Does Nazism = Marxism = Liberalism?

Is it allowed in Obama's America to object to the idea that a departed Marxist was a "Marxist Humanist Mensch"?



That's what John Podhoretz did when "leftist social critic Marshall Berman" was recently so eulogized.  He reacted, perhaps a little too quickly.  His tweet read: "Imagine a tribute to a Nazi humanist mensch.”



After a while he decided that he ought to apologize.



Actually, the idea that a thinker of poisonous ideas could be a mensch is not that outrageous.  People can espouse vicious ideas in their writing and still be kind to children and animals.  The point is that in Obama's America you are not allowed to call a dead Nazi social critic a mensch.  But you are allowed to do it for dead Marxists.



And if Nazism is an abomination, leading to the death of millions, what about liberalism, or "Liberal Fascism", as Jonah Goldberg so delicately puts it.  It led to the suffering of millions in the Great Depression and now it is creating great discomfort for millions in the Great Recession.



The point is that all these political doctrines -- Nazism, Marxism, and liberalism -- call for the supremacy of the political ruling class.  In all of them, politics and political power trumps everything.



Any sensible person would regard such ideas with suspicion.  Of course a ruling class, or would-be ruling class, would believe in the claptrap of political supremacy.



But not modern conservatism.  And that has to mean something.



Let us stipulate that Nazism, Marxism, and liberalism have a valid point.



Nazism grew out of the era of German Liberation during the Napoleonic Wars when German intellectuals like Fichte desperately tried to create an idea of German nationhood to push back against the endless imperial invasions of the French.  And the "volkisch" ideas of German Romanticism had a point too in honoring the solidarity and the community of traditional folkways.  A lot of the thinkers working on this were real "mensch" and good for them.  It all only became a murdering totalitarianism after the German defeat in World War I and the Germans, living in what they knew was the most advanced country in the world, started flailing around for an Answer to their problems.



Marxism grew out of the explosive industrial revolution that seemed to be turning workers into mechanical slaves.  It was plausible to worry that the newly powerful capitalists were something to fear and something to be fought.  Of course, Marxism was dead wrong.  But nobody knew that back in the 1840s.



Liberalism grew out of the same soil, the idea that someone had to supervise the huge new corporations that dominated railways and steel and oil.  Otherwise they would run amok.  It all seemed so plausible back in the 1890s.



Meanwhile, capitalism was crunching along, midway through raising daily income from $3 per capita to the present $120 per capita, based on the Invisible Hand doctrine that the market was self ordering.  Absent state power, the new capitalism would behave like an unconscious organism, according to Herbert Spencer.  People were like cells, obliviously doing their thing in the middle of a vast social organism, but still helping the whole thing thrive.  You believe stuff like that, fashionable people howled?  Give me a break!



Here's how I look at it.  Think of Nazism, Marxism, and liberalism as "plausible lies."



It makes sense that in a cruel world of knives in the back (German: Dolchstoß), you need a powerful nation built upon a people that share language and race.  Only it doesn't.  It turns out that humans are perfectly capable of cooperating across language and race barriers, so long as the language and the race baiters shut up.  Nazism is a lie.



It makes sense that individual workers would be helpless before the thundering power of Machine Industry.  Only it turns out that Machine Industry works much better when people are treated like humans and encouraged to be "self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility (German: verantwortungsfreudig)."  Marxism is a lie.



It makes sense that the economy would be a complete shambles unless "large-minded" administrators and experts were given the authority to organize things rationally.  Only it turns out that millions of producer and consumer decisions easily outperform the expert and the administrator.  That's because the millions are trying and failing and learning things in their millions, whereas the government expert and the government administrator can only try a few things, and cannot admit when they are wrong.  Liberalism is a lie.



That leaves us with the implausible truth that voluntary social cooperation is the way "forward" -- a voluntary social cooperation freed from a sovereign political hegemony that endlessly orders everyone around.



To figure out how that works you can do a lot worse than listen to Edmund Burke, the "first conservative."

1. No Lois Lerners.  Government administrators must not use their power to despoil ordinary citizens, e.g., "dangerous" Tea Partiers.  Burke started this revolutionary notion with his Impeachment of Warren Hastings.


2. No religious persecution.  Let people worship their own gods.  Burke lost his seat in Parliament for supporting Catholic emancipation.


3. No rule from afar.  It's stupid to think you can rule America from Westminster, said Burke.


4. No rule of the experts and mechanics.  The human condition is not a mechanical toy.  Keep the "sophisters, economists, and calculators" off the levers of power.  Burke predicted that the French Revolution would end in the gallows.  OK, he was wrong; it ended in the guillotine.

So there you have it: three Plausible Lies and one Implausible Truth.  But why be amazed?  Truth, they say is stranger than fiction.  Because fiction always has to be plausible.

No Shortcuts writes JR Dunn

Terrified by three-and-a-half more years of Obama?  Too bad, writes American Thinker's J.R. Dunn.  There is no easy way out; nor should we want one.  What this nation needs is a decisive rejection of liberalism.

I want every single train of events set in motion by Obama, his administration, and his supporters, down to the last halfwit college undergrad, to play out in full.  I want every disaster that fool and his parade of twitches have triggered to blossom in bleak completion.  I want to see all their trains collide, all their ships sink, all their airships burnt to cinders.

The purpose of this is not to experience the fun of it.  It's not going to be fun, not for anyone.  And there is no shortcut to the sunny green uplands of a conservative future.

I prefer that we drink this cup to the dregs, take this road to its lonely end.  The liberals need to undergo the whipping that they have dodged for over seven decades.  The voters of this country, who have treated politics like a reality series, need to be backhanded by the world as it exists.  We require a rude awakening.  This country's pols, both left and right, need to be overwhelmed with worry as to what the next day will bring.  The people of this country need to be buried up to their necks in the results of their own infantilism.  All the fantasy castles need to be demolished to the last stone.  Liberalism must be discredited and humiliated, its adherents defeated and dispersed.  The leader of the whole circus must be tormented to the human limit and beyond, forced to break down in front of the cameras as he begs for help that will not come. 

In my view, it is women, white women, that need to experience this meltdown most of all.  Liberals have been spinning lies to women for decades and women have lapped it all up -- hey, no offence, women are programmed to lap up the milk of the lover's blandishments.



But women are going to find out in the next few years how bad liberalism is for them, their children, and their loved ones.



It will all be too late, of course.  That always happens with women.



But it is not a weakness in women that this always happens.  It's clear that women are programmed, by God or by Darwin, to believe in the conventional wisdom of their local community of women.  And when things go south, women are programmed to hang on, hoping against hope that they can get their children to adulthood before the flood carries everything before it to utter ruin.



Since woman have the vote, their credulity and their just-hang-on culture is now part of the public square, and we skeptical, rebellious men just have to deal with it.



That's why we need to experience the absolute liberal wipeout for the next three-and-a-half years.  So that the American people, down to the lowest information women voters, say: Never Again. 

Obama Discredits Liberalism

When I wrote my usual American Thinker op-ed over the weekend titled "Discredit Liberalism Utterly" I had no idea that when the article ran yesterday it would be the same day that President Obama would do the job for us.



Imagine that. Imagine how the president could have done more to discredit liberalism utterly in his speech on Syria of September 10, 2013, a day which will live...  As the day that liberalism started to die.



On top of that it was also the day that two Colorado state senators were recalled by a movement led by a twentysomething plumber.  You know their names: State Senator John Morse and State Senator Angela Giron.  You may not know the plumber.  His name is Victor Head.



John Ransom addressed the discredit liberalism issue in "6 Tricks that God has played on Liberals since November:"

It’s not even just that they are wrong, it’s that at the top of the liberal pyramid they are liars, intellectually bankrupt, the moral and intellectual equivalents of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, spreading a gospel which not only they don’t understand, but the they exploit for their own, and no one else’s gain.

Yeah, that does put it in a special light.  Liberals are no better than the Bakkers.  In a real sense.  We don't know what the Bakkers really believed about God.  And we don't really know what liberals believe about liberalism.  But we do know that, when you add the numbers up the only people that really seem to benefit from liberalism are liberals.



Just like the Bakkers and God.



Jonah Goldberg also has a piece today that kinda hammers the whole "discredit liberalism" meme home.  He talks about the idea that liberals are live-and-let-live people and that liberal support for gay marriage and abortion proves it.  That, he says, is the Grand Myth of liberalism.

Social liberalism is the foremost, predominant and in many instances sole impulse for zealous regulation in this country, particularly in big cities. I love it when liberals complain about a ridiculous bit of PC nanny-statism coming out of New York, L.A., Chicago, D.C., Seattle, etc. -- "What will they do next?"



Uh, sorry to tell you, but you are "they." Outside of a "Law and Order" script -- or an equally implausible MSNBC diatribe about who ruined Detroit -- conservatives have as much influence on big-city liberalism as the Knights of Malta.

And when it comes to gay marriage and abortion, you'd better agree with liberals or else.  Gay marriage?  The local Human Rights Commission in New Mexico will come after you.  Abortion?  Obamacare says you gotta pay for it.



Thanks to those sharing and caring live-and-let-live liberals.



The only problem for me is what happens after liberalism is utterly discredited.  Even Aussie conservative Tony Abbott figured he needed to romance the ladies with a proposed maternal leave policy financed by a teeny-tiny tax on the rich earning more that $500,000 a year.



You see, nothing changes.  All politicians are like predatory plunderers, egging on their supporters with the promise of loot.  Women are supposed to be sharers and carers, yet politicians treat them like they were potential rapers and pillagers, anxious to get their hands on some free stuff.



The solution is obvious.  Fire the minds of men and women with the idea of limited government, that any plan to plunder A and give it to B is sick and wrong, and against "our values."



But who will be the one to make the first move?  Any ideas, President Obama?

Tony Abbott Equals Reagan Equals Bush

When Barack Obama acceded to the presidency after various verbal infelicities, such as the 57 states incident, he was hailed as a brilliant everything.



But conservative politicians are always represented as barely human.  Ronald Reagan was an amiable dunce.  George W. Bush was a dumb Texas cowboy.



So it's no surprise that Tony Abbott, leader of the conservative Liberal Party and winner in the recent Australian general election, has been characterized as an embarrassment.  He made a verbal slip about the "suppositories of wisdom" and is regarded as "hostile to women" and sexist for talking about the "sex appeal" of certain women parliamentary candidates.

Slowly, the public has come to accept Mr Abbott as its next prime minister, though he has long been dogged by claims he is hostile to women, particularly after his fierce approach to Miss Gillard.



He was heavily criticised for appearing at a rally against the carbon tax outside Parliament House surrounded by banners referring to Ms Gillard as "Ju-Liar" and "the Bitch".



Australia's first female prime minister hit back at him in a stirring speech in parliament last October that made global headlines.



"I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man," she said. "I've had enough, Australian women have had enough."

Well of course.  You're not allowed to criticize liberal women: That's sexist.  Just as you are not allowed to criticize President Obama: That's racist.



Any US conservative can see the parallels with US politics.  Conservatives are always characterized as unfriendly to women.  Or making divisive comments.  Or being sexist.  Or extremist.  A chap like Barack Obama can be way off on the left wing but get reported as the savior of women, children, and minorities.



Somewhere there is a campaign consultant that knows how to neuter this sort of thing.  But it won't be easy, because the routine marginalization of conservative politicians reflects the left-wing nature of the mainstream media.  The media lives in a bubble where of course conservatives are extremist, of course they are unintelligent, of course they are racist, sexist, homophobic.



That's why I issue the call to "Discredit Liberalism Utterly" in the American Thinker today.   I mean that particularly in the minds of nice women who have learned their lessons well in the modern secular seminary.  Because only when those nice women feel utterly betrayed will the scales fall off their eyes.  Only then will they realize that liberalism is bad for women for their children and other humans.  That liberals sees them as dupes, marks, easily manipulated innocents.  Because for liberals it is all about getting and keeping and deploying government power.  No matter how it hurts ordinary people just trying to live their lives.



Meanwhile, Tony Abbott has won in Australia, and "Australia is under new management and once again open for business."

"My Daughter the Bestselling Author"

Since time immemorial,or at least from the founding of the Second Temple, Jewish mothers have proudly reported the doings of "my son the doctor." OK, so they used to talk about "my son the rabbi" until the invention of asepsis and the founding of the AMA made doctors respectable at last.



Still, you get the point.



But now I can report to all my friends that my daughter Beatriz Williams is now a "New York Times Bestselling Author."  That's because in this week's NYT Bestseller Lists A Hundred Summers by Beatriz Williams hit #16 in the e-book fiction list and #24 in the combined e-book and print fiction list.  A Hundred Summers is Beatriz's second title for Putnam.  Overseas, her debut novel, was published in 2012 and is now out in paperback.



And really, what's "my son the doctor" compared to "my daughter the bestselling author"?



What does this mean?  It means that forever after my daughter's publisher can style her on the cover as "New York Times Bestselling Author Beatriz Williams."



It also means that it is not too late to order yours.  A Hundred Summers is a tale of lost love here.  And Overseas, a tale of love across time, is here.  Go ahead.  Click away!



I talked to a friend and asked whether she thought that the title "New York Times Bestselling Author" amounted to a patent of nobility, or whether it was better described as membership in an order of chivalry, the kind that lets you wear a star on your chest.



She thought that patent of nobility came closest.  But I beg to disagree.  In the first place, patents of nobility are forbidden to the United States government by the US Constitution.  In the second place, titles of nobility are traditionally inherited and there is no doubt, at least for now, that the title of "New York Times Bestselling Author" is not heritable.



No, I think that New York Times Bestselling Authors are all members of a glorious order of chivalry.  As in most such orders there are degrees of membership: Members, Knights, Knight Commanders and so on.  The Order of the New York Times Bestselling Authors is just the same.  There are ordinary Bestselling Authors and then there are Distinguished Bestselling Authors and of course #1 Bestselling Authors.  And so on.



All joking apart, this is a magnificent achievement for my daughter Beatriz, the culmination of years of hard work, relentless discipline, sleepless nights, and just raw talent.



Congratulations, daughter dear.  There is no higher honor -- other than being a wife, mother of four strapping children, and devoted Starbucks customer.

Levin's Amendments a "Fantasy"?

I've criticized Mark Levin's The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic from the right, writing that what's needed is not a laundry list of reforms but an ideological revolution to power them.

But for a lefty like Anne-Marie Cox at the British Guardian the whole Amendments thing is an "originalist fantasy" -- and boring too.

Because the states are never going to authorize a convention under Article V of the US Constitution.

Well, yes.  I get that.  I get that the constitutional amendment process is fiendishly difficult, and that to propose ten amendments is political insanity.

But that's not the point of Levin's Amendments.  The point is to dress up a conservative program of reform in the sacred garments of the Constitution, to turn the boring grind of day-to-day politics into a holy crusade.

I happen to agree with Cox that the originalist movement is a busted flush.  I happen to agree that a state-led convention process would be a dead letter.  But that is not the point.  The point is to get the conservative faithful riled up and ready for political battle.  Obviously, political recruiter Mark Levin has succeeded in that, since Amendments has already spent weeks as a #1 New York Times bestseller.

Right now, even as we speak, Amendments is #9 on Amazon.

And remember, Ms. Feminist Cox.  The Equal Rights Amendment may have failed to get ratification by the required 38 states in 1982, but its ideas and its prescriptions have seeped into every corner of American life in the public square.  I'd call that a stunning strategic success, even if the tactical ERA battle failed.

All this just means that the specific reforms that Levin advances, from returning the Senate to its original function as the voice of the states to the limitation on taxation, will be a dead letter unless we completely and decisively demolish the liberal world view.

By that I mean that conservatives must advance a world view that encloses both the originalist vision and the progressive vision and points the way to something new.

That something new, from the conservative point of view, must include the notion of limited government and civil society.  It will require a flank attack on our liberal friends, catching their activists facing the wrong direction, so that their strategy and tactics, indeed their whole world view, collapses before the ideological might of the conservative world view.

In my view the world-beating conservative world view should beat the liberals with the ideas of their own ideological saints.  If you want to talk about alienation with Marx, what is more alienating than a life on government benefits utterly cut off from a useful contribution to society through work?  If you want to talk about the exploitation of surplus value, what is worse than the government taxing away and sequestering 15 to 25 percent of the ordinary worker's wages every paycheck?  If you want to talk about oppression, what is more oppressing than the demolition of lower-class culture by the liberal social agenda?  Isn't that what all invaders try to do when they defeat their hated enemy?  Why can't conservatives use Marx as a club to beat their political foes?

But when it comes to a positive agenda, and a new and all-encompassing world view, I hold that we should mine the left for the best political ores.  I start with the first generation Frankfurt School and Horkheimer and Adorno.  Their Dialectic of Enlightenment admitted that domination is in the very blood of Enlightenment because: "What men want to learn from nature is how to dominate it and other men."  In other words, they admitted that their Holy Grail of Enlightenment is also the wound of an Original Sin.  I have boiled this idea down into a catchphrase: System is domination.

That means every one of the lefty comprehensive and mandatory government programs is nothing more or less than a system for domination: cruel, unjust, corrupt, and wasteful.

Then we advance to the next generation of Frankfurters and Jürgen Habermas, student of Adorno.  His grand opus The Theory of Communicative Action proposes understanding the world as a duality of "system" and "lifeworld."

The problem for Habermas is the "colonization of the lifeworld" by systems, the systems of bourgeois capitalism, steering media, and the authoritarian administrative welfare state.  The answer is to empower the "lifeworld" as a public sphere of negotiation and exchange of truth values in a spirit of equality to balance the strategic might of system domination. Right on Jürgi! In my words,

People are not just egos pursuing a selfish goal; they are social beings immersed in a shared lifeworld, a culture that begins with “ego” and “alter,” the self and the other in which, of course, language is central in defining what it is possible to think about in the shared culture.

It is worth noting here that "Action" in the title of Habermas magnum opus is "Handeln" in the original German.  That means a lot more than action.  It includes the idea of negotiation and even haggling.  In regard to Jews, for instance, "Handeln" can be used as a pejorative, meaning people that are always bargaining and looking for a deal.

I hold that we conservatives can only defeat the world view of our liberal friends with their own ideas, ideas from the very best lefty thinkers.  We have to change "what it is possible to think about in the shared culture."  That means, of course, reversing the culture of political correctness, which is precisely an attempt to limit "what it is possible to think."

But how do you change "what it is possible to think"?  You don't, most of the time.  But when things start going wrong, badly wrong, then people start to break out of the taken for granted culture, the "lifeworld" in Habermas' words that "appears as a reservoir of taken-for-granteds, of unshaken convictions that participants in communication draw upon in cooperative processes of interpretations."

The whole point of a culture, of a "lifeworld," is that it provides a "taken-for-granted" blueprint for successful life in society in the here and now.  But when things go wrong, then people start to ask questions.  They start to critique the "taken-for-granted."  They start to search for a better way.

The glory of the Obama years is that nobody could perhaps have designed a better way to bring all the liberal "taken-for-granteds" into question.  And the irony of the whole thing is, as Stephen Moore points out in the Wall Street Journal that the young, minorities and women are hardest hit by the Obama economy and energy policy and, no doubt, social policy.

Yes, indeed, Anne-Marie Cox.  Mark Levin's Liberty Amendments is a boring fantasy.  But that's not the point.  The point is that the book's success shows that the people are starting to ache for an answer to our present problems.

It is up to us to build a shining ideological edifice that will create conservative light out of liberal darkness.  Do that, and the reforms in The Liberty Amendments will become a slam dunk.

NYT Worries about that Emerging Democratic Majority

President Obama's winning coalition is a wonderful thing to liberals.  But how durable is it?  In "How Fragile Is the New Democratic Coalition?" Thomas B. Edsall runs the numbers for the New York Times faithful and worries whether it will all last.



A key part of the Obama majority, according to Edsall, was what Ron Lesthaeghe and Lisa Neidert of the University of Michigan Population Studies Center call the Second Demographic Transition, i.e. people who practice and preach "postponement of marriage, greater prevalence of cohabitation and same-sex households, postponement of parenthood, sub-replacement fertility, and a higher incidence of abortion."  In other words, liberals.



And, of course, any young person that goes to government schools, and in particular the secular seminaries we call "university," is likely to be carefully taught in the ways of the Second Demographic Transition.  Unless they have a crusty old Dad at home they are likely to become liberal fellow travelers.  Because that's the default thing to do.



To conservatives, all this looks like the "Life of Julia" broadcast by the Obamis in 2012.



Of course, long term, we conservatives understand that the practice of the life of Julia means not a Demographic Transition but a demographic extinction.  Come to childless liberal Seattle to experience that.  The lesson it provides to conservatives is that the culture of nearly all religions makes sense.  Society needs to jog its young and its not-so-young away from the culture of expression and Do Your Own Thing into more socially beneficial channels, ones that encourages and supports marriage formation, childbearing, and child-raising.



But in the near term, I wonder if the Second Demographic Transition and the Julias and Julians within it will get off the Democratic coalition before it's too late.



It makes sense for the liberal ruling class to promote secularism, cohabitation, abortion and all the rest.  It makes sense precisely as advertised in The Life of Julia.  A person living that kind of life needs big government.



But it doesn't make sense for anyone that feels the conservative instinct, that we, the generation of the living, have a duty to the generations of ancestors and the generations yet unborn.  We know that the only thing that matters is to get children on the ground and grandchildren after them.



The problem for the liberal fellow travelers is that big government doesn't give a damn about Julia, or anything else beyond Julia's next vote in the next election. Liberal politicians tell the young, the minority, the female that they care about them.  Then why are incomes declining in the Obama years, for all but the top 20 percent like me that are floating on the Fed's QE3?  Why are things worst for the young, the minorities, and for women, as Stephen Moore writes in the Wall Street Journal?



OK.  If that is so then why did the young and the minority and the female vote for Obama in 2012?



Look, there's a good argument that the November 2012 election came at the last moment that ordinary people could believe in the golden words of our president, that he cared about people like the young, the minority, the women.  The reality is that the spending, regulation, and subsidy of big government end up helping people with pull, not the average person trying to make it out in the outer suburbs, and if you believe that politicians care about you, I gotta bridge to sell you.



Back in the 2000s and the Obama years thus far conservatives couldn't advance their argument against the conventional wisdom that the Democrats were the natural home of the young and the minority and the female, because nobody was getting hurt.  Not yet.  Of course the temperature was going to cool and the seas were going to recede.  Of course free contraception was just the ticket for a frisky young woman.  Of course the Democrats cared about minorities while the Republicans were country-club racists.



And the mainstream media wasn't going to disabuse anyone of the Democrats' political line.



Back then conservatives and Republicans knew that it all had to end in tears.  Settled science, you know.



In fact, economist Ronald Coase's death on Monday reminds us that government regulation doesn't usually result in better outcomes than the free market.  You could look it up, under "The Problem of Social Cost".  Economics 101.



We conservatives know that anti-natal culture, of sexual self-expression and abortion and single-parent families, is a dead end.  Math 101.



We know that the permanent campaign, the desideratum of community organizers everywhere, is a dead end, because if you divide people too much into us and them, then they will take the hint and actually divide up in civil war. Politics 101.



We know that the politics of free stuff runs out when the free stuff runs out, and it always does. Margaret Thatcher 101.



But we understand that it is hard for young people, minorities, and women to get this.  They haven't been around the course a couple of times.



Well, they are half way around the course for the first time right now, and my prediction is that by the time they complete that learning experience there will be a lot fewer Democrats in the pack than there were when they started out.



That's why they say when anything goes wrong: "minorities and women hardest hit."  Because they are the most dependent on government.