Cost and Trende Have Spoken on Immigration

The GOP's kindly friends in the Democratic Party have been telling them for months that that the Republican Party  needs to get with the program on immigration, otherwise they'll never ever get an Hispanic to vote for them.



Fuggedaboutit, say conservative election analysts Jay Cost and Sean Trende.  The GOP's main problem is that people don't think it cares about average people like them.  Exactly, because my friend Stephen thinks of the GOP as the party of the bankers.



If only.  If only it were true and those greedy bankers were busily slipping money to Tea Partiers instead of marching in lock-step with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-WallStreet) because they know what side their bread is buttered.



The biggest problem Mitt Romney had in 2012 was the downscale white voters that didn't show up to vote.  In a choice between an "urban liberal like President Obama or a severely pro-business venture capitalist like Mitt Romney" writes Trende, they decided to stay home.



You can see how Obama's Joe Soptic TV ad nicely made the point that Romney was exactly what he was, a severely pro-business venture capitalist.  It doesn't really matter that what the downscale white voters objectively need according to settled science is a million venture capitalists shaking up the economy and renewing failing, badly managed corporations, because the good old jobs with good wages are gone forever.   Not only that, but the downscale white voters are not now, and never will be again, the little darlings of the ruling class that they were back in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.



But enough of the past.  Cost and Trende argue that there is nothing in the Senate's immigration bill for ordinary downscale voters.  Any politician that planned to appeal for the votes of ordinary, average people would be making populist attacks on the immigration bill, saying that it took jobs away from ordinary Americans and handed them to corporate and union fat-cats.



Gee, Sarah Palin just did that, calling the Senate bill an "amnesty bill filled with favors, earmarks and crony capitalists' pork".



This is what politics is all about.  Politics is division.  It is about hanging the labels of crony and greedy and banker and special interest on the other guys, and for Republicans that means the Democratic Party.  It is about showing that the Republican Party is the party that really cares about the ordinary American that isn't enrolled in the rank and file of the special interests: your greenies to reds to pinkos to blacks to browns to fems to gays.  Whatever happened to an America that cared for ordinary people, without separating and mobilizing them into warring and exclusive identities?



What a joke.  Here we have bourgeois capitalism, that has raised the common man from indigence to a suffocating prosperity.   Yet the common man is convinced that capitalism and capitalists are out to screw him.



Oh, I know.  In the old days the poor man could only hope to attach himself to a powerful patron.  And still he would starve and his children would die.  For many people, even most people, it still goes against instinct to imagine that the way to prosper is to throw yourself on the mercy of the consumers, and believe in the idea that you prosper by serving others rather than forcing them to cough up a livelihood for you upon the threat of force.



But that's the world we live in.  Until we can change it for the better.

Our Global "Little Darlings" Problem

In the old days they used to urge mothers not to let their babies grow up to be cowboys.  Or "pick guitars and drive them old trucks," as the song goes.  Instead, let them be "doctors and lawyers and such."

But I think the much bigger problem is letting your babies grow up to be the "little darlings" of the politicians.

The first people that grew up to be little darlings were the workers.  And look what happened.  Marxists used the workers to build the most oppressive regimes in history and basically enslaved the workers to produce useless products that nobody wanted.  That's when they weren't starving them to death with the aesthetic projects to build model villages and model tank factories in Magnitogorsk.

The ordinary democratic socialists were different.  They merely taxed the workers (or sneakily their employers) to the hilt; they took their savings and put them in non-existent "trust funds." All in all, they treat the workers as slaves on an advanced slave plantation.  I mean that they treat the workers humanely, but as cogs in a machine.

And as for the labor unions, the once authentic brotherhoods of the working stiffs, they are reduced to being political pawns, stooges for government bosses, as the IRS union has recently demonstrated.

Who was next to be anointed as political little darlings?  Women, of course.  Women were shockingly oppressed.  What they needed was the vote, government welfare, contraception, abortion, no-fault divorce, and careers in the workplace.  Everything except love, marriage, and children.  What's happened is that the lower-class culture has been demolished, as women retreat from marriage and men retreat from work.  Women have become the cats-paw of politicians, to be serially terrified by some new threat to their safety or health.

Then of course we have African Americans, or "minorities."  They have also become the little darlings of the politicians.  But, of course, to be any use to politicians they must be mobilized, and mobilization takes hate and fear.  So our liberal politicians use infinite patience and guile to keep African Americans terrified by a return to Jim Crow and police brutality.

The latest little darlings of the politicians are the gays.  In my young days, the most anti-gay folks were the left.  In Britain they used to equate gayness with upper-class privilege and decadence.  Today, of course, the left equates anti-gayness with right-wing hate and bigotry in the heartland, and the Supreme Court is one decision away from mandating gay marriage nationwide.

Here's my problem.  Any time that you gin up a political movement and use the government to advance your agenda, you end up becoming political cannon fodder.

Workers' rights:  Wouldn't it have been better not to create a gigantic welfare state and to nationalize the social welfare aspects of labor unions, so that workers could themselves build the kind of protection they wanted and were prepared to pay for?

Women's rights: Is free sex and abortion and easy divorce really such a benefit to women?  Doesn't it devalue love and marriage and children?  And doesn't every woman you know eventually return to all three, usually after it's too late?

Civil rights:  It's one thing to write a law to enforce racial equality.  It's another thing to make race a factor in giving out the goodies to your political supporters.  Politics is division.  When you inject race into politics, you sow racial division and conflict.

Gay rights: It's one thing to stop the police from raiding gay hangouts.  It's another thing to advertise that gay life is just a lifestyle choice, and gay marriage is just like marriage, and then force America to agree with you or else.

The problem with the "little darlings" problem is that in politics, nobody knows when to stop.  In the end you destroy what you started out to create, because government is force.  It turns everything it touches into a war, because that's what force is for.  It turns a people into the opposite of society, which is people living in amity with their neighbors.

The leaders of the workers ended up using government to destroy the great industrial corporations in steel and automobiles.  The leaders of the feminists ended up using government to destroy love and marriage.  The civil rights leaders ended up destroying the hope of amity between the races.  We don't yet know how the gay-rights movement will self-destruct.

Don't let your babies grow up to be little darlings.  It will turn them into missiles of social destruction.

Women are the Future

It's been a demoralizing week for conservatives as the US Supreme Court muddled its way towards rubber-stamping the ruling class's views on gay marriage, as it rubber-stamped the ruling class's views on abortion a generation ago.

Meanwhile the US Senate is continuing the peculiar institution of "undocumented workers," the system whereby we don't enforce immigration laws on people that have overstayed their visas.

The frustrating thing for conservatives is that we are not the culture; we are a subculture.  The culture is the culture of the ruling class, with its administrative welfare state and its libertine sexual culture.  And if you disagree with that culture you had better expect to be named and shamed.  Where does it end?

I have already argued that, economically the rule of the administrative welfare state will only end when it runs out of money.  The American people voted for that in 2012 when they symbolically voted for an unremarkable scion of the ruling class, Barack Obama, over a man that symbolizes America.  First of all, Mitt Romney is a member of an natural-born American religious sect, the Mormons, that was started during the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century.  Mitt Romney entire life symbolizes "civil society."  All his life he has combined faithful family life with an energetic business career and an untiring dedication to church responsibilities.  His business career, in particular, was all about taking problem organizations and restructuring them.  But the American people said: No.  So we will probably not be able to reform the welfare state before it goes broke.

But what about the cultural side of things?  In my view things will not change until women give up on the ruling class and form a moral movement of resistance against its self-indulgent libertinism.

It was said back in the Sixties that the sexual and the drug revolution was all very well for the upper middle class.  It had the money and the resources to climb back out of the abyss.  But the poor and the working class did not.  They went to the wall and paid the full price of vice.

The ruling class argues that its programs are there to help people in need.  The welfare state is there to help people that can't help themselves.  Abortion is there so women have the right to choose whether to bear a child.  We've moved on from the "Father Knows Best" family of the 1950s.

Nothing will change until women realize that they have been sold a bill of goods on all this.  Women cannot rear healthy families unless government gets out of it.  Every child need a mother and a father: their mother and their father.  The welfare state breaks up the family.  Women cannot allow the abortion culture that licenses young men to bonk everything in sight and tell their victims to go get an abortion.  Women must realize that freedom for women is a world in which every man that impregnates a woman would be eager to marry her and raise that child with her.

I often argue that men are fighters and women are lovers.  There's a beautiful eulogy in Commentary by John Podhoretz to his sister Rachel.  Here was a woman so full of love it overflowed.

Our sister Naomi once said she had never seen anyone who loved being a mother so unqualifiedly as Rachel. It was not that she loved her children more than anyone else, not that she exemplified maternal wisdom like her beloved Marmee from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. It was that Rachel took an almost sybaritic pleasure in mothering, in all of it, the quotidian and the profound, the meals and the fights, the company of these small beings whom she not only loved fiercely but really, really, really liked.

The longer I live, the more I appreciate how women's lives are utterly devoted to love.

It is my judgement that the ruling class culture of the administrative state and "activism" and identity politics make it very difficult for women to construct lives built around love.  If you ask me, the present culture is a war against women and their culture of love.

It is my faith that eventually women will create a moral movement that will rise up against the ruling class culture and restore a culture of love.  Why will they do it?  Because women cannot stand a world without love.

Coincidentally the women's movement of love will restore for men a culture of domestic warriors, fighting for hearth and home.

The new culture will be a culture of love and marriage and children and civic service.  Why?  Because humans are social animals, and social animals can only flourish when they are being social.

Yes, but what is "social?"  It sounds like socialism, and we know where that ends up.  So let me make it clear.  Social doesn't include government, because government is force.  Social doesn't include politics, because politics is division and hate.  Social doesn't include system and administration and bureaucracy, because system is domination.

Social means little platoons, a culture of affection, civic society, associations, neighborliness, and love.

Yes, but when?  I don't know, but I believe that if I can think it, someone is already doing it.  And pretty soon that someone will form a movement, and pretty soon after that you and I will hear about it or read about it.  And pretty soon after that it will get onto the media radar.

And then the cat will be among the pigeons.  But only women can make it happen.

Ruling Class and Country Class

Now that the present ruling class is about 100 years old, we can look around and see what it has done.  We can put up a notice, as Sir Christopher Wren's son did on his father's grave: "Si monumentum requiris, circumspice."  If you seek his monument, look around.

It is interesting, to me, to think about what the ruling class has conceded to its subjects, the "country class" of Angelo Codevilla, and what it has not.  It is pretty obvious to me that all the social issues, from the just-decided gay marriage to abortion and the "sexual revolution" are issues on which the ruling class has imposed its will.  The ruling class wants to be able to do what it wants, and it has the cultural and political power to impose its will.

But then the whole welfare state is also the ruling class's idea.  The working class may have had an idea of free education and higher wages with unions.  But it certainly didn't come up with the idea of nationalizing its fraternal associations and benefit clubs into the administrative welfare state.  That was the idea of the educated ruling class.  And who benefits?  The ruling class, because it gets lots of jobs and sinecures out of the administrative welfare state, from professorships to directorships to counselorships.

Now, in the case of social issues and the administrative welfare state it is clear that the ruling class has created an over-under coalition with the underclass.  But what about the middle-class entitlements: pensions, Medicare, and education?  Again, the ruling class gets what it wants, but this time in a coalition with the middle class and against the underclass, which must grub for the $1 trillion a year in crumbs for welfare, compared to the $3 trillion in pension/healthcare/education colossus that is subsidizing the middle class.

Angelo Codevilla wrote back in 2010 that if you agree with the ruling class, you have a party to vote for: the Democrats.  But if you disagree with the ruling class, you are out of luck, because the Republican Party is a kind of junior ruling class.

[T]he ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans — a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents — lack a vehicle in electoral politics.

Sooner or later, this will change.

Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority’s demand for representation will be filled. Whereas in 1968 Governor George Wallace’s taunt “there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference” between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with only 13.5 percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a serious contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39 percent of Americans vs. 31 percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Clinton) simply by speaking ill of the ruling class. 

But how?  How will the majority's demand for representation be filled?  The simple answer is that it won't happen until the ruling class starts to run out of money and start losing wars.   The French Revolution didn't occur until the French monarchy was broke after losing a couple wars against the Brits.  The Reagan Revolution didn't come along until the ruling class had lost the war in Vietnam.

There is this.  A good ruling class knows that it must train its young up, get tough on them and make them deserve their inheritance.  The prime example of this was the Spartan regime in ancient Greece.  But our ruling class is terminally self-indulgent.  Perhaps it has no option; perhaps it has to buy the support of each rising generation of the ruling class.

The ruling class can go soft in a hurry.  It didn't take long for the murderous Bolsheviks to go soft on terror, then go soft on their empire, and then just hand over the reins of power to the KGB.

All we know is that our ruling class will one day lose power.  And that the way of its losing will take everyone by surprise.

Of course, the cure may be worse than the disease.

Obama, Government, Politics and War

If only, writes Victor David Hanson, President Obama would show the same aggressiveness towards thug dictators that he demonstrates towards evil Republicans.

I cannot recall, in the last five years, Barack Obama ever identifying the Iranians, Hezbollah, or the late Hugo Chavez as among our “enemies,” in the fashion that he once urged Latino leaders to punish conservatives at the polls: “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.”

I've written about this in the recent past.  In fact I am always writing about it.  Our liberal friends are always making allowances for foreign governments, allowances that they never make about conservatives and Republicans.  For conservatives it's "punch back twice as hard" or "bring a gun to a knife fight."



The explanation is, of course, very simple.  Government always needs a war to justify its resort to force.  The war that President Obama and his people are waging is the war against conservatives.  In this they are not conjuring up straw men or imagining enemies on the right; conservatives really are the people that stand in the way of liberals and their vision for a better society.  Conservatives really are the enemy.



Now I like to say that government is force, politics is division, system is domination.  But war is the intersection of all these notions.  Why start with politics unless you have a war to wage against a monstrous enemy?  Why win control of the government unless you mean to mobilize the nation to arms?  And how can that war be waged without the systematic domination of the nation and the culture and the conversion of all interests and factions to the single overriding need to win the war?



Now we know what Republicans were missing in 2008 and 2012.  They were missing a reason to go to war.  It is not enough to rally your supporters and paint a vision of a glorious future of good jobs as Mitt Romney did.  You must have an enemy to vanquish, and President Obama was off the table because that would be racist.



In 2008 the Democrats had George W. Bush to run against.  In 2012 they had the monster Mitt Romney that had put a dog on the roof of his car and ruined the life of laid-off steelworker Joe Soptic.   And did they ever.



In 2014 and 2016 it is obvious what Republicans will be running against.  They will be running against the corruption and the injustice of Obama.  And the IRS and the NSA and Obamacare and scandals yet unseen that demonstrate that, for the Obamis, there is no law that should hinder them in their righteous war against "Republicans and all they stand for."  Republicans will be running against Big Government.  But not, of course, against the vital entitlements like Medicare and Social Security.  Oh no.  Those are insurance programs, for which we paid FICA taxes.  We are owed.



But what about foreign enemies, from radical Islam to thug Russia and ambitious China?  Shouldn't we be sounding the tocsin against those dangers?



In my view, we should use the Obama years as a chance to regroup: winter quarters, Valley Forge and all that.  Maybe we don't care about Islam in the Middle East so much.  Maybe our focus should be on Islam in the West.  Maybe Islam isn't the problem but liberalism is.  Just as the Carter interregnum provided a necessary pause before the Reagan years, maybe the Obama years give us a chance to think, and come up with a better strategy than the Bush occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.



But we can never shrink from the truth that we are in a war.  We are in a war because war is the intersection of government, politics, and system.  There is no escape from it.  If you haven't figured out who the enemy is then you don't have a war and you can't enter the lists of politics or win the powers of government.

The Liberal Blind Spot

I was out in flyover country over the weekend, and I got to talk to some real middle-class women.  You know the kind, working at ordinary jobs like paralegal and supermarket merchandising manager.  They are the kind of people that the politicians ought to be thinking about when they implement their grand plans for the fundamental transformation of America.



They ought to pay attention because those ordinary middle-class folks are the ones that will pay the price for the political mistakes of the politicians, and will reap the reward if the politicians actually do something to benefit the nation.



Then I ask myself what the Obama administration has done for people like that.  Because I suspect that what good honest middle class women want is enough prosperity so they can raise and educate and establish their children in peace.



And I ask myself what the IRS scandal and the NSA scandal and the Benghazi scandal have to do with that?



The big problem with the Obama era liberals is that they are not governing for the interest of the average American.  They are crusaders trying to bring the true religion to a nation of unbelievers.  In the battle of good against evil, you can't worry too much about collateral damage.  Not if you can keep the Tea Party groups at bay long enough to win reelection, or swing the EPA to win your war against coal.



In this I think that the Obamis are doubly wrong.  First of all they are wrong tactically.  It just isn't good politics to keep your supporters riled up in a permanent campaign.  What happens is that they start to use government in blatant ways to help your political agenda.  That helps recruit people for the opposition, for a governing party is never more than a clique.  The more you divide the nation with your politics and the more you hand out goodies to your supporters the more you will create malcontents that got hurt by one of your myrmidons or that didn't get a share of the loot.



But the bigger issue, that goes beyond tactics and strategy, is the separation of church and state.  The great gaping flaw in progressive politics is that it ends the separation of church and state.  That is, it joins together the defense of the nation from enemies foreign and domestic with the question of the fight of good against evil.  We see this clearly in the IRS intimidation of Tea Party groups.



If you are a Lois Lerner that has gone through a normal education K-12 through law school, you have probably had over a dozen teachers that believed that conservatives were nothing more than racists, sexists and homophobes.



Lois Lerner was apparently quite happy to be putting the Christian Coalition through the regulatory wringer when she served at the Federal Election Commission.  And she did an equally enthusiastic job at the IRS exempt organizations unit.  How does a Lois Lerner get her beliefs and her enthusiasms?  She doesn't have to do anything.  It is in the very air she breathes as a Susie Goodgirl getting good grades from her liberal teachers in the government schools.



Here's the problem.  It is one thing to win the battle of ideas.  It is another thing to march through the institutions of government and turn the bureaucrats into partisan supporters of your progressive religion.



The argument is not that you shouldn't bother to try it because it won't work.  It may work all too well.  The problem is that you get civil war at the end of it, because you create enemies out of the people that you intimidate and dominate.  And then your wonderful vision of the future collapses in war and mayhem.



There seems to me to be a kind of crude ignorance of all this in the modern progressive liberal.  They really don't get how they are wrecking their own cause by cutting corners and self-dealing.  I am talking of everything from the aggressive pursuit of leaks to the pervasive waiving of the law in the treatment of illegal aliens to the nod-nod-wink-wink looking the other way in the whole welfare culture.



The reason for the government to follow the rules is to avoid giving people the idea that the only way they can obtain justice is in the streets.  Liberals think they own the streets: just yesterday Sen. Chuck Schumer threatened demonstrations if Congress didn't pass his immigration reform.  But I think liberals are wrong.  I think they completely underestimate how thin the ice is.  They think they own the culture, own the politics, and they are above the rules.



I am here to say that the liberals are wrong on all that.  But we will all have to pay for their mistake.

Do Liberals Sneer at the Responsible Individual?

Over the past year I've been developing the concept of the "responsible self" as the sine qua non of conservatism.  I stole the idea, fair and square, from Robert Bellah, who introduces the idea in his paper "Religious Evolution".

Bellah argues that the Axial Age featured the emergence of "historical religion" that featured not the old ways of propitiating the gods but a simple salvation concept: "the religious goal of salvation (or enlightenment, release and so forth) is for the first time the central religious preoccupation."

But this engages not the tribe but the individual.  It is the individual that will be saved, get enlightenment or burn in hell.  So each individual is called to take charge of his life to gain that priceless reward: salvation in the next world.  Here it is in scholar-speak.

The identity confusion characteristic of both primitive and archaic religions is radically challenged by the historic religious symbolization, which leads for the first time to a clearly structured conception of the self.  Devalutaion of the empirical world and the empirical self highlights the conception of a responsible self, a core self or a true self, deeper than the flux of everyday experience...  [T]he historic religions promise man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.

This is the birth of individualism.  It is not the cartoon individualism, the center of selfishness and egoism, used as a straw man by our liberal friends.  It is the awful responsibility that ultimately I, not my comfortable family or tribe, is responsible for my life.  It is I and only I that will be judged at the Last Judgment.

Now when I wrote my latest American Thinker piece "The Consequences of Liberalism" I wrote the following about liberals and the responsible self:

It makes complete sense that liberals sneer at the responsible individual, the busy bourgeois, the independent householder, the church member, and harass them. The bourgeois middle class with its businesses, its adaptability, its families, its work and its savings represent the existential threat to liberal power and its curdling tribalism.

Then I got an email from a good liberal who took me to task on everything, but particular the sneer bit.

Liberals do NOT sneer at the responsible individual.  That is a total, and outrageous, lie. What liberals advocate is that the opportunity to be a “responsible individual” be accorded to everyone; that each of us be accepted for what he, the individual, is, or wants to be. 

Actually, my interlocutor gives away the store.  The notion of the "responsible self" in the Axial Age religions and in modern conservatism is that each one of us is responsible to God (and by inference, society) for our lives.  But when you say that each of us be accepted for what we are or want to be, he is removing the fundamental argument of responsibility.  We can be whatever we want.  No problem.  No consequence.  No responsibility.  You get to be called a responsible individual even if you're not.

I've written elsewhere that liberals believe not in the responsible self but the creative self, the revolutionary self, the educated self, the marginalized self.  Anything but the responsible self.  But they can't really admit to themselves that they have turned against the responsible self even though the whole administrative welfare state is an attack on the responsible self and the whole culture, from Hollywood to TV sitcoms, is a sneer at the responsible self.  Why, in Pleasantville the point is made with a sledgehammer.  The boring responsible suburbanites are shown in black and white -- "Honey, I'm home! -- and the redemptive creative types are shown in living color.  Get it, rubes?

My liberal interlocutor has also drunk the KoolAid on Social Security.  "The government isn’t “spending money on pensions” if you’re including Social Security.  Although Congress was sufficiently stupid in the 70’s to move it into the Federal budget, the Federal budget system and tax stream do not fund SSI.  FICA funds it."  You gotta hand it to FDR and the Democrats.  They've got millions of people believing that the government actually segregates all that FICA money for Social Security.  At least President Obama has admitted that Medicare is a crook deal.

President Obama had Senate Republicans nodding in agreement during a recent ice-breaking dinner as he described a basic problem for the nation's fiscal future: For each dollar that Americans pay for Medicare, they ultimately draw about $3 in benefits. What's more, he added, most people do not understand that.

Any more than most people do not understand that Social Security is not an insurance program, but a simple income redistribution program from the young to the old.

But don't worry, sports fans.  Liberals won't be doing too much on the sneering front in the next few years.  It looks like the Obama administration is finally getting caught in the maelstrom of its vaporous rhetoric.  And it's only just begun.