Democrats Running on Empty

Ever since 2000 and the permanent campaign Democrats have represented themselves as Major Bagstock, the pompous friend of the pompous Paul Dombey in Dickens' Dombey and Son.  Rough, tough, and devilish sly.  That's what the gallant major would say about himself.



And indeed, he was a bit of a bully.  But it was all an act.  When it came down to it, Major Bagstock was a windbag, just as his name suggested.



That's why I think that all the rough, tough talk by Democrats these days is mere windbaggery.  The Democrats are in a world of hurt, and they are working desperately to keep their supporters from seeing the truth.



We all know why.  It's the economy, stupid.  And the unemployment and the explosion in disability claims.  And the economic and moral and social collapse of the dependency classes.



We know now that the Obama strategy, if he had one, was to do as much as possible on the progressive agenda. Period.  The economy?  Just do the regular Keynesian policies?  Defense?  Just go through the motions.  What Obamis care about is comprehensive health care.  And saving the planet with green energy.  And liberal social issues.  And rewarding supporters.



Trouble is that all the liberal economic agenda items end up wrecking the economy.  And the liberal social issues, from abortion to gay marriage, end up wrecking society.



As America goes down the toilet liberals have to ratchet up the rhetoric to keep their base home.



But what actually happens at this stage of the political cycle is that the base starts to get demoralized. All politics is a kind of ersatz religion.  It promises heaven on earth with its redemptive leader.  But after a while it becomes clear that the leader is a windbag and that nothing is going to change.



Meanwhile the people in the middle start to complain about the jobs that haven't appeared, the house that is still underwater, the school that still doesn't work, the health care that is still getting more expensive.



Right now the experts are predicting that the US Senate is up for grabs in 2014.  Really?  So soon?  I wonder what the experts will be saying a year from now in the summer of 2014, after yet another year under Obama, another year of scandals, and ordinary work-a-day corruption?



This morning the screenwriter Roger L. Simon has a piece where he confesses that he is a racist.

Worse than that, I profile.



When I see a black gangbanger walking down the sidewalk toward me at night, sometimes I cross to the other side. Even if he’s not wearing a hoodie.



Ditto for skanky white guys in ponytails who look like meth heads, bandana-clad Mexicans who might be members of the Zetas, and Asian guys with ominous Fu Manchus, black belts, and ninja pajamas.



Yes, I profile. In that way, at least, I am sort of like the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Middle-class Americans have always given the latest immigrant criminal underclass a wide berth, going back to the Irish in 1850 Boston and New York.



Only now you're not allowed to admit it.  Because?  Because without the 95 percent support from the black community the Democratic Party would be toast.



Like I day, the whole Democratic, liberal, progressive project is running on empty.  One day we will wake up and discover that those fearsome bullies defending the ramparts of liberalism are in fact dressed-up dummies, and that the liberals have left town with what's left of the nation's wealth.



That day is closer that you think.

Dividing the Pie

The way you get kids to play fair is to tell them that one of them gets to cut the pie, but the other one gets to choose which piece.

But that is not the way that politics works.  In politics it's winner take all.  If you divide the electorate the right way then you get to run the government, and you get to rub the noses of the losers in it.  Whatever it is.

The only downside is that you make the losers really mad.  But that's not the end of it.  Eventually many of the people on the winning side get pissed off.

A politician is like a guy romancing a whole bunch of girlfriends at once.  Girls being girls they each think that she is the one he loves.  Until it turns out that only one or two get the weekend getaway to Vegas.  Hell hath no fury, etc.

The point of all politics is to divide, and the worst scandal in the world is the divisive and extreme politics of the guys in the other party.  Liberals make a way of life out of activism and protesting, but when the Tea Party arose and began protesting liberals were outraged by the divisiveness and the extremism of it all.  Naturally, conservatives return the compliment and experience most liberal political acts as divisive and extreme too.

So you can see that not only is politics division.  The whole point of it and the whole art of the politician, the political practitioner, is not just to divide but to define the other guys as beyond the Pale.  Not just Us and Them, but Good and Evil.

But don't despair, conservatives.  Let us get an encouraging word from Angelo Codevilla in War: Ends and Means. Says he: When you go to war you better have a strategy and it better be right.

In the context of the present race wars swirling around George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, the strategy is what, exactly?  Let us agree that the race card played against George Zimmerman back in 2012 worked for President Obama and got the black vote all ginned up for November.

But suppose you are a Hispanic.  Or suppose you are a moderate white woman (Let alone a moderate white man).  What do you think?  You think that for President Obama and the media you are outside the charmed circle.  You are not the girl that gets to go on those wild weekends in Vegas.  You are the girl that gets a booty call at 2:00 am.

It is said that George Zimmerman is/was an Obama voter.  You think he still is?  You think that a million young Hispanic guys aren't thinking about what might happen to them if they got into an altercation with a young black guy?  You think that millions of moderate white women, the ones that are supposed to hate division and political name-calling, aren't worried by the scenes of young blacks rioting in the street about Trayvon Martin?

The reason that politicians cool the rhetoric after the election is over is that they want the populace to be nice and peaceable most of the time.  They want them riled up at election time, because you need to rile people up to get them out to vote.  But after the election they want the people to do what they are told.

Ever since the 2000 election the Democrats have been running a "permanent campaign."  It certainly helped them get Congress flipped in 2006 and Obama elected in 2008.

But since then, I would argue, it has not worked so well.  After all, with all the divisive rhetoric the GOP won back the House in 2010 and the president got reelected with only a 4 point margin.  How's that divisiveness working, Barack?

Here's the thing.  The way that politics works, it is fairly easy to persuade the voters  after about 6-8 years that the government stinks and it's time for a change.  But when you are the government, when you are the ruling party, it is not so easy.  Too many people have been disappointed; too many pretty girls have seen other girls get the trip to Vegas.  Then the divisiveness game starts to cut against you.

They say that Republicans need to reach out to Hispanics.  But what if Obama and the media and the race industry is doing the Republicans' work for them?  What if all over the country this week Hispanics are thinking: Wow.  It looks like when the chips are down the Democrats are going to side with those lazy ass blacks instead of with me. (Polls tell us that Hispanics think blacks are lazy.  Whites do not).

The thing about politics and dividing up the pie is that most everyone ends up being disappointed.  That's why conservatives think we need less politics and less government.

Are the Democrats in Trouble?

One thing our Democratic friends are good at is putting on a brave face.  What me worry about Obamacare, about the deficit, about entitlements, about the government employee pension crisis?



But Democratic actions belie the bravado.  How come President Obama quietly postponed the start of the employer mandate for Obamacare?  How come President Obama needed to gin up black rage with the Martin-Zimmerman case?  How come Harry Reid needs to go for the "nuclear option" to end filibusters of presidential nominations?



Maybe Democrats aren't marching down the field making first downs with minorities, women, the educated, and young people quite like The Emerging Democratic Majority told us was happening.



There are lots of things going wrong with America that would be all over the news if a Republican president were in the White House.  Minorities, for instance, are doing badly in the semi-recovery.  Of course they are.  It's because they got suckered into the housing bubble; it's because they have weaker skills; it's because they have weaker families; it's because they rely too much on government.



Same thing for women.  They have been drinking the government KoolAid and don't seem to understand how careers, the sexual revolution, and the collapse of marriage turns women into state-dependent cogs and sex objects.



Same thing for young people.  Like many before them, they believe the lies their teachers tell them and blindly conform to the corrosive gang mentality of every youth cohort.



As for the educated:  We know why they have been trending Democratic.  It's partly snobbery, because your average educated person doesn't want to be included among the bumpkins.  It's also because the educated fill a lot of the credentialed jobs in big government from regulatory scientists to social workers picking up after the underclass.



But the truth is that the Democrats are betraying all of these groups: minorities, women, youth, and educated.  The truth is that government dependency is a dead end, and it always has been.



These groups will all eventually realize that they have been had, but it will take a while.  That's the nature of a secular religion.  You have to see your life in ruins before you begin to grasp everything you were told was a lie.



The basic lesson is simple.  It is the mistake of assuming that you can get what you want by force.  Those that live by the sword will die by the sword.  If you use big government to get what you want you are using the dead hand of force to get a living in the world.



But government is always running down, according to George Gilder in Knowledge and Power.  The way to prosperity is through the surprise and the learning that you get from entrepreneurs coming up with creative new ideas.



When you are a minority without city skills just trying to figure out how to thrive in the city it is natural to look for a strong patron to ease your way.  When you are a woman coming out into the public square it is easy to go with the politicians that care about women.  When you are a young person you are enslaved to the zeitgeist as you try to fit in.  But it's all a chimera.  The modern world doesn't work that way.



The modern world works by the invisible hand.  You learn a skill, you try to offer it to the world.  The better you serve other people, the more you will get your reward.  It is a very difficult thing to learn, this idea of surrendering to the market.  It seems foolhardy to trust to the strangers of the marketplace.



But that is what everyone must do, especially the little darlings of the Democratic coalition.



And as they individually wake up, and become people of the responsible self like the rest of us, they will peel away from the Democratic Party and the Democrats will get more and more desperate.



That's a shame, because it means that in the summer of Zimmerman and scandal and shameless identity politics, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

The Struggling Middle Class

Remember when Algore gave his wife that bend-her-backwards kiss at the 2000 Democratic National Convention?  And remember how the crowd went wild?



I thought then that something had changed in American politics, and I didn't like it.



After all, the Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the little people, working families struggling to make ends meet.  Here was something different, and I'm not sure exactly what it was.  Perhaps reality TV rearing its ugly head.



My point is that if you are a member of the struggling middle class, struggling to get and keep a decent job, struggling to make the mortgage payments, struggling to keep your marriage together and raise your kids together you really don't belong in the party of the Big Kiss.



Because the party of the Big Kiss is the party of Obamaphones, the reversal of welfare reform, the dependency state, identity politics, IRS corruption, blithe decisions not to enforce the law if it's politically inconvenient.



Why is it then, that George Zimmerman, the "white Hispanic", was an Obama supporter in 2012?  How can a man trying to "do something" about a rash of burglaries in his neighborhood vote for the Party Hardy party?



Sultan Knish writes about the great divide that the Martin-Zimmerman case reveals.

It's a culture clash of a primal kind. Settlers and nomads. Cops and robbers. Builders and destroyers. And it was never going to end well. The elites want the settlers to make way for the nomads, the cops to acknowledge their role in alienating the robbers and the builders to admit that their construction is really the destruction of the way of life of the destroyers. They don't understand the struggling lower middle class and they don't care to. They have a great deal of empathy for the Trayvon Martins swaggering around another neighborhood that decays at their touch, but none for the George Zimmermans, sweating, mopping their brows, worrying how they're going to hold everything together.

 That is the scandal of American politics.  It is a scandal that the George Zimmermans of America don't all vote as one for the party of the responsible self, the stupid party, the Republican Party.



Of course we know why.  If you are a member of the struggling middle class but you aren't political then you are only going to hear the Democratic talking points echoed through the mainstream media.  You are not going to hear the Republican talking points, because they don't get transmitted through the media, not unless you make the decision to listen to talk radio or watch FoxNews.  So all you hear is that the Democrats care about working families, about people like you.  And the Republican Party is the party of bankers and big corporations and religious extremists.



Where's a patriotic American to go?



It was the peculiar talent of Ronald Reagan that he did communicate to the struggling middle class.  That's why I encountered a pack of Reagan Democrats, people that looked like technicians and construction guys, in the 1980 Washington State Republican presidential caucuses.



We know now that Mitt Romney struck out with the struggling middle class.  And we know why.  Struggling voters feared the ruthless corporate turn-around guy that Joe Soptic had encountered.  The struggling middle class believes in economic populism, not settled-science economics.



It's an irony, of course.  The future for struggling middle-class folks depends precisely on entrepreneurs recklessly starting up new businesses, on savings accounts that pay decent interest and don't lose their value to inflation.  It depends on ruthless turnaround guys like Mitt Romney doing a Roto-Rooter on failing old businesses.  It depends on reforming the corrupt and wasteful entitlements from healthcare to education.



But people are afraid to change.  They are afraid of losing what they still have.  They are afraid of surrendering to the market; they put their faith instead in government force to protect their meager job tenure or access to health insurance.



I'm no political genius, so I don't know how to put together a political narrative that turns the table on the liberal narrative, one that sells the struggling middle class on the notion that Democrats don't care about people like them, that the big corporations and the banksters all toe the line of the Democratic Party, that the dreadful insurance companies are trapped in the system that Ted Kennedy set up 30 years ago when he boosted Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), that politicians will always try to divide us, and government is force.



But that's what the Republican candidates for 2016 need to figure out.  Ronald Reagan did it.  Mitt Romney didn't.  Go figure.

Searching for Hope

First of all, a majority of the people get fed up with the government.  So they form an opposition coalition to throw the rascals out, and eventually, they do.  But the new government can't satisfy all the hopes that it ignited as it campaigned against the corruptions and injustices of the old regime.  So people start to peel away from the government party and form a head of rebellion.  They form an opposition coalition to throw the rascals out, and eventually, they do.



And so on, according to one theory of politics.



If you are a conservative, this is the winter of our discontent.  At this point, we can only hope that it will be followed by a glorious sun of conservative reform.



We see the recovery from the Crash of 2008 horribly mishandled.  We see a destructive Obamacare that will turn health care into the DMV of health.  We see the post-partisan president sending Department of Justice operatives down to Florida to gin up a race war.  We see an immigration bill that will increase the number of visas for low-skilled immigrants at a time when low-skilled Americans are being hammered by the slow Obama recovery.  We see a regulatory attack on conventional energy that kills jobs.  We see an underhanded campaign to impose gay marriage on an unwilling population.



How bad can things get?



Politics is division.  Even as we sit here in deepest gloom the successful Obama division that got him elected in 2008 and 2012 is breaking up.  It's said that the Obama coalition depended on sharply higher black turnout and enthusiasm from young people in 2008.  In 2012 a major factor was that low-income whites stayed home rather than vote for corporate whirlwind Mitt Romney: the Joe Soptic factor.  Look up at the previous paragraph but one.  You couldn't devise a record better designed to break up the Obama coalition.



Politics is division.  The question is who will come forwards to define the post-Obama division.  Can he or she bring underemployed young people together with aging low-skilled workers together with entrepreneurs and women frightened by the failures of Obamacare?  And unite them against liberal privilege and pride and the race hustlers and the union thugs?  In other words, can Republicans come up with a candidate that excites populist rage but bases it on solid growth economics?



Nobody knows.  But those of us that hope remember the fall of the Soviet Union.  There it was, this powerful monolith, armed with its propagandists and its KGB thugs, not to mention its western lefty apologists.  And then one day it was no more.



The key to the fall of the Soviet Union was that its ruling class no longer believed in the Communist idea.  They saw the failure and the corruption and they simply did not know what to do.



The optimists in the conservative camp thought that the Clinton era was the time of perestroika, when liberals lost their faith in the competence of big government, when the god of big government died.  Hey, didn't Clinton actually declare that the era of big government was over?



Alas, it was not to be.  After Clinton left office the Democratic Party moved left, and doubled down on class and race politics.  And the party doubled down on the administrative state, pushing huge new regulation of business and the huge new entitlement of Obamacare.  They even created their own little echo of junk-science Lysenkoism with the chimera of global warming.



The American people are oddly quiet right now, despite their disappointment and their troubles.



You'd have to believe that, some time before 2016, their disappointment will kindle into a furnace of rage.  The question is, who will provide the spark?

O.J. Plus Zimmerman Equals The End

If you're an average white racist bigot you might be asking yourself when's it gonna end?  I mean the whole race-hustling business that maintains the idea of white guilt.  For white guilt, we know, must be requited by affirmative action, quotas, and reparations.



The corollary is the idea that blacks can't be racist because they are oppressed.  You can only be racist if you have the Power.



So the question is: when would we be able to tell that blacks were no longer oppressed, assuming that there is some objective criterion for such a judgment.  Assuming that there is some criterion other than: because left-wing activists say so.



I would say that if it ever happened in America that a black defendant that murdered a white girl got off because a black jury refused to convict then you would start wondering if the worm had turned.



I would say that if it ever happened in America that black activists and the mainstream media could force the government to prosecute a white man who pretty obviously had killed a black man in self defense then you would have some justification for saying that the age of Jim Crow was over.



That's why I say that OJ + Zimmerman = The End of Oppression.



The point of the OJ criminal trial, when O.J. Simpson was tried for the murder of his white wife and acquitted by a black jury, was this.  The trial advertised to the world that blacks had the Power.  They had the power to say to the criminal justice system: we ain't gonna convict one of our own.



The point of the Zimmerman prosecution, when "white Hispanic" George Zimmerman was prosecuted for the second-degree murder of black Trayvon Martin, was this.  The fact of the prosecution advertised to the world that blacks had the Power.  They could rise up and protest and demand that a white guy be put on trial even though police had judged he had acted in self-defense.  They had the power to say to the state government in Florida that we demand you put one of the "other" on trial.



You can see where I am going with this.  If blacks now have the Power --  the power to act on a modest scale more or less as white southerners did back in the days of Jim Crow --  then maybe they aren't oppressed any more.



And if blacks aren't oppressed any more, maybe it's possible for blacks to be racists.



In fact, it turns out that blacks think that blacks are more racist than whites, according to a recent poll.

Among black Americans, 31% think most blacks are racist, while 24% consider most whites racist and 15% view most Hispanics that way.

But that is another story.

President Obama's Accidental Achievement

On coming into office, President Obama told us that he planned on "fundamental transformation."  I wrote yesterday that fundamental transformation is a progressive conceit.  And anyway, Obama is failing in his fundamental transformation, big time.

He has utterly failed to be a "post-racial" president.  Instead he has ginned up racial division.  He has utterly failed to improve health care.  Instead he has created a "train wreck."  He has utterly failed to make government more transparent.  Instead he has led an administration that is notably non-transparent and notably quick to use the federal bureaucracy to intimidate the president's opponents.

And that leaves out the stupidity of the stimulus, the hyper-regulation of Dodd-Frank, the chimera of climate change.

So liberals will probably get their "fundamental transformation."  Only it won't be the kind they were planning on.

Instead of the endless liberal moral melodrama featuring endless liberal Scarlett O'Haras, we are more likely to get an age of Rhett Butler: the age of I don't give a damn.

On race, there's a good chance that the president's race hustling will finally provoke the end of white guilt.  After the beer summit and the Trayvon Martin case, it's time to say, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

On health care, there's a good chance that the president's mendacious promises and incompetent rollout on Obamacare will create room for some practical reform, moving away from highly regulated first-dollar coverage towards HSA-type catastrophic coverage and transparent pricing.  In other words, letting Americans decide what they want to pay for out of their own pockets with a decent provision for the old and the poor.

On the economy, there's a good chance that the hyper-political hyper-regulatory follies of the last decade will be so discredited that we can do some sensible reform: reversing the cheap money, high borrowing for the federal government and switching to hard money and spending cuts.  And the demolition of Sarbox and Dodd-Frank wouldn't hurt.

On climate change, there's a good chance that the Ruling Class's obsession with carbon dioxide will collapse as the science proves to be a lot less settled than we were told, and the crony capitalist scandals of green energy discredit the whole effort.

Back in the 2000s Judis and Teixeira were boasting of an Emerging Democratic Majority.  My guess is that it will evaporate in 2014 and 2016.  Why?  Because the Obama Democrats failed to show a bright future to the women, minorities and young people that they captivated in the 2000s with the promise of hope and change.

The truth is that they had it in their grasp.  If Obama had really brought the end of race politics, if he had done an Obamacare that featured a bipartisan compromise, if he had curbed the stimulus, and pushed a less regulatory Dodd-Frank, he might now be leading an America bursting with hope and confidence.

But he didn't.  That's because neither he nor the elite liberal ruling class has a vision beyond the idea of ruling and administering the United States like a feudal estate.  They, the ruling class, are the guys with the ideas and the power. We, the country class, should shut up and do what we are told.

George Gilder is just the latest to tell us why the liberal way doesn't work.  In Knowledge and Power he argues that humans advance by surprise and learning.  People come up with new ideas that nobody thought of before.  And then they learn how to apply the idea to society: the fabled learning curve.  Think the last two centuries starting with the Industrial Revolution.

But the liberal vision is one of revolution and stasis.  The idea is to set up an administrative system with a political reform and then sit back and let it run.  We know what happens when you do that.  You get a sterile system that slowly runs down and dies.

The recurring story of the last two centuries is that the way to flourish is to surrender to the process.  Come up with a good idea instead of going with the flow.  Think of serving others first rather than grabbing for your share.  But the truth is that we are all afraid.  We want to be sure that we get our share; we worry that we won't have anything valuable to contribute.  And so we gum up the works with force and rigid system.  And fight over a shrinking pie.

We can do better, and with the ruin of his administration President Obama may be clearing the way to a better future.