What Went Wrong: Bad Political Philosophy

Yesterday we looked at the foolish politics of liberals, punching through major legislation on a partisan vote, running a permanent campaign as though Americans were at war with each other.  (Beginning of series here.) But now we look at the foolish philosophy at the bottom of it.

The difference between a society and a bureaucracy or army ought to be obvious. A bureaucracy is a goal-oriented organization. Like an army it has simple, strategic goals. It is an instrument to collect taxes, like the IRS, or to coordinate health care programs, like the federal Department of Health and Human Services. But a society is different, because society is a work in progress. The truth is we do not know what a society is for, just as we don't know what humans are for, or the Earth, or the Solar System, or the Universe. The closest we can come is in vague words about the good society like “human flourishing” and “something higher than just material prosperity.” People disagree earnestly and deeply about what a good society is, and even when they agree about the nature of the good society they still disagree about how to get there.

So how can a president say to his defeated opponents: “we won?” How can we build a good society in the United States when the victor in the latest round of political fisticuffs says, in so many words: “screw you, loser?” He can only say it if he is a fool.

Moreover, how can a political party advance the cause of “human flourishing” with a comprehensive and mandatory administrative program like Obamacare, not to mention all the other big entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare? Administration and bureaucracy kill human flourishing; they pave over paradise and make it a parking lot. The whole point of administration and bureaucracy is to prevent autonomous activity and replace it with rigid rules. The whole point of life and liberty is that you don't know what is coming up next. The world will probably throw you a curve ball and you will have to adapt. How do you adapt to change when the whole of e.g., health care, is rigidly defined by legislation, bureaucracy, and entitlement whether or not the resources are there to deliver? When the world changes, how long does it take your activists, your politicians, your legislation, you bureaucrats, your regulations to adapt and catch up? Actually we know. With great national programs it is only possible to do political reform once in a generation, if that.

Our great national problem is that our ruling class, in order to advance its paltry idea of an administrative state and implement its elite fantasy of top-down springtime for rulers, has reduced the people of the United States to the pathetic status of freeloaders and foragers. To win the next election and the mandate to enact the next tranche of administrative authoritarianism the rulers must again and again bribe the voters with the promise of some free stuff. Hey kids: more student debt! Hey uninsured: super-subsidized health insurance! Hey illegals: amnesty! Hey veterans: free health care for life! But what actually happens? Students get buried in debt, because a twenty-year-old has no clue what kind of income he'll earn after college. The uninsured get lured into expensive insurance that doesn't help them because the uninsured don't need health insurance, not having any assets; they just need a bit of help with their health-care bills. Kids from Central America get lured to the border. Vets find that the free health care has a real cost: waiting lists and second-rate service.

Golly, who could have seen all that coming?  Evidently our educated ruling class could not.

So what do we do about all this?  Stay tuned for the next exciting installment.

What Went Wrong: Drilling Down

We just looked at the mess of what has gone wrong in America in recent years.  Now let's drill down a little.

That's all very nice, but let's get back to the question. What went wrong? I will tell you. And the answer dwells in the difference between the understanding of government as force, the necessary force to defend against enemies, and the understanding of society as a voluntary consensus, an unconscious organism of human cooperation.

When a presidential candidate wins a presidential election with his party we can think of him winning a civil war, but with ballots not bullets (actually ballot is the same word as bullet). Now the question is: after the bullets are counted, what happens next? Do the victorious president and his party continue to fight à outrance, as the French say? Or do they stop the war and follow the advice of Winston Churchill: “in victory, magnanimity?”

Yeah. When the president sends the bust of Churchill back to the Brits it does kinda send a message.

The fact is that President Obama and his party decided to go all out and exploit their 2008 victory to the uttermost limit. This was symbolized by the passage of Obamacare, in which the Obamis decided to pass their Affordable Care Act, after losing their filibuster-proof Senate to Scott Brown, by legislative shenanigans. Yeay! That'll teach those racist-sexist-homophobes!

But the Irish-American Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said years ago that you always want to pass a big thing like Obamacare by a 70-30 majority in the US Senate. You need to manufacture, at very least, the appearance of consensus. Why? Because in the end, you must obtain the consent of the governed for your legislation. If you win merely by powering over the opposition you have not obtained the consent of the governed; you have merely provokeed a head of rebellion.

Obtaining the consent of the governed doesn't just mean doing big things right like passing your landmark legislation with a 70-30 bipartisan vote in the US Senate. It means doing little things right, like obeying the law, talking to the leaders of the opposition and buttering up the barons of Congress, and speaking kindly to people that will never vote for you in a hundred years. Why? Because it quiets the fears of your opponents.

If we recognize politics as “civil war by other means” then we understand the truth that politics is a kind of shadow boxing, a ritual combat in which we reenact on the stage of the political theater what could, in another time and another way, be enacted in the real combat in a real civil war. You get the feeling that the president and his people just do not understand that they are playing with fire when they talk of “punching back twice as hard” and when they keep the president's campaign organization fully mobilized between elections. Liberals ought to understand that: during the Cold War they were quick to note the provocation that a big defense budget or offensive nuclear weapons represented to the rest of the world. If you are mobilized for political war between elections then you are communicating that you mean to crush your political opposition without mercy. You are telling the opposition that you just might stage some kind of a surprise attack while they are out to lunch. What sort of a message does that send to your political opposition?

But is that all that went wrong? Did our liberal friends just make a mistake on tactics, playing the stupid jerk when august maturity was wanted? Alas no. Because now we come to the real problem with today's America. It is the folly of the administrative state, the idea that human society could be or should be organized on the principle of the modern army or the national bureaucracy.

But that's for the next installment.

The Way Forward: What Went Wrong

By now nearly everyone in America senses that something has gone wrong, that somehow, after the promise of Hope and Change in the maelstrom of the Crash of 2008, things in America are going from bad to worse.

What is it?  What has gone wrong?  Why did President Obama's promise of an end to the mistakes and the corruption of the Bush years, an end to partisanship and polarization not turn America around?  Why has it seemed to go from bad to worse?

Is it because the president has tried to implement “fundamental change” when fundamental change wasn't needed?  Or did he not go far enough?  Perhaps the problem is that he has abandoned the good old All American Way for a farrago of untried and untested ideas.  Could it be that underneath the comforting assurance of the president's rhetoric hides a Marxist fanatic that wants to destroy America before rebuilding it as a neo-Marxist utopia?  Maybe the failure is nothing more than good old All American political corruption, the Chicago Way in black-face.

You'll be frustrated to learn that the answer is None of the Above.  Our problem here in America is not a specific problem but a generic problem, an old problem; perhaps it is the oldest problem in human government.  Our problem is not merely the good old human evil of bad government, or even worse, good old bad government incompetently conducted, but merely good old human folly, playing in endless repeat.  It is the problem of the ruling class that forgot what government is for.  Government is not instituted among men for the ruling class to indulge itself with glorious visions and pet programs, to admire itself in the mirror and reward its friends and punish its enemies, to legislate its evolved morality over the cramped visions of the great unwashed.

No, government must cringe and recoil before such self-indulgence or it is rubbish.  Government must sail, with ears deaf to the song of the Sirens of power, between the Scylla of defending its people against enemies and the Charybdis of free human flourishing.  Or, in left-wing terms, we must defend the road to enlightenment and liberation from exploitation and injustice, and that means defending our glorious vision of a world of peace and justice from the power of government, any government, as much as the power of corporations and the rich and powerful.

Yeah.  Pity the poor schmuck who thinks that the road to the future is paved with government programs, in other words with force. Because even if you delude yourself into thinking that government is nothing more than the slightly doddery kindliness of an absent-minded librarian that listens to NPR, it is still true that government is force.  As the saying goes: all power corrupts librarians, but absolute power corrupts librarians absolutely.

But if the path to the future is not paved with government programs and defended by force, how shall we find it?

Link to the next post in this series as we drill down.

Is This What You Really Wanted Liberals?

Yesterday I noted Matt Bai's rundown on the rich-bitch Democracy Alliance.  How it's now just a fully-owned dependency of the Democratic Party as it signs up the head of the National Education Association.  Oh well, those rich billionaires that thought they were creating a left-wing version of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" got what they paid for.

Maybe more than they reckoned for.

Sharyl Attkisson tells us why in a Changing Lanes interview on RealClearPolitics.  Attkisson did some stories back in the day that really burned the Bush administration.  And liberals loved her.  But when she started pushing on Fast and Furious, then all of a sudden she experienced determined pushback from TalkingPointsMemo and Media Matters for America for sloppy journalism.  Guess what.  TPM and MM get funding from folks like Democracy Alliance.

According to Attkisson the pushback from the lefty media foghorns was a lot more intense and brutal than the pushback from the Bush administration and conservatives.

Here we have a problem liberals.  You guys have convinced yourself that there's a hard-ass implacable "right-wing message machine" that you guys have to oppose by pushing back twice as hard.

Only you guys are deluding yourselves.  Your problem is not that conservatives have their own policy shops and media outlets.  You are pissed off that anyone dares to oppose the liberal narrative.  So you think that the answer is to overwhelm the opposition with your own "message machine."

But you know what?  Your brilliant tactics is in the process of making the biggest mess in American politics in our lifetimes.  Because you guys aren't brilliant; you are clueless.  Let us rehearse the ways that this is so.

First, your full-court press means that we don't get to have a serious discussion of the issues.  It means that conservative voices don't get heard and it means that liberal reporters are afraid to question anything coming out of the liberal "message machine."  Can you spell Obamacare?

Then there is the little problem of Obama's phone and pen.  Let's face it, if some Republican president tried this, there would be hell to pay.  And that is quite from the minor fact that a Republican president wouldn't do it because Republicans have this weird fetish about the Constitution.  My liberal friends don't seem to have heard this, but the big problem with kids swarming over the border is connected with the president deciding to implement the DREAM Act without benefit of Congress. Someone sent the message down to Central America that kids get in free.  And now the New York Times, according to my liberal friends, is telling its liberal readers that the president is working hard to fix the problem. Yea!

But ya know what liberals?  If, way back, you guys had said wait a minute, Mr. President, we can't change the law by executive fiat, then the poor helpless New York Times wouldn't be having to grudgingly tell us that the president is getting right on to fixing this disaster of little kids packed on the top of railroad cars like Depression Era bums.

There are numerous instances of the president's illegal violations of law, from his administrative nullification of welfare reform and expansion of food stamps, and they won't turn out well.  Because any opposition absolutely hates a government that doesn't obey the law.  Remember how pissed off you guys were when "Bush Lied, People Died?"

The problem with the "left-wing message machine" is that liberals told themselves it was merely a response to the conservative message machine.  But anyone with a heartbeat can tell is that the left-wing machine is clearly not just a ramp of lefty activist groups, but coordinated into the whole government, from the White House to the IRS.  I don't think you guys realize what a gift this is to Republicans and all of us racists, sexists, and homophobes.  Nobody understands finance and debt and health policy.  Everyone loves their local teachers and so the teachers unions are able to stop education reform.

But hey liberals! People sure understand using the IRS to punish your enemies!

There's a bigger issue here, liberals, and I hope you don't pay attention.  You chaps are used to sitting in the catbird seat.  You are used to exercising the power of the race card.  You are used to kicking young men out of school for not quite ticking all the feminist boxes on lefty sexual etiquette.  You are delighted to pile on an aging rich billionaire talking trash to his mistress.  You think it nothing to humiliate a tech guy for the sin of not quite going the Full Monty on gay marriage.  The thing is that ordinary people hate this bullying. Or they can easily be made to hate it.

Back in the 1990s I voted for Bill Clinton because I knew that only a Democratic president would revive interest in getting a GOP Congress.

In 2008 I voted for Obama because I wanted Democrats to stop barracking Bush and actually show and tell what they believed in for a foreign policy.

What I did not appreciate was that the Obama years would develop into a pedal-to-the-metal effort to push the liberal agenda a far as it could go.  Not by consensus, or even the ironical Chomskian "manufactured consensus," but by raw power and bullying.

You really couldn't give conservatives a better gift.  When we've said that liberals are really fascists (as in Jonah Goldberg) or closet totalitarians (as in F.A. Hayek) we sounded like Chicken Little squawking that the sky was falling.  But when liberals actually do in real time what we warned would eventually come way into the future at the end of the Road to Serfdom, well, it kinda shows that we know what we are talking about.

See you at the polls, liberals.

There Really is a Difference Between Conservative and Liberal Big Money

According to Matt Bai the Democracy Alliance was set up a decade ago to provide an ideological answer to the right.

The alliance grew out of a PowerPoint slideshow assembled by Rob Stein, a longtime Democratic operative, who diagramed what Clinton had famously called the "vast right-wing conspiracy." He argued that a handful of rich, conservative families had funded a network of vibrant think tanks and a "message machine" to spread their ideas.

The thinking behind the Democracy Alliance was to create a venture capital fund for new progressive groups. (The Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America were two of the charter recipients.) A central tenet of the alliance in those days was that it wanted nothing to do with the Democratic Party or elections, per se. The alliance was about creating a bolder alternative to the status quo.

But what are we to think of this? "Earlier this month, the alliance announced that John Stocks, executive director of the National Education Association, would become the chairman of its board."  We should think, writes Matt Bai, that the Democratic rich billionaires have been captured by the status quo.

Actually, I would say that they always were.  After all, they have been promoting the received liberal doctrine on things like climate change.

The "handful of rich, conservative families" were always consciously fighting the status quo.  The notorious Koch Brothers are not inside players.  They are playing an outside game.  But coal-billionaire Tom Steyer and his tattooed wife Kat get the kool kat treatment in the SF media. (Did you know that Steyer once invested in coal plants in Indonesia and now he bankrolls campaigns to stop coal exports from Washington State?)

Yeah, right on, Tom and Kat!

But the "rich, conservative families" (interesting how that "families" gets in there) don't expect luvvie coverage.  They expect nothing but scorn.  They are doing what they do because they want real change; they want to build an adversary culture to found a move away from the educated elite expert-led authoritarian welfare state.  I doubt that Democracy Alliance ever imagined doing much more than rearranging the deckchairs, stiffening up a bureaucracy or two with some corporate processes to improve feedback and accountability.  I am thinking of something like the Gates Foundation.  Good stuff, but still completely within the liberal mindset.

The current rebellion against the status quo, from Koch Brothers to Tea Party to pro-lifers to gun nuts to bitter clingers, may thrive or it may wither.  But it is real.

The flutters of reform in the Cathedral like the Democracy Alliance are no more than the ruling class gazing at its navel.  Nobody is really thinking of substantive reform.  Not yet.

Who Deals with the Freeloaders and Predators?

The two Big Problems of human society, in my view, are Freeloaders and Freebooters.  I have a whole chapter about it in "Freebooters and Freeloaders." Who are they?

The Freebooters are the common criminals that prey on the poor.  That's what we have police forces for.  That's just the domestic freebooters.  The foreign freebooters are the neighboring state, the expansionist empire, the marauders and the pirates.  That's what we have armies for.

But what about the freeloaders?  They are the people looking for free stuff.  And it's a curious thing that the government that defends us from freebooters, common criminals and dreaded foreign powers, is the agency that tends and feeds the freeloaders.  Why does it do that?  Because that is how all governments maintain their power.  They originate as rebel or conquering armies that distribute baronies to the captains in their armies.  They continue by buying the loyalty of their supporters with government spending and privileges.

So we could say that governments exist to protect the people from the predators.  But they do it at the cost of encouraging the freeloaders.  Two steps forward and one step backward.

What do we do about the freeloader problem?  That's what we have religion for, and specifically the post-Axial Age religions that advance an individual relationship with God.  Put it this way.  The only way you can deal with a common criminal is by arresting him and locking him up.  But freeloaders are different.  They are people that don't actively break the law.  They are just sneaking around looking for handouts.  It's obviously a universal human trait or we wouldn't have supermarket specials and coupons and airline frequent flier programs.

The way you deal with freeloaders is you make them ashamed of their idleness. You shame them into getting a job.  That's what religion does.

Back when Jane Austen was writing novels it was nothing for the rich to be idle.  And the worst of the worst were the young heirs that wasted their youths on gambling and dissipation.  I am thinking in particular of young Tom Bertram in Mansfield Park.

Not any more.  The liberal trustafarians of our own time all present themselves as busy as bees running their family foundations and funding social justice projects.  High class women don't sit around embroidering and making calls. They all have college educations and have careers.  Rich people don't have social cachet these days unless they are doing something.

So much for the rich.  But at the other end of the spectrum the modern welfare state actually encourages the poor in their idleness.  It makes a virtue out of freeloading!  And this is coded into the very design of the authoritarian welfare state and its over-under governing coalition.  The "over" part gets the jobs, the money, the power and the love of beautiful women.  The "under" part gets to freeload with a share of the loot, a payoff for voting the "overs" into power.

Now I maintain that the secular liberal political movement is actually a secular religion.  It is not just a governing party but a way of life.  So here we have a religion that actually promotes freeloading!

If you ask me, something's gotta give.

Here's my idea for a better America.  Keep the government focused on fighting the freebooters and the predators.  Government is force, and the only thing it can do is wage war on someone.

But we need a new religion to shame the freeloaders.  Religion is all about the meaning of life and what it takes to live a good life.  And the way that religion works on people is by shaming and shunning the backsliders: "social control" as our liberal friends put it.

But first we've got to chase the present liberal priesthood out of the temple, because their religion is a false religion.  If a religion does not shame its believers away from freeloading then it is worth nothing at all.

How to Teach Rapists Not to Rape

There's a big flap going on in SF quarters right now about rape.  Conservative SF writer Larry Correia in his blog affirmed the advice of Miss Nevada that women should take self-defense classes to protect themselves from rapists.

Apparently this is all wrong.  The current liberal narrative is that there is a "rape culture" in the US and that instead of teaching women to defend themselves we should "teach men not to rape."  After all, rape is not women's fault so why should it be their responsibility to defend themselves?

This would be comical if it weren't so serious.  Look, if women are to go out into the world as independent women without the protection of their fathers then there's a chance they might run into a nasty.  What's a woman to do then?  Teach the guy not to rape?

Women in general and feminists in particular have no idea how men's minds work.  One of the biggest differences is that if you teach a girl something she will dutifully learn it and repeat it back to you.  But boys resist learning.  That's why we have Basic Training and Boot Camp for soldiers.  Basic Training is not about teaching anything.  It is about ramming lessons home to a "licentious soldiery."

I have a little private joke about Jaques' tale of the second age of man in As You Like It:

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. 

My point is that you don't see little girls "creeping like a snail / Unwillingly to school."  Why?  Because little girls do what they are told and are glad to do it.  Want to teach men not to rape, other than nice well-brushed upper-middle class lads?  You put the fear of God or the drill instructor in them.

And that brings up the bigger point.  It's about the social triad of economy, government, and religion.

Ideally, in the best of all possible worlds, people would exchange and barter like they have for 200,000 years and cooperate with each other, making and doing things that are useful for other people. After all, exchange and barter are what has created the miraculous global economy.

But there is a problem.  Some people don't want to do that.  They would rather just take from other people.  They may be thieves snatching stuff from others, or they may be in a gang organized to prey on others.  Or they may be in a predatory army or a political party offering free stuff to its followers.

That's why we need government: to punish the predators and freeloaders.

But the problem is that all governments are organized as a kind of criminal conspiracy.  All governments are armed minorities occupying a patch of land from which they seize resources from the inhabitants to give to their supporters.

So we have a little problem.  The very people that are charged with defending us against predators are themselves predators.  Or, to put in in rape terms, the very people that we charge to protect us from the rapists are very often rapists themselves.

I don't need to mention any names of famous politicians for you to get the point.

So what's the solution?  It's religion, of course.  Religion does not merely teach men not to rape, it teaches them the concept of divine justice. If they rape and pillage they will burn in hell.  Yes, and they will still burn in hell even if they "get away with it" and escape human justice.  Because God Knows, and God will judge all the sinners in the next life.

What we see in our liberal universities and schools is liberals trying to create a secular religion to replace the religion of Judeo-Christian personal responsibility that they have spent the last century trying to destroy.  All the stuff about sexual harassment and rape culture and freshman indoctrination is an attempt to restore some sort of order after the liberals declared that the old order of male courtesy towards women was nothing but patriarchal oppression.

Meanwhile we are raising a generation of feral young men that have never had fathers.  But no worries. We will just teach these home-boys not to rape.