Businessmen Are #1

I was at the opera last night, a performance of Siegfried, the third in Richard Wagner's four-opera Der Ring des Nibelungen.  It was a first-rate performance with Stefan Vinke in the title role, even allowing that the Brünnhilde, Lori Phillips, was standing in at the last minute as the advertised Brünnhilde, Alwyn Mellor, was sidelined with an allergy attack.



The great theme of Siegfried is the end of the age of the gods.  Wotan, now the Wanderer, accepts that the rigid idea of the triune world and everyone in their place: -- Nibelungs in the underworld, giants on the earth and gods in Valhalla -- is over.  Now humans, represented by the Volsungs, i.e., Siegfried, will inherit the earth and freedom and contingency will reign.



Freedom, as I define it, is the right to make mistakes.  And of course in the final Ring opera, Götterdämmerung, Siegfried will make a big one, everything will get screwed up, and the world will be left with the eternal female, Brünnhilde, singing in full voice while the whole universe collapses into the Rhine.


But in the intermission, aside from talking with conductors and art dealers, I got to talk to a guy from Boise, Idaho, who was running a couple of waste energy plants.  One was waste-to-energy, which I assume means garbage waste.  The other was a refinery waste project, "burning" waste from a refinery in Billings, Montana, and delivering steam back to the refinery, among other things.



It made me think.  To be a businessman, doing real stuff like trying to make a profit in some obscure but important economic niche, is the most honorable thing I can imagine.



Ordinary Joe employees like you and me?  We are ungrateful whiners that actually get to sleep at night.



Sauntering politicians?  They are divisive scum.



Political activists and community organizers?  They are worse than scum because, unlike politicians, they have absolutely no responsibility.



Barnacle bureaucrats?  They are bloodsuckers backed by men with guns taking and spending the lifeblood of ordinary people on the principle of How Not to Do It.



Not-for-profit preeners?  Look, it's a lot easier to  fundraise and spend money on worthy causes than to wrestle a business plan, day to day, into actual real profits.



Creative artists?  They are wonderful.  Don't forget that many are called but few are chosen.



But businessmen and businesswomen?  They are the people that actually make things happen in this world and that all of the above blame when things go wrong.



Back to Siegfried.  Seattle Opera General Director Speight Jenkins came out before the third act to announce the Brünnhilde change and he got a standing ovation.  I'll tell you one little story that will tell you why.  Speight Jenkins visits the orchestra at every performance, and my neighbor Julie, who plays viola in the pit, just loves him for that.



Speight Jenkins is a wonder.

Where's the Love?

Salem Radio's Lee Habeeb has a challenge for conservatives.  He asks, in effect, Where's the Love in conservative politics?  All he sees is anger.

It is love, regrettably, that is so utterly absent from anything we talk about as conservatives. I would bet that if you Googled every speech by every conservative candidate in 2012, you wouldn’t find the word “love” once.

It's a good point.  Love is especially important in attracting women voters, because, despite a century of feminism, women are still all about love.

Men are different; they are fighters, so you can use the rhetoric of Les Miserables to get their vote.

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

This is a call to arms, which makes sense for men because men are fighters.  But what about the "looove" that women crave?

Obviously, we can admit, the Democrats do a bang up job of oozing the love to their single-women voters, even as they project the vilest hate towards the racists sexists and bigots of their imagination.  That's what all the rhetoric about caring is about, and proposing a program to meet every human need; it appeals to the woman in all of us.

Conservatives should play that game too.  That a government worker can't love a child like a parent, that every child is precious, that poverty is the result of a child without a father's presence and love, that bad schools and social promotion are loveless.  Only we don't say it.

The other side of love is betrayal.  If you are serving up fake love, Habeeb makes clear, then sooner or later your loved one gets to experience the betrayal of love withdrawn.

And that is clearly the line that conservatives must take.  Big government promises to care for you, but look what happens to schools, to kids, to Obamacare, to you.  What you get from government love is betrayal.

Government and politics are not about love.  Government is force, politics is division.  You will never get love and happiness from government and politics.

It is humans as social animals: that's where love comes in; humans that cooperate freely and honestly and lovingly in what Habermas called the Lebenswelt, the lifeworld.  By lovingly we mean doing what the lover does, acting while thinking about the other person's needs.

That's why government deals in "entitlements" but love never does.

So if conservatives are honest, we cannot promise a government of love.  We don't believe in that.  We know that politics can only be a fight.  Perhaps, every now and again, it can deliver the hope of "Do you hear the people sing," in "a life about to start / When tomorrow comes."  But the life that's to come will be created not by the government but by the free and responsible selves determined to live and work and love truly in the lifeworld opened up by the retreat of government and its dominatory systems.

What we conservatives can promise is that we will restructure government and reduce its force and its divisive politics so that love can bloom in the free and honest expression of love and cooperative spirit between American and American.

And that, we can agree, contra Herbert Croly, is the real Promise of American Life.

The Most (Awful) Ever

The Obama administration set the bar high for itself.  Most transparent, most ethical: who knows what else was promised?



But now we have reality.  Government always promotes itself as the end of history.  But the reality is always a disappointment, because when you get down to it, government is only good at breaking things.  That is why radical Randolph Bourne told us that War is the health of the state, riffing on Hegel.  The trouble is that the left-wing war on self-organizing society is just another form of the old imperial project, brought up to date.



Reality is that President Obama is the Worst President Ever.  This is because of his permanent campaign.  Politics is division, and therefore is best left to election time.  If politicians elected to lead nations persevere in division they will find it impossible to lead the nation they want to lead.  Because it is divided.  Even Bill Clinton pretended to be the bipartisan leader while he savaged Republicans for attacking his bipartisan balanced budgets.

President Obama is the Most Racist President Ever.  Does the president grasp the utter disaster his racist sallies portend?  Anyone can make a career as a race-baiter.  It takes talent to bring the races together.



The Obama administration is the Most Corrupt Ever.  This is really an insult for administrations like the Harding administration that limited corruption to grand-scale peculation.  The Obama years were going to be transparent and honest and fair.  But in reality the example comes from the top to do whatever it takes to help Obama friends and hurt Obama enemies.  Obama-style corruption goes way beyond peculation to the ideological corruption of government.



The Obama administration is the Most Dishonest Ever.  The problem with scandals like the Benghazi affair, or with promises to close Guantanamo, or sell Obamacare as a way to reduce health care costs, is not that politicians are lying again.  Politicians always lie, because we the people demand that they lie.  We refuse to be told the truth.  The art of politics and government is to tell the fewest number of lies that will allow you to govern successfully.  The Obama folks seem to feel no restraint on their lies, probably because the lapdog media doesn't hold them to account.  The trouble with all the lying is the problem of the Boy that Cried Wolf.  Eventually the Obama folks are going to need us to trust it in some crisis.  But how do we know when to trust?



The Obama administration is the Most Economically Clueless Ever.  The Great Recession certainly was a big challenge.  As Reinhart and Rogoff tell us in This Time is Different, a big banking crisis takes years to heal.  But the Obamis refused to trim their sails to reality, and the result is pathetic growth and soaring debt.  Young people are usually the ones to suffer from a bad economy and this one is no exception.  Maybe that's good.  Maybe the youth will be hesitant next time The One We Have Been Waiting For presents himself.



The Obama administration is the Most Arrogant Ever.  Politics is an arrogant trade, for sure.  That's because successful politicians have always seemed to defy the odds: indeed they are lottery winners.  But the trouble with the Obamis is that the courtiers of the ruling class have encouraged arrogance, and that is not a good idea.  The press  of a bygone era liked to inflate itself by talking about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.  They do this job splendidly when Republicans are in power, but not so well when Democrats are in power.  In the Obama years they have been hopeless, and this has encouraged the Obamis in their arrogance.  And this will lead to a major demoralization of the liberal project in the near future.



I could go on.  My point is that government is always a mess; government officials are always making one stupid mistake after another.  It's best for all of us if we keep our messianic instincts in check and avoid immortalizing the mortal.  It's just bad for politicians to think that they have a clear road ahead.

Liberals on Stage with the Patriarchy

A lady at a nearby table at dinner here in Ashland, Oregon nearly choked on her dinner and so we got into conversation.  She observed that the Shakespeare festival this year seems to be all about patriarchal issues: Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady making a silk purse out of a sow's ear for the embassy ball; the angry King Cymbeline banishing all and sundry and making his sweet daughter marry the doofus Cloten; Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire beating up his timid wife Stella; Petruchio effecting The Taming of the Shrew Katherine.



I naughtily interjected that no wonder she was choking on her dinner.



Yes, you could interpret things in that lifeless liberal way.  But, for Pete's sake aren't we all better than that?  Can't we MoveOn.org beyond state liberal tropes and find the good the true, and the beautiful in the theater?



For instance, it's all very well to send all the lower-class girls to school where they will dutifully learn their lessons and become nurses and teachers instead of factory hands.  But haven't we just taken them out of the textile factories and put them in the government bureaucratic factories?  And what happened to the vibrant lower-class culture that we have obliterated.  Suppose we had refrained from carpet-bombing the London Cockneys with government schools and government doles?  Back in 1911 just before the start of the welfare state just about everyone belonged to a labor union, a benefit club, or a friendly society.  Imagine what might have been.



For instance, it's all very well to rail at Stanley Kowalski's domestic violence and crudities.  But in fact he smoked out Blanche's obscuring lies rather cleverly.  And it was Stella that made the central decision of the play and called in the men with guns to take batty Blanche to the State Mental Hospital, or whatever it was called back then in Louisiana.



For instance, it's all very well to interpolate a little and pretend, wink, wink, that the assertive Katherine was not really cowed by her lordly Petruchio. But the bigger question remains.  What do you do about a woman that is making everyone's life a misery?  We know what you do with refractory young men.  You send them off to boot camp and the wars.  Of course, in our evolved age we don't send them to the wars any more, we just graduate them from our government child custodial facilities to our equally misnamed penitentiaries and reformatories and panopticons.  Yes, but what about refractory women, usually in some powerful family position and taking full advantage of their power? Truth is, we don't have a clue, because nearly all women do what they are told.  Petruchio's solution is the method of the totalitarian interrogation: starvation and sensory deprivation balanced by the appeal to let's all just get along.  Just sign this paper, just agree with me, and all this unpleasantness will disappear.  Any better ideas out there?



Yes.  We have big problems in today's America, and the liberal ruling class is the immovable object that's preventing us from moving on and solving our problems.



But here's an interesting point.  The festival in Ashland is very careful about race.  They always have a black-themed play and a few black actors for their lily-white liberal audience.  The black actors also appear in the other plays. Lucentio, Bianca's eventual groom in Shrew is black, and so is his father.



But in A Streetcar Named Desire the races have to be kept straight.  You can't have a black Blanche Dubois.  Or a black Stanley, or a black Stella.  Because that would cross up the basic message at the core of the play that the Old South was finished, marinating in its lies and its corruption.  You can have a black Eunice, the neighbor, and so that's what we get.



Yep, these liberals are something else.  And they don't have a clue about the depth of their hypocrisy and their corruption and their injustice: especially the sweet liberal ladies in the audience.



But one fine day...

Let's Talk Conservative Populism

Everyone has been talking populism this week, after Ross Douthat started the ball rolling with his country vs. court party oped.

That would mean a change in the current party setup where Democrats are supposed to be social elitists and economic populists and the Republicans are supposed to be social populists and economic elitists.

Except of course that the current Democratic Party is social elitist and economic crony-ist, and the Republicans are social populists and crypto-economic populists as well.

In other words, conservatives are market supporters rather than big business supporters.  The Democrats feel most comfortable when they regulate big business into dues-paying puppies.  Well that's what they think, but really they end up feeding the beast of crony capitalism.

OK.  It's fine to talk about economic populism, but what would it actually look like?

It would be different from the old populism, that's what.  The populists of the late 19th century were victims railing against the injustice of big banks and corporations.  We conservative populists are different. Conservatives are people of the responsible self.  We don't experience ourselves as victims, but as sober and responsible contributors to society.  So our populism is not a populism raging against the machine.  It is the populism of the responsible self that argues simply against privilege, whether it's crony capitalism at the top or benefit cadging at the bottom.

Now, my own approach to populism grows out of my basic view of government spending, which is $1 trillion a year for pensions, $1 trillion for health care, $1`trillion for education and half a trillion for welfare.

This conservative populist, a populist of the responsible self, looks at the trillion dollars a year in pensions and says: We want to be responsible for our own savings and pensions.  We don't want our savings sequestered in corrupt government programs and used by the government to buy votes for 30 years until we retire.  Plus we have other ideas with what to do with our savings in the mean time, such as buy a home, start a business, educate the kids, have a nest egg to tide over Great Recessions.

Then we populists look at health care and say: We people of the responsible self want to be responsible for our own health care; we don't want the government's one size fits all approach.  And we want the flexibility to direct our health care dollars to our children, our parents, and our other loved ones as the need arises, not as government policy permits.

We look at education and determine with Cato's Andrew Coulson in Market Education that government education pits parents against each other.  And education ends up as a producer's cartel.  We want to direct our own money at our children's education, and we want that money going to things that we value, not things that some activist or bureaucrat values.

We look at welfare and we say that we want to spend our own money on the relief of the poor.  We want the poor to look to us, the responsible middle class, for relief, and we do not want them looking to some community organizer waving government money around in return for their votes.  Since conservatives are the most generous donors to charitable works, we have standing on the matter.

President Obama has just come out with a proposal to cut the taxes of big business with lower corporate tax rates.  But he proposes nothing for small businessmen that pay taxes at the personal tax rate.

Here's a chance for good conservative populism.  To heck with President Obama and his big business cronies; they can take care of themselves.  What about helping the real job creators: small businessmen.

Go Econo-Populist, Young Man

Up to now the two political parties in the US have broken down as follows, according to Yuval Levin:

The Republican party has been the party of cultural populism and economic elitism, and the Democrats have been the party of cultural elitism and economic populism.

So on this view the Republican party is the party of knuckle-dragging Christians and job-destroying corporatist looters like Mitt Romney.  And the Democrats are the party of secular elitism and little-guy economics.



But now, Levin says, the Democrats have really become a true "court" party, the party of social elitism and economic elitism, looking after the big guys, whether they are social elitists or corporate elitists.  On economic policy we find them

protecting larger players from competition in exchange for their willingness to serve as agents of government power and driving crucial sectors of our economy (finance and health insurance above all, but by no means only those) toward greater consolidation.

That gives the Republicans an opening to economic populism.

This would mean emphasizing conservative paths to higher wages and a lower cost of living for working families (like pro-family tax reform, a more growth-oriented monetary policy, health-care reform that reduces costs through competition and consumer power, energy policy aimed at both spurring growth and lowering utility bills by making the most of our domestic resources, K–12 reform to give families more ways to escape failing schools, higher-ed reforms to restrain tuition inflation, entitlement reform to reduce the burden of debt on the young while retaining the safety net for the poor and the old). It would also mean financial regulation with an eye to competition, rather than consolidation. 

And wouldn't you know, there's a good opportunity to do that where President Obama is proposing to lower corporate income tax rates and close loopholes for big business while leaving in the cold small business that report business income on personal income tax returns.



Really, Republicans have been populist in this way for a decade, but our leaders haven't been listening.  The evergreen Democratic line that the Republican Party is the country-club party has been baloney for a decade at least.



And why not?  As Victor Davis Hanson writes, there are all kinds of ways, from gas prices to student debt to agriculture/food stamps to immigration to monetary policy, in which the rich and the poor conspire to milk the system leaving the middle class to take the hit.



What Republicans need to do is improve on the messaging and tell the American people that Republicans stand for the small businessman that is trying to get a retail store or a contracting business off the ground.  And why not start belaboring on big business which, from big banks to big boys like Warren Buffet, has been notably going Democrat recently.  I don't blame them; they know that in return for political contributions they can get protection as political cronies.  But there is no reason to give them cover.  Republicans should start connecting big business to the Democratic Party and an out-of-touch liberal elite.



And the sooner the better.

Politics and Religion in Washington

Pundit and former political staffer Rich Galen wants to "take religion out of economics."  The parties don't just disagree any more, he worries.

The two parties no longer consider each other to be political opponents -- each aiming for the same goal but choosing differing paths to get there.



Each of the two parties now considers the other to be not just a political enemy, but an enemy of everything the other believes in.

One can argue, of course, about who is "to blame" for this.  My idea is that the current pre-revolutionary situation arose in the 1980s when all of a sudden liberals realized that they weren't going to win in a walkover.  There were actually people in the US that wanted America to go in a different direction and were prepared to do something about it.  Then the Republicans took over the House for the first time in 40 years.  Then George W. Bush won in a squeaker.  Well, liberals decided that it was time for No More Mr. Nice Guy.  Not that they'd ever been nice to conservatives and Republicans.  Here's a look back at liberals targeting conservatives in the New Deal era from David Beito.



But Rich Galen proposes a "why can't we get along" politics to do stuff we can agree on.  On climate, he suggests: "Is it better to put more garbage into the atmosphere or less garbage into the atmosphere?"



Good point, Rich.  But the question is over carbon dioxide.  Is it a pollutant or not?  The question is: Do windmills and solar farms make a blind bit of difference?  The question is: is climate science any good or an enterprise totally corrupted by politics?



On the economy and government spending, Rich wants to spend more productively and to "raise the largest possible number of Americans who are at or below the poverty line into the middle class".  But austerity won't work, we writes. It "hasn't worked in Greece or Spain and it won't work here."



But austerity is exactly the problem.  Once you hand out free stuff -- also called government spending on entitlements -- people decide that their own personal free stuff is an eternal sacred right, and they will fight to the death to keep their monthly check coming.  So-called "austerity" is government dipping a tiny toe into reducing those government entitlements, those eternal sacred rights.



The trouble is that in the end, government runs out of free stuff to hand out.  That is the problem in Greece, in Spain, and most directly Egypt.  In Egypt, a huge proportion of the population relies on subsidized food handouts: Egypt, that used to be the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.  But now Egypt needs about $20 billion a year to keep the food coming.  $20 billion it doesn't have.



All these entitlements start out the same way: a wonderful program to help the poor.  Except that free education today most notably fails the poor in the inner cities.  And Medicaid's free health care for the poor apparently doesn't have any better outcome than no health insurance.  And decades of welfare doesn't seem to be raising people out of poverty and into the middle class.



The reason we conservatives are mad as hell is that we look at the political agenda and the political action in the liberal ruling class and we don't see any effort to solve problems.  We see a ruling class that is purely focused upon dividing the nation in a way that will win the next election.



For example, we have a president who ran against venture capitalist Mitt Romney as a monster killing the wives of laid-off steelworkers.  This summer he is going to rent the Martha's Vineyard home of Chicago venture capitalist David Schulte.  Isn't that special?



So yes.  There really is a religious difference between conservatives and liberals on the economy.  We conservatives believe that the way to wive and thrive is to get yourself some skills and then offer them to the marketplace, and accept what the marketplace renders back.  Liberals believe that you have to force the marketplace to cough up a just return, because of exploitation and inequality.



We conservatives are willing to stipulate the exploitation and inequality in the world.  We just don't think that government force actually solves it.  In fact, we argue that the whole earth economic and political experiment conducted in the 20th century, at the cost of probably 100 million human lives, proves it.  Moreover, we argue that the kind of regimes that feature government force big-time are just the ones that multiply exploitation, inequality, and human misery, as in Mao's China, Stalin's Russia, and the Castro brothers' Cuba.



So that's why "let's all just get along" doesn't quite do it for conservatives.  We think there is a fundamental clash coming about America's goals and we say Bring It On.



Because the longer we wait to solve the problem, the worse it will be for the little people.