Why the Obamacare Fight Matters

Look, Obamacare will get funded.  Either this week or next week.  And if there's a "government shutdown" the Republicans will get the blame.



But that's not the point.



The point is that, unlike all the other lovely entitlement programs from Social Security to Medicare, Obamacare is violating Kristol's Law.  That's Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol's dad.



Kristol's Law says that if you want to help the poor, you need to deal in the middle class.  When Social Security was passed, the average middle-class senior didn't have a pension plan.  When Medicare passed the average middle-class senior didn't have health insurance.



But today, the average middle-class family already has health insurance.  So if we are now going to extend health insurance to the 30 million (who are mostly young people and people without assets) that don't have it and throw in a subsidy as well, it stands to reason that the average middle-class family is going to find itself spending more on health care.  A lot more.



Kristol's Law merely makes explicit the unsaid calculus of the authoritarian welfare state.  It tries to offer free stuff to a lot of people that seems to be paid for by a few.  That's why President Obama is always going around talking about getting the rich to pay a little more.  In fact, of course, you can never really tell who will be the net payers for a government program.



The meaning of Kristol's Law becomes even more explicit when you remember that all government, from the robber band to the guerrillas in the hills to formal democratic government, always operates by offering the promise of loot and plunder to its supporters.  It is always a calculus of force: Join us and you will get yours.



The conservative argument against the calculus of loot is threefold.

1. Government is force.  Humans are social animals; we cooperate and do things for other people not because we are forced to but because that's what social animals do.  Force is a destroyer; cooperation is a multiplier.  The more force, the less prosperity for anyone; the more cooperation, the more prosperity for all.  Because why bother to go out to work in the morning when you can force someone to send you a check?
   


2. Administration by experts doesn't work.  This has been settled science for over half a century.  Ludwig von Mises in the 1920s argued that socialism couldn't work because it could not compute prices.  Mises's student F.A. Hayek in the 1940s argued that the "man in Whitehall" just couldn't know enough, compared to a million consumers and producers, to direct the economy.  We've seen the expert model fail recently over global warming.  Based on the simplistic idea that carbon dioxide was the marker for global warming, teams of experts and activists insisted that we reduce our consumption of carbon-based energy.  But the computer models they built on that theory clearly aren't any good at predicting the future; climate is a lot more complex than they thought.  Back to the drawing board.  But the market does that automatically without political intervention.
   


3. Entitlements and subsidies lead to disaster.  Our liberals friends insist that health-care and education and food stamps are a "right."  The trouble is that, in fact, health-care and education and housing and transportation are the things we work for; the whole economy is based on people striving to get the goods and services they need.  We make things and serve other people so that we can earn wages and buy the things we need to live and prosper.  If you give a single mother with two children $35,000 a year in benefits then she doesn't need to get married and doesn't need to get a job to support herself and her children.  This leads to social and cultural and economic breakdown, as the settled science shows.

The conservative approach is to remove the liberal culture of compulsion and replace it with the cooperation of "civil society."  Health care?  Well, today's longevity is a factor of about seven things, from asepsis to vaccination to sanitation to education to income to food to actual "health care."  Education?  Uber-liberal homeschooler David H. Albert in And the skylark sings to me shows that there are abundant resources to help parents educate their children without government getting in the way. Jobs? Well it would be much easier for employers to hire people if they weren't harassed by endless taxes and regulations, starting with the minimum wage and the payroll taxes.

Would the conservative alternative work?  Of course it would, for humans are social animals.  But there is a problem.  Millions of people have adjusted their work effort and their lives to take advantage of the government's free stuff.  It will take a total meltdown for them to release their grip on their entitlements and their "rights."

But with Obamacare, we can make a start.

What Happened to the German SPD?

The Germans call her "Mutti."  It's a diminutive of "Mutter" or mother.  So it means that Germans call their Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel "Mommy."  You can say this about Margaret Thatcher; nobody ever called her Mummy except her children.



But in the triumph of Mutti there is this to consider:  What happened to the SPD?  After all, Merkel's CDU/CSU union only got 41.5 percent of the vote.  So nearly 60 percent of the voters voted against her.



The answer is that the SPD did something in the 2000s that a left-wing party must never do.  It actually tried to reform the welfare state.  Under Gerhard Schröder the party deregulated the labor market a little, making it more flexible, and it lowered unemployment benefits.  This caused a split in the party and the growth of a new left-wing coalition, Die Linke, meaning literally "the Lefties."



So, in Sunday's election, the SPD got 25.7%, Die Linke got 8.6% and Die Grüne (Greens) got 8.4% of the vote.  In our US system, that would be as if the "progressives" in the Occupy movement and the enviros split off into separate parties from the mainstream Democratic Party.



Could it happen here?  Well it did happen in Canada, where the dominant Liberal Party got panicky in the 1990s and enacted sweeping cuts in federal spending do "do something" about the Canadian national debt.  Net result?  The Liberals lost their mojo.  In the latest election in 2011 the Liberal Party slipped to #3 in party strength behind the explicitly social democratic NDP.



There's a big lesson here, one that is difficult for your average conservative like me to understand.  The average center-left voters come to politics expecting to get their share of the loot.  For sure, they don't think of themselves as looters and plunderers.  They just demand their "rights" and they don't see beyond that reality to the bigger horizon of national solvency.



If their party takes away their "rights" to welfare and unemployment then they will take their vote elsewhere, to a party that really will "fight for the people against the powerful."



I like to explain all this as the divide between the modern People of the Responsible Self and the People of the Group Self.



The People of the Responsible Self first emerged in the Axial Age 2000-3000 years ago when the idea of an individual responsible to God was invented in the Axial Age religions.  That is the meaning of "individualism."  It does not mean pure egoism; it means individual responsibility for thought and action, as opposed to loyalty to the group self of the tribe and clan.



If you want to understand the People of the Group Self, a good place to look is Infidel by Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  In Ayaan's youth, her grandmother taught her the names of her parents going back generations.  For a Somali, that was your identity: the memory of the names of all your ancestors.  In that society it is unthinkable to go against the authority of the clan and the tribe.



In the modern era the cause of the Group Self is taken up by left-wing parties and their identity politics.  The parties of the left represent people still clinging to the old way of human community. Identity politics advances the group as the defining identity in race, class, gender.  Thus our US Democratic Party appeals to people by their group identity, as blacks, Hispanics, women, gays.  It stands to reason that the one thing you must not do, if you lead a left-wing identity party, is to weaken the sense of group identity and group "rights."



Maybe that explains President Obama.  He must know, either consciously or instinctively, that once he concedes the need for retrenchment or "austerity" the Democratic Party is toast.  That's why he's intransigent on all the domestic issues.  Because if the Democrats won't fight for the people and their "rights" against the powerful, its voters will find another party for their vote or just stay home.



Meanwhile "Mutti" Merkel has won a famous victory over her divided lefty opposition, and we wish Germany's first Bundeskanzlerin well.

What the Obamis Get Wrong

We've seen in recent days that the Obama economic policy seems to privilege the rich and screw the poor.  That's because cheap money goes first of all to those closest to money: people with assets.  And secondly, I would argue, that government spending goes to existing interests, people with power.

When I say that government spending goes to existing interests I am saying nothing about the purity or the corruption of the government.  I am just saying that it is in the nature of government spending that it goes to existing interests.  Period.

By existing interests I don't just mean rich bitches and crony capitalists.  For instance, the biggest government programs are entitlement programs for the middle class: Social Security and Medicare.  The poor get screwed with a blizzard of miserable welfare programs and the failing Medicaid.  Then there is education, which subsidizes the education of middle-class children right through grad-school.  And the poor get screwed with abysmal schools in the inner city.

It's simple.  The vast majority of voters are middle class, and so the middle class will get most of the loot.  That's how government works.

Scratch a liberal though, and you'll find someone that genuinely believes that all those programs really help.

Liberals really believe that one-size-fits-all government programs help people.

Conservatives believe that one-size-fits-all government programs will always end up benefiting the administrators of the program and the special interests that gather around them.  Conservatives believe that first and foremost, government spending will be used to get politicians elected.  Modern politicians, in our view, are no better than the leaders of robber bands; they offer the prospect of loot to their supporters, and aim to deliver when they get elected.  As St. Augustine put it, a robber band is made into a kingdom "by the addition of impunity."

The genius of modern liberalism is to dress this naked larceny in the raiment of caring and compassion.

So we learn that the median young, the minority, the single woman has lost real income in the first four years of Obama while the rich like me have benefited.  How could this happen with a president that wants to grow the economy from the middle out?  Whatever that means.

Obamanomics doesn't work because the administrative welfare state model doesn't work.  The administrative welfare state model doesn't work because it is indistinguishable from the robber band model of loot and plunder.  It is a model of net subtraction.

Take Obamacare.  It was a grand attempt to extend health insurance to the uninsured. Never mind that the 30 million or so uninsured might just be people for whom insurance didn't make any sense, people without assets to protect from medical bills.  That is to say, if you are a person without assets it makes sense to go bankrupt rather than pay your medical bills.  But in order to get Obamacare passed the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress had to hand out goodies to all the special interests.  It looks like they promised a lot and probably double-crossed a number of their special-interest supporters, from Big Pharma to labor unions.  But the point is that in order to give benefits to the deserving poor they had to give away a whole bunch of goodies to special interests.  Net subtraction.

Take Medicaid.  Right after World War II the feds offered free money for hospital construction.  The only caveat was that the hospitals had to let anyone in for treatment.  After a while the hospitals decided that they really needed to get reimbursement for all the government-mandated free care.  Voila: Medicaid.  But of course the government soon found that Medicaid was getting too expensive so they started trying to duck the commitments it had made by reducing the amounts paid for Medicaid-funded procedures.  Hey, what would you expect a robber band with added impunity to do?  So doctors and hospitals started cutting back on serving new Medicaid patients.  And so on.

When you have the whole economy riddled with this sort of scamming and subsidizing, it's not surprising that the economy starts to get kinda rocky.  Like right now.

That's because all government spending, all of it, is a dead weight on the economy and society.  Oh there may be exceptions.  DARPA.  The internet.  Interstate highways.  Public health.  But it is a delusion to project these occasional successes onto government as a whole.  Government spending is waste.  Period.

But people will kill to keep their government contracts, their government benefits, and their government subsidies.  That's why we need government control much more than we need gun control.  Stop the killing!  Actually, politicians are so afraid of people with benefits that it seldom gets to killing; the last thing politicians ever try is cutting entitlement programs.

The solution to the Obama economic malaise is simple.  Cut.  Start cutting now, and keep on cutting.  And return to sound money.  And clean the tax code out and replace it with simple, low-rate taxes.  And reform the credit system so that it's almost impossible for homeowners to get underwater, and banks to get insolvent.

Here's why liberalism doesn't work.  The poor, the unskilled, and the undisciplined are starting out with a problem.  Nobody wants to hire them.  They will get hired eventually, but only when all the skilled and the disciplined already have jobs.  If you have a minimum wage then the unskilled and the undisciplined may never get hired.  If you give money to the unskilled and the undisciplined then you take away some of the incentive for them to get skills and develop discipline.

In other words if you espouse liberal politics and liberal government programs you will keep the poor poor, the unskilled unskilled, and the undisciplined undisciplined.

Meanwhile the rich get richer.

Now It's Bernanke's Turn to Choke

A week or so ago, President Obama choked on his "red line" to stop the use of WMDs in Syria.  He decided not to ask Congress to authorize him to bomb Syria.  What was he afraid of, do you think?



This week the fluffer is Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who choked rather than start dialing back the Federal Reserve's money printing operations known as QE3.



What is Bubbles Ben afraid of, do you think?  Could it be that he is afraid that the US economy itself will choke unless he continues printing money hand over fist?



Obamacare anyone?



If that is so, then what is the point?  If the economy won't grow without the injection of $85 billion in new money every month, five years after the Crash of 2008, then I'd say it's time to get on the blower and say: Houston, we have a problem.  To coin a phrase.



Just an aside here.  The total in Federal Reserve monetary base just before the Crash of 2008 was just a skinch over $800 billion.  As of July 2013, in the ongoing QE3, the monetary base was $3,310 billion.



Just to put the $85 billion in perspective.  That rate of monetary expansion would expand the pre-2008 monetary base by 10 percent a month!



 Well, we know what the Obama-Bernanke economic policy has created.  It has created the slowest economic recovery since World War II.  It has also benefited the rich while hammering the rest of the country.



And of course the young, the black, and single women are hardest hit in the period June 2009 - June 2013 when overall median real household income fell 4.4 percent:

1. Young under 25: down 9.6 percent.
   
   


2. Black: down 10.9 percent.
   
   


3. Single women: down 7 percent.
   
   


4. Hispanics: down 4.5 percent.
   
   


5. High school education or less: down 6.9 percent.

Meanwhile a chap like me has doubled my net worth since the nadir of winter 2009.  I don't know if I'm in the dreaded 1%: the Census Bureau says that 13 percent of households have more than $500,000 net worth.

But really, you LoFos.  The Obama administration has been the worst imaginable for the young, the black, the single woman.  And you folks voted for the guy.



Will you still be voting for Democrats in 2014?  In 2016?  You think those guys really care about people like you?  Or do you now think that they don't give a damn about you, but will say anything to get your vote?

This week Bubbles Ben has said he is going to keep printing more money, which will inflate the net worth of rich guys like me.  Next up is "Calamity Janet" Yellen, the First Woman Fed Chair!  Oh wow! Here's what Reagan Budget Director David Stockman has to say about her.

She has no clue how to wean wall street from the pathetic addiction to this massive stimulus, easy money that has been going on for the entire century.



I backed that up because she has spent her whole life as a monetary bureaucrat in the Fed system, and has no clue what honest capital and genuine free markets are about.



[She] believes the entire system has to be run by a monetary politburo, turning all the dials and short-term interest rates and yield curves and the entire financial system.

So, when the inflation starts to rage and the dollar starts to flush down the toilet, what do rich guys like me do then?  And what will ordinary middle class wage earners do, let alone the young, women, and minorities that are hardest hit?



Because I'm damned if I'll let President Obama and Bubbles Ben and Calamity Janet strip me of the savings that I've worked all my life to accumulate.

Who caused the Crash of 2008? Government.

In his speech on Monday September 16, 2013 President Obama spewed his usual vomit of dishonest partisan talking points.  As in:

They said that they wanted entitlement reform -- but their leaders haven’t put forward serious ideas that wouldn’t devastate Medicare or Social Security.  And I've put forward ideas for sensible reforms to Medicare and Social Security and haven’t gotten a lot of feedback yet. 

Oh really Mr. President?  I haven't heard a whisper about your ideas on entitlement reform.  But I have heard about Rep. Paul Ryan's Medicare reform, a sensible idea to switch to a straight subsidy.  And if you are interested in entitlement reform, why don't we hear more about it?  Why aren't you barnstorming up and down the land, like President Bush did for his Social Security proposals in 2005?



But I really want to deal with the president's mendacious narrative on the Crash of 2008.  President Obama said:

And as we worked to stabilize the economy and get it growing and creating jobs again, we also started pushing back against the trends that have been battering the middle class for decades.  So we took on a broken health care system.  We invested in new American technologies to end our addiction to foreign oil.  We put in place tough new rules on big banks -- rules that we need to finalize before the end of the year, by the way, to make sure that the job is done -- and we put in new protections that cracked down on the worst practices of mortgage lenders and credit card companies.  We also changed a tax code that was too skewed in favor of the wealthiest Americans. 

Let's take these item by item, Mr. President:

• Broken health care system.  The problem with the health-care system is that it is cartelized by government.  Principally, the problem is that most people don't pay directly for routine care.  Your Obamacare will make these problems worse.


• New American technologies. I suppose this is an oblique reference to all the green energy crony capitalism and boondoggles that your administration has backed.  But the decline in foreign oil addiction is due to the "fracking" revolution.  And your administration is trying to slow it down and hinder it.


• Tough new rules on big banks.  You mean, I suppose, the endless boreal forest of Dodd-Frank rules.  Here's a tip for you Mr. President, which might help the next Democratic president avoid 5 years of sub-par growth.  The time you need tough new rules is during a full-bore boom.  That's when you need to bump up credit-score requirements for loans and down-payment requirements.  Right now, when asset values are down, banks should be taking a flier on new loans.  And anyway, the big banks know that they are too big to fail.  They know that the government must bail them out.  Nothing has changed.


• Worst practices of mortgage lenders and credit card companies.  This is the one that stuck in my craw.  The number one thing we need to learn from the housing bubble is that it was government, through the Community Reinvestment Act and the GSE mortgage lenders, that forced mortgage lenders to lend to people with bad credit.  The "worst practices," Mr. President, were forced on lenders by people like you working with ACORN in Chicago in the 1990s. Remember that?


• Taxes favoring the wealthy.  How come the share of federal income tax paid by the 1% went up as tax rates were lowered?

Let's get down and dirty with the mortgage meltdown. Here's a real cool chart on mortgage delinquencies in 2008 by credit score.





Gosh, golly, geewillikins.  It looks like the lower the credit score the more likely people were to default.!  Who would have thunk it?  So here's the smoking gun, according to Tom Bloomer.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did their part by lowering borrowers’ credit score approval thresholds in their automated underwriting systems for loans they would purchase from originating lenders. The key changes, according to a mortgage brokerage executive with whom I spoke in 2006, involved reducing the conventional loan threshold from a FICO credit score of about 670 to 630 and the subprime threshold from about 630 to 590 (other online sources I’ve found indicate that each threshold may have actually been an additional ten points lower).

Notice how, on the chart, 670 is just the place where you want to draw the line.  15% defaults. Perfectly manageable.  But if you go to the new subprime threshold of 590, you get to 51% default.  No bank or GSE is long for this world when it is suffering 51% defaults.  Especially if the government has forced lenders to lower their down-payment requirements.



The credit system, sports fans, relies on two things.  It relies on the confidence that other people will make their payments.  And it relies on the confidence that the assets backing any loan would liquidate the loan balance if the debtor defaulted.



Liberals spent twenty years turning that upside down with their government coercion of banks into lowering credit thresholds -- thus increasing the probability of defaults, and lowering down-payment requirements -- thus increasing the chance that loans in default couldn't be liquidated.



Thanks liberals.  You guys are so brilliant I gotta wear shades.

Welfare State: Mend it or End it?

What should we do about the welfare state of comprehensive government social-insurance programs? We know that Social Security can't go on the way it has.  We know that Medicare is worse.  We know that government education from K to grad school is mindlessly elbowing boys aside as it mindlessly continues to regard girls as an "under-served population."



But the question for conservatives is: should we mend it or wait until things get worse and end it?



Here's NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez interviewing Christina Hoff Sommers, author of the updated 2000 book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men.  Yeah.  Thirteen years later and nothing has been done.  Girls are doing better and better in school, and boys are doing worse and worse.  Sommers suggests a program similar to ones in Australia and Britain.

[W]e can follow the example of the British, the Canadians, and the Australians. They have openly addressed the problem of male underachievement. They are experimenting with programs to help them become more organized, focused, and engaged. These include more boy-friendly reading assignments (science fiction, fantasy, sports, espionage, battles); more recess time (where boys can engage in rough-and-tumble play as a respite from classroom routine); campaigns to encourage male literacy; more single-sex classes; and more male teachers (and female teachers interested in the pedagogical challenges boys pose). A few years ago, the Australian government launched a campaign called “Success for Boys.” This program provided grants to 1,600 schools to incorporate boy-friendly methods into their daily practice.

Oh good.  Another one-size-fits-all government program.  With its own advocates, its bureaucrats, and its special interest suppliers.



Here's Reagan-era warhorse Martin Feldstein offering a reform of Social Security and Medicare by raising eligibility levels and lowering benefits.

Congress should vote now to continue raising the full benefit age from 67 to 70. When that is fully phased in, the annual cost of Social Security benefits would be reduced by about 20%, equivalent to a saving in 2020 of $200 billion or about 1% of GDP.



Gradually raising the age of Medicare eligibility in line with the age for full Social Security benefits would achieve a budget saving of more than 1% of GDP in 2020 and later years. Individuals between ages 65 and 70 could still enroll in Medicare by paying a fair premium.

Do conservatives really want to get caught in this trap: the people that cut Social Security and Medicare?



The conservative vision of a limited government and a large civil society would surely require that parents control the education of their children.  So it would be meaningless what the government thought about it.  Parents would organize their children's education according to their lights not according to some elite activist's lights.



The conservative vision would surely require that the inflexible one-size-fits-all structure of Social Security and Medicare should be replaced by personal saving.  You want a secure retirement with a good income and a solid health care package?  Why, you work and save for it.  And if you have made a mistake or two on the way, or if the government strips the nation of resources in a war or a financial collapse, then you get to work a year or two extra.  Your work and your savings then create jobs and careers for the young generation as you enjoy your retirement.



No doubt we should all be forced to pay for a safety net for people that will not or cannot provide for their children or themselves.  But the default must be that people take care of their own.  The default must be that millions of us, responding to the challenges and the opportunities of our individual lives, work and save and adapt in our own individual ways to contribute to the welfare of the whole.  That is the foundation of humans as social animals.  We each do our best, contributing according to our lights.



When we talk about a program to help boys, or a cut to Social Security and Medicare, we are still talking the liberals' language, with the government in the center of our lives, telling us what to do, or else. And inevitably the whole thing will turn upon the free stuff that the government hands out to its supporters.



I went to watch a play-reading over the weekend.  It used Don Quixote to illuminate the problems of the homeless and the mentally ill and the question of Dignity for such people.



Well, here's an idea.  There can be no Dignity in the authoritarian welfare state.  That's because government is force, and system is domination.  Nobody, not the Tea Party member being roughed up by the IRS or the homeless Hispanic hearing voices, gets to be treated with Dignity when the government functionaries are backed by government force.  Because there always comes a point in an interaction with a government functionary where the functionary says do what I say or else.



There is such a thing as society.  It's just not the same thing as the state.

What American Exceptionalism is Really About

Since Russian autocrat Vladimir V. Putin raised the question of American exceptionalism this is a good time to remind ourselves what it is all about.

The best way to start is to show that President Obama's idea of American exceptionalism, as addressed in his Strasbourg news conference in 2009, is all wrong and misses the point.  In answer to a question about American exceptionalism he said:

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.

That, Mr. President, is exactly what American exceptionalism is not about. America is not a tribe or a nation state based upon a state church and a Volk as originally thought up by the German Romantics.  It is a universal state for people that define themselves not by race and ethnicity but as individuals responsible individually to God.

Most people define themselves by their place, their family, their clan, their tribe, their race.  And they experience their national existence as a war against other nations, a fight in a cruel world of scarce resources.  But American exceptionalism tries to put all that on the waste heap of history.  I like to say that we Americans are People of the Responsible Self.

That is why we are individualists: not because we are selfish and egoistic, but because we experience ourselves as individually responsible for our lives, to God if we believe in God and to the people we know, and to society in general.

The reason that President Obama hesitates as he did in Strasbourg is that liberals don't believe in American exceptionalism.  Their whole world-view is a revolt against American exceptionalism, its individualism, and the idea of the individual as a responsible self.

Liberals have returned to the idea of the state as a robber band, plundering and pillaging the world for free stuff to give away to its members.  Liberals have returned with their identity politics to the definition of people by their tribal membership -- in race, class, gender -- rather than their universal individual humanness.  Liberals believe in the color of your skin, not in the content of your character. Liberals have turned politics into a scramble for loot and subsidy.  Liberals encourage people to think of themselves as victims, denied their rightful share of the world's benefits.

I like to say that this view of politics goes right back to our chimp ancestors.  In that world, as described by Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn, the welfare of the troop depends on the food supply, and the food supply, mostly in fruits, depends exactly on the ability of the males to extend their territory by border warfare.  Obviously this chimp world is a zero-sum world, because the food-bearing territory that the males conquer must be taken away by force from the neighboring chimp troop.

It all sounds very familiar.

The point about the modern world is that everything depends not upon the food-producing land that we occupy, but upon the ingenuity of each individual human to produce good and services for other humans.  Wealth does not consist in land or in natural resources but in "intangible capital," the skills and knowledge of humans and their ability to work together.

But people that have just arrived in the city don't yet understand this.  And so they respond to community organizers that tell them that they are being oppressed and exploited.  They are in a tough place, of course, because they don't yet know how to contribute to society with their skills and knowledge.  That makes them second-class citizens.

Let's give our liberal friends the benefit of the doubt.  They believe in their world view.  They believe that they are doing the right thing by handing out free stuff to the traditionally marginalized.  And it sure doesn't hurt that getting free stuff from the local patron is what the traditionally marginalized understand from their lives in the country as peasants.

But American exceptionalism says we are called to something higher, something better.  We are called to be People of the Responsible Self that think first about what we can do and what we contribute, and only second about what we will get and what we deserve.  This culture seems to have started in the cities in the first millennium BC, at the birth of the modern religions from Hinduism to Judaism to Christianity in the so-called Axial Age.

On this view Islam is something of an outlier, because Islam, in its very name, is a religion of the Submissive Self, not the Responsible Self.  It is a religion of warrior tribes, not cooperative city dwellers.

In How Civilizations Die David P. Goldman says that civilizations die by not having children.  See Europe, Russia, Japan, American liberals, and Islam.  People with a faith in the future have children. People that have given up do not.  American conservatives and American immigrants have children. American liberals do not.  Indeed American liberals worship the idols of creativity and abortion and population control and non-heterosexuality which lead to an empty crib and no grandchildren.

Goldman predicts a glorious future for America.  That's because of our American exceptionalism.  But obviously we can't really get a grip on the future until Obama and his liberal friends exit stage left.

And after the end of Obama the American people will need to declare, with their vote, that they are a People of the Responsible Self.