Politics as "Political Warfare"

I am reading Angelo Codevilla's War: Ends and Means under the influence of my usual rubrics: Government is force; politics is division; system is domination.  And, of course, that politics is civil war by other means.



There's a chapter on Political Warfare, which is devoted to interstate conflict short of outright war.  It's a sorry tale because in the 20th century the US was so bad at it.  For instance, Saddam Hussein between 1991 and 2003.

Between 1992 and 2003 Iraq's Saddam Hussein reversed the military outcome of the Gulf War.  Politics was his "weapon of mass destruction."  With it he hampered the Americans' will to deal with him, destroying what respect the Americans had earned in the Arab world by their display of military force in 1991...



[H]e calibrated his challenges to a level high enough to embarrass the Americans, but just below what would make it necessary for them to come get him.

The problem for the United States foreign policy is that we really don't want to conquer the Middle East or Islam.  We just want them to join the game of international capitalism and start trading.  So we slap the students when they get too unruly in the classroom but we don't force them to kow-tow to our superior force.



But I am reading Codevilla's ideas on political warfare as they apply to US domestic politics.  He is discussing the message that a conquering side wants the combatants on the other side to hear "in deeds as well as words":

We are here to win.  We have totally devoted ourselves to winning.  We have what it takes and we know what we are doing.  You can count on our winning.  You and everybody else will depend on us for your lives and for your futures.  We have a well-deserved reputation for being kind to those who join us and for making those who stand in our way wish that they had never been born.  Moreover, if you think about it, our side deserves your adherence because we are the more in tune with the standards by which you live that are our opponents.  These people will soon be either cadavers or prisoners.  You have a rare and fleeting chance to show you belong on our side and not theirs.  Don't miss it!

Now you know what Michelle Obama meant when she told a rally at UCLA what Barack Obama would mean to the students:

He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed. 

Now the question that faces Republicans after the end of the Obama era is precisely how to infect the body politic with this sort of conquering, you'd-better-join-the-winning-side message.



It was easy for Democrats in 2008 because the mainstream media had spent eight years telling Americans that Bush was a stupid fool that was leading America to disaster.  And low and behold in 2008 the economy did tip into disaster on Bush's watch.  It didn't matter that the proximate reason was the epic failure of Democrats to push "affordable housing" by using Fannie and Freddie to push mortgages at people that had no business borrowing money.



As I keep saying, Obama could have followed a moderate course and implemented a few goodies on the health care front with a bipartisan majority, and could have focused like a laser on turning the economy around.  With that kind of agenda he could have established a Democratic majority to last for a generation.



But instead he has pushed everything on the liberal wish list from stimulus to national health care and has crippled the economy.  So it is going to be possible by 2016 to argue to the American people -- without the help of the mainstream media -- that things just can't go on like this any more.  That Republicans have a plan to fix the economy, and that people should come aboard because the Democrats that promised them so much really don't care about them.  Democrats only care about their divisive liberal whack-job interest groups and they don't care about ordinary Americans like you and me.



Americans aren't really ideological.  They don't really get capitalism, but they don't really get the threat that big government programs represent to them and their families either.  Why not have a program for health care?  For childhood education?  What could be the harm in a program that puts a little money in my pocket?



So the only way to do the right thing is for the American people to see with their own eyes what a mess liberalism makes of everything.  Ronald Reagan helped the American people wee that a generation ago.  Now it's time for another presidential candidate to make the same appeal.



It's not hard.  Government is force.  Politics is division.  System is domination.  The more you have the worse it gets.

Changing the "Narrative"

Hugh Hewitt spent three hours yesterday interviewing Mark Leibovich about his new book sensation This Town:Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America's Gilded Capital.  It's a tell-all about the players in Washington, DC.



Why do the elected and the appointed officials decide to "stay on" after their official careers end?  What's the point of all the legislating and regulating and influence peddling and gamesmanship?

The influence that is being peddled is only secondarily about the legislation and the regulations. It is primarily about the overall media envelope which is shaping the public opinion which is truly shaping the legislation and regulations.



It is all about the awful term, the "narrative."

OK.  So Washington, DC is all about the power, but the power needs a story, a story about how things are and how they should be.  Just like the postmodernists tell us.



So the question for conservatives is: How do we change the narrative?  How do we change it from the current narrative which is that somewhere, somehow some helpless victim is being held down by some powerful force, whether white privilege or corporate greed, and government is the solution?



Because if we conservatives can't produce a good narrative after eight years of Obama, we should hang it up and go home.



The trouble is that you can't say, dipping into centuries of conservative thought, that of course Obamacare wouldn't work, because a rigid administrative system never works.  You can't say that of course regulating the banks never works because the government's interest isn't economic justice but cheap money from the credit system with which to buy votes.  You can't say that of course the supposed dangers of fracking or of oil pipelines are ridiculous, because then you are diving into the swamp of "safety" as in "Mr. President is it safe?"



But you can represent the ruling class as clueless and out of touch, as in:



"After seven years of economic incompetence, we need jobs.  So why did the Obama administration pass huge tax increases and hand the health care system over to the IRS?  Does the IRS know how to create jobs?"



"President Obama and his friends tell us that we must stop using fossil fuels. because the seas are going to boil and the ice is going to melt.  So what does he do?  He gives subsidies to his friends so they can buy pricey green cars on the cheap.  Then he gives subsidies to his crony capitalists so they can make a fortune out of wind farms that kill birds.  Meanwhile Americans don't have jobs."



"The beltway elite and their lobbyist friends want an immigration bill so we can amnesty millions of illegal immigrants, while people who obeyed the law get shafted.  They want to let in millions of new immigrants while millions of Americans don't have jobs."



I'm confident that there are thousands of campaign consultants and speechwriters that can do a much better job than I can.



But the problem for me is that at the level of political rhetoric we are not dealing with the basic problem.  For me the basic problem is the idea that government has any business in health care.  What? You think politicians and activists have a clue about how to deliver health care?  That a monster education blob can deliver education to children?  That the government can relieve the poor and lead them to productive lives?  What are you smoking?



Because the unspoken error is that you can order anything in the world by force.  That you can do anything with politics except divide people.  That you can do anything with an administrative system except dominate people.  As in:



"President Obama seems to think he can improve health care by ordering insurance companies and employers around.  Oh yeah?"



"President Obama seems to think he can improve race relations by injecting politics and Reverend Al Sharpton into race relations.  Oh yeah?"



"President Obama seems to think he can make the oceans recede by getting the EPA to regulate the coal miners out of business.  Oh yeah?"



In the end we are going to send the ruling class liberals packing by creating a narrative that makes them into pompous idiots. Somehow, somewhere, there is a word-meister getting ready to do that.  I wish I knew his name.

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?