives.  In their world politics is everything.  The whole point of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals is never to let up on "them," ever.



Theoretically, this divisive strategy might work.  It might be that Democrats have forged a permanent political majority and they can afford to marginalize and harass conservatives without getting in political trouble.



But the fact is that President Obama got reelected in 2012 on fewer votes than 2008.  The popular vote in 2008 was 69.46 million to 59.93 million.  In 2012 it was 65.62 million to 60.88 million.  Imagine what could happen if Republicans were really motivated to vote and Democrats were no longer voting for the First Black President.



President Obama was elected on great wave of not mere trust, but faith.  By 2016 Democrats will have drawn down that well to the bitter dregs.



Then it will be anyone's game.

"A Conspiracy So Vast"

The last time that liberals got into real big-time trouble was back in the McCarthy era.



You see, liberals, being the fashionistas they are, had gotten tangled up in the big political fashion of the 1930s: communism.  They had joined the American Communist Party, many of them, or even done a bit of spying on the side.  See Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss.



So along came the young generation of politicians, WWII veterans like Richard Nixon (R-CA) and Joe McCarthy (R-WI) and made a little political hay out of it.



How Dare You!  That was the response of the liberals of the time.  You see, men like Nixon and McCarthy came from rather modest backgrounds and Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White came from the bluest of blue American blood.  A chap like Alger Hiss could never have betrayed his country!  And the very idea of believing a shambling accuser like Whittaker Chambers, darling.  Do you know where he grew up?  Brooklyn and Lynbrook, Long Island.



The beauty of it all was that after the whole thing had blown over and Sen. Joe McCarthy had left the Senate we were all taught to believe that the problem was McCarthyism and "guilt by association".  Why, do you know, those wascally Wepublicans were actually investigating the innocent political associations of good New Deal liberals.



It's true that Sen. McCarthy had used rather florid rhetoric in his campaigns against Communists in the State Department, and he could never get straight just how many Communists there were.  But hey, who expects a politician to be precise on his arithmetic or consistent in his rhetoric?  Certainly not President Obama!



The current liberal mess is not, of course, a conspiracy, any more than the liberal Communist spies of the 1930s and 1940s were a conspiracy.  No, it's been really worse than that, both times.



In the 1930s and 1940s liberals were getting their fingers burnt in the Communist Party because that's what "idealistic" young people did back then.  They all drank the KoolAid of the era, that World War I was the fault of the Merchants of Death and that capitalism was a dead letter -- when it wasn't exploiting the workers.  Why, their college teachers told them so!  (And KoolAid hadn't even been invented yet!)



Same thing today.  There isn't a conspiracy to deep-six conservatives and their political associations.  There doesn't need to be.  Nice young ladies like Lois Lerner don't have to be recruited into obstructing and harrassing conservative politicians and activists at the Federal Elections Commission and the IRS.  They were taught to "hate Republicans and everything they stand for" when they went to high school and latterly when their college professors railed against racists, sexists, homophobes, and anti-choice fascists.  They just know that conservatives are wicked.  Why do you think we have government schools?



And now we learn that the media is tied to the Obama administration by blood ties.  There are lots of media types married to people in the Obama administration.



The more I think of it, the more it feels like the years leading up to the French Revolution.  Budget problems?  Check.  Monetary instability?  Check.  Doofus head of state?  Check.  Exciting but foolish intellectual movements?  Check.  Mindless attitude of superiority in the ruling class? Check.  Laws do not apply to the ruling class?  Check.  Douceur de vivre (for the ruling class)? Check.



Will liberals manage to blame conservatives for the whole thing after the Revolution, like they did after the Communist spy era?  Who knows?  It all depends on how much cultural power they have left after the dust settles on the Great Obama Scandals.

The Guardian Does Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School seems to give conservatives the willies.  Founded as the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1920s, its mission has always been to deal with "Problems in Marxism," in other words to rescue Marxism from the failure of its prophesies.

Now Peter Thompson in The Guardian has written an 8 part review of the Frankfurt School. Links here.  Is it any good?  Well, I found it useful in guiding my own study of the Frankfurt School.

My take is roughly that the Frankfurt School was basically honest.  It was trying to create real knowledge from the debacle of the Marxist prophesies that became evident in the 1920s.  Thus Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment argued that the problems of the world weren't just due to capitalism and its exploitation.  Domination was encoded in the very idea of Enlightenment.  Men use knowledge to dominate nature and other men.

But this makes a nonsense of the progressive view of history, including the Hegelian dialectic, taken up by Marx, that sees a progression, through the dialectic, from thesis to antithesis to synthesis.  Obviously, this is not true.  History does not always progress forward. Thus, in Negative Dialectics, Thompson writes, Theodor Adorno argued that

history is not the simple unfolding of some preordained noumenal realm and that existence is therefore "ontologically incomplete".

In other words, Marxian prophecy is out.  This obviously complicates the Marxian narrative, because now it admits that things aren't as simple as Marx prophesied.  Well, I'll have to read Negative Dialectics to find out.

With Marcuse, of course, we get to "repressive tolerance." Thompson:

This is the theory that in order to control people more effectively it is necessary to give them what they need in material terms as well as to let them have what they think they need in cultural, political and social terms.
Parliamentary democracy, he maintains for example, is merely a sham, a game played out in order to give the impression that people have a say in the way that society works. Behind this facade however, he maintained that the same old powers were still at work and, indeed, that through their tolerance of dissent, debate, apparent cultural and political freedom had managed to refine and increase their exploitation of human labour power without anyone really noticing.

Agreed.  But nothing that the Marxists have proposed have done a thing to fix this.  Conservatives have, in our notion of "civil society" and "mediating structures."

Then we get to Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch.  Thompson says that they argue that Marxism is the spark of liberation contained within the authoritarian corpus of religion.

To those who criticise communism and Marxism as "merely" a new form of religious belief, Benjamin's position – as with Ernst Bloch, whom I shall look at next week – was that religion was actually a vessel that contained within its authoritarian history and structures the spark of liberation which could only be fully realised through historical materialist transformation. In that sense religion is "merely" an old form of a future and as yet unrealisable dream.

Conservatives would say that unless the religious power and the political power are separated then all you are going to get is authoritarianism rendered down into totalitariansim.  As all regimes pretending to Marxism have shown, from Lenin to Chávez.

With Jürgen Habermas and Alex Honneth Thompson turns to "reification."  Although it simply means "thingification" I always worry that I don't understand "reification" in the way that Marxists do.

Strictly speaking, as I understand it, reification refers to the fact that, under capitalism, it seems that people do not relate person to person, but instead as object to object.  The exchange economy depersonalizes people into objects.  In traditional Marxism there is no way to remove reification and alienation except through the destruction of capitalism.  But Habermas has another way, Thompson writes:

Rather than maintaining that nothing could be done to improve conditions until capital had been dislodged and replaced by a socialist system he was much more interested in finding ways in which the public sphere could be gradually transformed into a space where domination by the media and the big ideological apparatuses of the system could be replaced by interactive and intersubjective dialogue from below.

Yep.  As I read Habermas, he is saying that the intersubjective public sphere is a balance to the reification of instrumental reason as implemented in the exchange economy and the administrative state.

Now here is Thompson on Honneth.

Honneth goes back beyond Lukács and Marx to early Hegel and locates the basis of reification not in social, economic or structural terms but in the problem of "recognition" or what Plato called Thymos which, alongside reason and eros form the three basic parts of our psyche. Of course this platonic triad could be said to be equal to the Freudian division into id (eros), ego (reason) and superego (thymos) and in that sense, reification continues the psychoanalytical tradition within the Frankfurt school. But Honneth also de-ideologises it by removing structural economic factors and foregrounding individual psychology.

But according to Wikipedia, Platonic Thymos is passion, spiritedness.  I don't get it.   And when I look at commentaries on Honneth, I get it even less.

The problem with the Frankfurt School, for conservatives, is that they are still looking for liberation here on Earth, as their lefty pals have been doing for two centuries.  They dream of a world without work and suffering, without injustice and inequality.

Conservatives are different.  We believe that a world of work and suffering is inevitable.  What we can do, in our social, economic, and political institutions, is mitigate the sorrows of life.  That's why I like Habermas.  He is not proposing heaven on earth.  He is proposing that the answer to the domination of instrumental reason in totalizing systems is to cultivate the lifeworld of intersubjective communicative action and negotiation.  It is telling, of course, that he steps outside of the Marxian bubble and invokes non-Marxist Max Weber, George Herbert Mead, Emile Durkheim, and Talcott Parsons.   Here is how he presents his program at the start of Volume Two of The Theory of Communicative Action.

In the Marxist reception of Weber's theory of rationalization, from Lukacs to Adorno, the rationalization of society was always thought of as a reification of consciousness... [But] rationalization cannot be dealt with adequately within the conceptual frame of the philosophy of consciousness.

So Habermas uses the "communication-theoretic" approach of Mead and Durkheim to develop his notion of a lifeworld of communicative action and negotiation of truth value.  This is based upon what he calls a philosophy of language that is opposed to what we might call the consciousness-theoretic approach of the Germans from Kant down to Adorno.  It would seem to me that this is no longer Marxism.

Now back to the Obama scandals.