The End of Liberal Stealth Politics

Just when is President Obama actually going to do the hard stuff, like actually enforce Obamacare, asks Megan McArdle?



We know the problem.  Since the president and his Democratic pals and his Democratic operatives with bylines lied through their teeth about Obamacare, things are turning out a bit rough for them now that the truth is coming out.  So now they propose to allow non-compliant health plans another couple of years of life, to put off the bad news until after the election.  (But tough titty for the folks whose plans are already canceled.)  Says McArdle:

This latest maneuver is supposed to help midterm Democrats, who are facing a very tough landscape in November. But there will always be an election coming that Democrats will want to win. The longer this goes on, the harder it will be to activate the unpopular parts of the law. 

And this applies to entitlements in general.



Problem is, of course, that it's not the unpopular "parts" that are the problem.  It's the whole concept.  Obamacare, writes McArdle is based upon a three-legged stool.

1. guaranteed issue: they gotta give you a plan.


2. community rating: they can't price according to risk.


3. mandate: you gotta buy it.

Cut off any one leg and the whole thing collapses.



All this takes compulsion and government force, big time, otherwise nobody will sign up for insurance until they become sick. But the Obamis didn't really tell us about all this.  All they told us was that we could keep our doctors and health plans and we would save $2,500 per year.



To top it all, the uninsured aren't signing up.  Could that be because insurance never made any sense to them anyway?  Because they don't have assets?  And preferred mini-med plans?



So the result is that President Obama is afraid to implement the compulsion part of Obamacare because he knows that the American people will eat his party alive in November if he does.  And he never so much as whispered in his speeches that there might be some tough things to swallow down the road.



"Oh what a tangled web we weave..."



Oh yeah.  Back in corporate-speak land, they go on and on about "managing expectations" and "getting the bad news out".  Because in corporation land, you really need to maintain the trust and loyalty of your customers.  That means being truthful and honest with them.



In my view, liberals have been lying about politics ever since they found that the spending on the War on Poverty had failed, and they decided to go on spending and electing anyway.



When liberals talk about "faith traditions" they lie, because they hate religion.  When they talk about "patriotism" they lie, because they hate nationalism.  When they talk about creating jobs and growth they lie because they believe in a post-getting-and-spending world.  And, of course, when they said for decades that they were opposed to gay marriage, they lied.



Politics always involves a ton of lying, not least because the people won't stand for being told the truth.  But the art of politics is to tell a story that makes sense to the people hearing it, and then make sure that reality backs you up, more or less.



But liberals are afraid to do that, because they know that most of what they want to do the American people don't want.



So they try to do everything by stealth.  They bury things in 1,000 page bills.  They send their radicals to EPA or the NLRB.  They litigate things to death.  But eventually the whole creaking contraption just collapses.  Because in the end, the ruling class cannot just go on its way irregardless.  It must obtain the consent of the governed or face rebellion and revolution.



Here is Tony Blair's guru, Anthony Giddens on political judgement in "Modernity and Self-Identity," after a little riff on Macchiavelli:

Thinking how things might turn out if a given course of action is followed, and balancing this against alternatives, is the essence of political judgement.

So who did the thinking about outcomes, Mr. President?  Anyone?



Thinking about outcomes is one of the jobs of a good honest bare-knuckle media and public square, one devoted to the idea of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.



Which we don't got -- here in the land of Democratic operatives with bylines.



I wonder what happens when the next domino falls -- Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D cuts.

Against the Axis of Losers

What should the US and its allies do about a revanchist Russia?  Or Iran?  Or Venezuela?

Leaving aside the question of Ukraine, we learned recently that Russia was setting up agreements for naval port facilities in eight countries.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday the military was engaged in talks with Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Algeria, Cyprus, the Seychelles, Vietnam and Singapore.

But really do we care?  Because Russia is allied with countries that you might call an Axis of Losers: Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, Syria, China.

Think about it.  The Axis of Losers includes a bunch of countries that are determined to run a top-down autocracy that wants the political sector to sit astride all other power centers in society.

And we know where that leads.  Absent abundant energy, it leads to poverty.  And with energy it leads to poverty too, only more slowly.

What the Axis of Losers can do, and can do pretty well, is act like spoilers.  They can sponsor terrorism.  They can invade their neighbors and sink them into poverty.

Up to now, the US has seen its role as the global hegemon, acting as global daddy, keeping the losers on the hop.

During the Cold War, that was probably a good idea, since the Soviet Union did seem to cast a shadow over Europe.  Anyway, when Jimmy Carter backed off the Cold War, citing an "inordinate fear of Communism" he got his head handed to him, and Reagan went on the win the war without firing a shot, except in Grenada.

But Obama's global retreat has seemed to offer a new option.  As regional leaders have lost trust in the US they have joined up with their neighbors to oppose the local troublemaker.  With the mess in the Middle East, we have heard rumors of an Israel/Saudi axis against Iran.  And then we also hear of cooperation between India and Japan and South Korea.

So let regional alliances flourish to oppose the local Loser.  Really, what could be better?

There's another option: declare war on energy prices.  After all, what could hit Russia, Venezuela, and Iran worse than a drop of, oh, 50% in oil prices?

The thing is that this is already happening, with the horizontal drilling revolution.  The US has just about doubled its oil production in the last few years.  With new refineries, pipelines, and crude oil exports we could start an oil price revolution.  Drill, baby, drill.

And now our neighbor Mexico has taken the huge step of allowing energy development by private actors, ending the monopoly of its corrupt and sclerotic national oil company Pemex.

Yes, but what about Al Qaeda?  I don't know, but I suspect that with oil revenue cut in half the Saudis won't have so much money to spread around encouraging Wahhabi mosques all over the planet.  We know that Al Qaeda can do terrorism, but can it build powerful states that can wage regional war?

The thing is that once you have built a powerful commercial state, you really lose interest in regional domination, because you are too busy making money.

What a pity the Axis of Losers seems determined not to learn this lesson.

The Problem with Movements

The problem with an army is: what do you do with it after the end of the war?



Or, on the view that politics is civil war by other means, what do you do with a movement after it has achieved its goal?



The temptation for every political leader is to keep the troops -- or the rank-and-file in the movement -- mobilized and find a new war for them to fight.



So liberals kept the civil-rights movement going, and turned it into a permanent arm of the Democratic Party, nosing out racism everywhere and anathematizing the racists that it found.



Same with feminism.  It wasn't enough to get women the vote, to require equal pay for equal work.  It became necessary to winkle out sexism wherever it could be found and anathematize it.  And women had to be taught -- in 2012! -- that Republicans were running a "war on women," whatever that means.



Now we are getting the same thing with gay rights.  Gays, mobilized and flushed with their success are running up the score -- on mom-and-pop florists.  Here's Erick Erickson:

In one real world case, a florist had a long-time relationship with a gay couple. She had sold them flowers on multiple occasions. She knew they were gay. She gladly served them. When they asked her to provide flowers for their gay wedding, she declined because of her faith. She assumed they were friends. They sued her business for discrimination.

Yeah.  Silly fools.  They should have realized that the personal is the political, that liberal politics is all about division and us and them.  They should have remembered Lenin and his crack about the need to break eggs when you make an omelette.  Even when the egg is your long-time florist.



The trouble with politics is that it is always about dividing people and demanding that people announce for you or against you.  Most people just want to get along and complain about other people behind their back.  But not movement people.  They are doing God's work, or history's work, or justice's work.  And so a little road-kill is just the political equivalent of the Pentagon's "collateral damage."



But why have liberals been so intransigent during the last decade?  I will tell you.  They believe Judis and Teixeira in their Emerging Democratic Majority of minorities, women, young people and educated people.  They think they are in the political driver's seat with a Democratic majority for decades to come.



Let's give liberals the benefit of the doubt.  Things certainly looked good back in the mid 2000s during the rule of the evil Bush.  But now minorities are wondering what happened to Hope and Change, women are angry about not keeping their doctor, young people are wondering about jobs, and the educated have stopped worrying about their social liberalism and are thinking more about the need for economic conservatism.



In "Exorcising Latin America's Demons," Samuel Gregg urges the Venezuelas and the Argentinas to lose their populist and divisive politics, the clientismo, the cronyism, the "right leader," the extremist rhetoric that "pits groups against each other: poor against rich, mestizos against whites, rural dwellers against urban residents, employees against employers."



Like we don't have those problems here in the USA with "fairness," the "war against women," government shutdowns, climate "denialism," evil Koch Brothers, and all.



If there is a saving grace for the US that makes it different from Latin America it is that Americans are mostly middle class "people of the responsible self" whereas many folks in Latin America are closer to their pre-industrial roots and experience life more as "people of the oppressed or victimized self."



Thus an Obama can sell the American people on keeping their doctors and health plans and saving $2,500 a year and get them to believe it.  He can talk about transparency and his "faith tradition" and get a pass.  But when it turns out that people can't keep their doctors and plans, and kids can't get jobs, and the administration and the Democrats in Congress openly use the IRS as a catspaw against their political opponents, then the political winds can change.



The people of the responsible self don't like being lied to, because trust is a key factor in their lives in the capitalist economy.  The people of the responsible self don't like the Chicago-style cronyism and corruption.  They don't like their kids living in the basement.



Nobody is expecting the people of the oppressed self to change their minds on Obama, but that's not the point.  The question is whether the vast middle class in the US has "had enough."



Another thing about the folks in the broad middle class.  They really don't like "movements."

Trouble in the "Cathedral"

The notion of the "Cathedral" was invented by Mencius Moldbug, Curtis Yarvin, in his blog.  The idea is simple.  Today's ruling class is a kind of secular church, for it combines its politics and its secular religion much like an established church.

The lead role in the Cathedral is taken by the professors.  They are the chaps with the progressive ideas.  The media and the entertainment industry pick up their ideas and publicize them, and the politicians execute them.

So here comes Nick Kristof, from the choir stalls in the Cathedral, complaining about the performance of the professors in academe.  He opens with:

SOME of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.

And he closes with this:

I write this in sorrow, for I considered an academic career and deeply admire the wisdom found on university campuses. So, professors, don’t cloister yourselves like medieval monks — we need you!

If you are a conservative then Kristof's lament should encourage you.  For Nick is complaining that the professors, the bishops of the Cathedral, have left the media choristers without an anthem to sing.  And they have left the politicians with no ideological weapons but the bully's cudgel.  Here we are with Obamacare, a product of decades of professorial research, and it's flushing down the toilet, and the rest of the Cathedral, bishops, and choristers, and political thugs and all.

That is the hidden subtext of Kristof's lament.

Hey Cathedral! sez Nick. We gotta problem!  So here comes Daniel W. Drezner in Politico to address Kristof's concern.  And he says... What exactly?

He goes off at a tangent to show how in international relations, his field, there are three sectors, and, well, although they are all good chaps, they don't always get along.

And I think I’m in a unique position to shed some light on why the three tribes that dominate the discussion of foreign affairs—academics, Beltway types and money folks—don’t always get along.

Hey Dan!  Who cares?  The point is that, three tribes or not, the Obama foreign policy is a mess.  That's probably because you chaps are second-class thinkers and haven't really articulated a vision of America in the world that media types and grasp and write about and political types can get into their thick noodles and convert into foreign policy.

Not that anyone should be surprised.  What would you expect from a bunch of bishops in a secular established church?  Not much.  You would expect them to repose upon their benefices and occasionally emerge to engage in a fight over some arcane matter of remuneration or theology.

On my model of politics -- every government is an armed minority that keeps itself in power by ladling out privileges and pensions to its supporters -- you would expect that over the years the supporters would expect more and more loot and put out less and less in support of the regime.

And so it turns out with our modern progressive ruling class.  The overarching reality of the Obama administration is that it doesn't bother to persuade.  It just thugs ahead, pushing Obamacare on an unwilling America and siccing the IRS on its opponents with an assist from Democratic senators and representatives.

The only question is: when will the disgruntled people rise up in a Reformation and push back against the corrupt Cathedral, its privileges, its laziness, and its system of politically correct indulgences?

My prediction: it will all start to happen when the current ruling class cannot find the money it needs to keep its supporters happy.

Here's a telling item.  State and local governments are cutting back hours on part-timers, like adjunct faculty, because Obamacare.

Hey you adjuncts!  They are throwing you under the bus!  You OK with that?

Don't Give Me That "Collective Action" Rubbish

I'm reading a thumb-sucker right now about Jürgen Habermas by a political science prof. -- so you don't have to.  It's called The recent work of Jürgen Habermas: Reason, justice & modernity by Stephen K. White.

Habermas is interesting to me because he is a lefty trying to deal with the consequences of Horkheimer and Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment.  These founders of the Frankfurt School writing during World War II had to face the fact that the Enlightenment hadn't resulted in unalloyed sweetness and light as advertised.  In fact, they admitted, Enlightenment and Reason were about power.  Man was interested in reason in order to dominate nature and other men.  So Habermas comes up with a dual-track idea.  There is reason, which is instrumental and strategic, egos using reason to get their way in the world.  And then there is communicative action or negotiation, which is about people interacting as social equals in a taken-for-granted lifeworld.

It doesn't take too long for Stephen K. White to start burbling lefty code words like "power" and "ideology" and "social change" and "collective action" and "collective goods."  I had to restrain myself from upchucking.  Because what do those words really mean when stripped of what we might call lefty "false consciousness?"  Let's parse these words for their real meaning, when deployed by lefties as weapons against conservatives.

Power.  Lefties are obsessed with the power of others, particularly the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. There is no doubt that the bourgeoisie and the capitalists created a new form of power -- we might call it market power -- that began to compete with political power, and this seems to be an immense problem for lefties.  But the truth is that market power is a reciprocal thing.  You get market power by doing what the consumers want and doing it well.  When you stop doing that you lose your power, unless you have access to political power.  But lefties want to combat market power with political power.  You can see the problem with that in everything from the Soviet Union and Communist China to the stupidities of political power in Obamacare.

Ideology. Lefties understand that religion and ideas are critical sources of power.  As Andrew Breitbart said: "politics is downstream from culture."  But lefties don't want anyone to have power except themselves, and so lefties are obsessed with the idea that someone other than lefties might be influencing people.  That's why Marx invented the idea of ideology and "false consciousness," to make a scandal out of people other than lefties launching ideas into the world.  But the truth is that lefties spend their whole lives spouting ideology, and, to get back to Horkheimer and Adorno, lefty ideology is intended to dominate in a Habermasian strategic sense as strategic reason, rather than initiate a conversation.

Collective Action. This is a euphemism that is designed to obscure what is really going on.  When lefties talk about collective action they are talking about everything from a lefty street demonstration to the passage of a lefty legislative action.  In other words force or the threat of force.

Collective Goods. Another euphemism.  When lefties talk about collective goods they are talking about government programs that forcibly tax and/or regulate people to support some kind of one-size-fits-all government program.  It might be education, pensions, or healthcare.  But force is there, front and center, except that lefties don't want to draw attention to the force, or face the fact that their whole world view is about force.

Social Change. This means government-enforced change.  It means that social cooperation in some sphere of human intersubjective activity is to be replaced by government force in which the terms of interaction and cooperation will be replaced by administrative and bureaucratic rules with the force of law which cannot be changed by voluntary agreement between individuals.

We are getting to see all this operate in the miserable operations of the Obama administration.  The Obamis know what we need and they are determined to give it to us, whether we like it or not, from Obamacare that sweeps the whole health-care system under the detailed supervision of government to clean energy that substitutes the pipe dreams of environmental activists for the market.  As you can see, in the manipulations of the IRS, the National Labor Relations Board, the EPA, the politicizing of criminal cases like the Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin affair, there is no attempt at creating a consensus or agreement.  Everything is about using government power to advance a liberal agenda and to intimidate opponents.  And the result is the opposite of justice.

The beautiful thing about the market system is that its power is limited.  It is certainly hegemonic, for it demands everyone to submit to its price signals or face the consequences.  But the market does not demand to own your soul.  It does not demand uniformity or loyalty oaths or acts of submission.  It just says: look, if you want to thrive in this world then you have to do things and make things that other people are willing to pay for.  Reduced to its essential, the market says that you have to think about other peoples' needs.

The great fact about our modern era is that there are lots of people, who think they represent the future, struggling with all their might to kill the market and replace it -- by turning back the clock to an age where everyone was utterly subordinated to the local lord.

Here we have our modern left, convinced it is utterly committed to erasing the patriarchy.  But what does it do?  In every action it is effectively trying to return society to a kind of neo-patriarchy where individuals are subordinated to some political boss: the politician, the bureaucrat the activist.  This brave new world of the political boss, if you ask me, is indistinguishable from the awful patriarchy of the pre-modern era when the dominant male ruled over all.

Who cares what the gender of the political boss is?  Domination is domination, and humans hate to be on the receiving end.

Smash the Cathedral!

Last week I suggested that we can't just go out and change America, and that's why Speaker Boehner and the House Republicans couldn't just vote against increasing the debt ceiling and stop the spending.  First they have to win the battle of ideas.  Here's how I put it:

First of all, opinion leaders in the academy and the media must have their come-to-Jesus moment.  (I know: Dream on). They see that for over a century they have been brutalizing and betraying the little people with their rational plans and their race and class politics.  Then purveyors of conventional wisdom like Ron Fournier have to get the message.  Then NYT readers and NPR listeners must start mouthing the new catchphrases.  Then liberal activists and Democratic politicians must be shamed out of their race baiting and class warfare.  Then the rank-and-file entitlement beneficiaries get reeducated.  Then we get to reform the welfare state.

By "opinion leaders in the academy and the media" I mean, of course, the folks that "Mencius Moldbug" calls The Cathedral.  And those folks are not going to have a come-to-Jesus moment without a lot of encouragement.

Now Moldbug suggests that the path to the future is through a kind of national bankruptcy that he calls the "Reset" that turns the US into a kind of limited-liability corporation.  But in real life the US probably turns into Brazil, as Brazil turns into Argentina, as Argentina turns into Venezuela, and Venezuela turns into Zimbabwe.   Because politics is not the same as bankruptcy.

No, I suspect that the way to end the rule of the Cathedral is through a Reformation rather than a Reset.

The proximate cause of the Reformation was Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses against indulgences.  But the bigger picture was the printing revolution had permitted the middle class to get and read their own Bibles, got to be more engaged in their faith and the exegesis of the Bible, and so, as Wikipedia puts it,

[H]is publication of his objections was paradigmatic of the resultant shift from internal to extramural debate on matters that had previously been taken as given.

In our terms, the availability of printed books increased the bandwidth of public participation in religion and discussion of life, the universe, and everything.  People weren't content to leave the exegesis of religion up to the Church.  They wanted in on the discussion.

Could our time, with its own increase in bandwidth through the information revolution, see a similar revolution?  Could a burgeoning Long Tail of engaged citizens dislodge the current ruling class of the Cathedral, the academics and the journalists that have controlled public debate over the last two centuries?  Or will the Cathedral manage to maintain control of the moral-cultural sector and continue its hegemony over the political sector and the economic sector?

The comparison with the Reformation is chilling.  There  were many failed attempts to reform the old Cathedral, from the Waldensians to John Wycliffe to Jan Hus.  And they were all put down. Until Martin Luther came along.

So we should expect that the way to a better world, a world that has emerged from under the hegemony of today's ruling class, will not be easy or swift.

But there is hope.  There is hope because world is full of people of good will that want to participate in their own moral development and take responsibility for themselves and build communities of cooperation and faith.  There is also hope in the fact that every cultural elite eventually decays into hypocrisy and the pursuit of power for the sake of power.  It loses its moral authority in the cesspool of its own corruption and cruelty, and then with its moral authority gone its physical authority collapses.  Surely our elite is well on the path to self-destruction.

The only thing to do is to have the courage to tell truth and shame the Devil.  And have faith that in the end good will prevail.

Hillary Clinton's Course in Pragmatism. Well, not exactly.

Like many Americans I had nothing but scorn for Hillary Clinton's famous judgment on Benghazi.  Said Secretary of State Clinton to a Senate panel:

Clinton: Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?

But a few weeks ago I bought a copy of William James's eight lectures on "Pragmatism," and now I understand what the Secretary was talking about.  Says James near the beginning of Lecture Two:

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable...  The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences.  What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true?  If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. (My emphasis). (p.23)

Who knew?  Hillary Clinton as a profound philosophical thinker?

Now the question in the case of Secretary Clinton was not really about a "protest" or "guys out for a walk one night."  Even though it certainly does make a difference if the Ambassador Stevens was killed by a planned terror attack rather than a "spontaneous" protest.  It was about what in the Sam Blazes the Secretary and the President were doing that night and whether there was some action with practical consequences that they might have taken to save the lives of four Americans.   And we can guess the answer to that.  Deer in the headlights, baby.  Or maybe:  the president/secretary is in a meeting.

I like the pragmatic method as presented by William James.  It agrees with my own view that we know nothing about the world as it really is.  We only know that certain things work according to our experience and our theories.  Beyond that be dragons.

But I think that James rather betrays his principle when it comes to Kant.  He pooh-poohs Kant's idea of space and time as intuitions when they are "constructions as patently artificial as any that science can show."(p.79)  Hmm.  But the point Kant makes is that we don't want to think of space and time as absolute and equable in the way that Newton taught us to think.  As "forms of intuition" we learn to think of them as something we have conjured up in our brains.  Space and time might be something completely different than we think, and so it turned out with Einstein and space-time.

Then James goes on to whack against Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant and Hegel for being "utterly sterile, so far as shedding any light on the details of nature goes."  Well, maybe they seemed that way, back at the turn of the 20th century.  But I'd say that the contribution of critical philosophy and skepticism is that it keeps us precisely safe from the "dogmatic slumber" that Kant wrote about.  They remind us to keep our wits about us and expect the unexpected.  My view is we couldn't have got relativity and quantum mechanics without the radical skepticism of the empiricists and critical philosophy of the Germans.  It's telling that Germans made pretty well all the early running in the physics revolution that started with Einstein's two papers in 1905.

Why would that be?  It would be because German philosophy had kept German minds radically open to anything.  So when it appeared that however you measured the speed of light, it was always the same, a German Jew was ready to suggest that, if the speed of light was always experienced as constant it meant that, as far as the math were concerned, space and time were relative.

And James agrees with this at the beginning of Lecture Eight on Pragmatism and Religion.

On pragmatic principles we can not reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it.  Universal conceptions, as things to take account of, may be as real to pragmatism as particular sensations are.(p.119)

You can see where this is leading.  It leads to God and Reason and the Absolute as conceptions that men down the ages have certainly regarded as useful.  It's just that we keep changing our minds.

And why not?