What Went Wrong: Getting to a Solution

For those of us that believe in individual responsibility and the free collective mind, we've got to get out of the freeloader culture and its collective mindlessness.  That's what we argued in the previous part of this series. (Beginning of series here.)

It is the great question that confronts our society in the second decade of the 21st century.  Shall we go further and further on the current path towards a society of complete administrative supervision, what I call collective mindlessness?  Or shall we change course and reduce the weight of government and reanimate our collective mind.

You've got to accentuate the positive. Eliminate the negative. And latch on to the affirmative. Don't mess with Mister In-Between. Rare words, brave world!  But what do we actually do?  The answer is obvious: we eliminate the negative boat anchor of politically mandated freeloading and its collective mindlessness.  We accentuate the positive flourishing of the collective mind.

But how?  How can we deal with the vice that has utterly metastasized itself throughout modern politics, the cancer of votes for free stuff?

In a recent piece for The American James V. DeLong confirms this analysis by describing the current political regime in the United States.  Each party must appeal to the “values and concerns” or “V&C” of a broad swath of voters but must also get money and influence from elites and special interests.

The system gives a big edge to the Democrats, who have no particular principles except for more government and more money to deserving groups. These principles are congruent with the interests of the dependent classes, the bureaucracies that serve them, the public and private elites who operate the system, an academia dependent on federal money, and many corporate looters.

DeLong goes on the show the problem that Republicans and conservatives have dealing with this system.

The Republicans have a harder time with the imperative to appeal to both the broad base of V&C voters and special interests. On taxes, the Republicans have made the link between benefits for targeted groups and pro bono publico, arguing that reductions for the rich and upper middle class prove the party’s dedication to the interests of working people, and it is not surprising that tax-cut rhetoric has a long chapter in the Republican catechism.

For conservatives, the definition of V&C has evolved. Rather than the usual jobs, education, and so on, their V&C concerns go deeper and now include dedication to free markets, light regulation, individual autonomy, respect for conscience, refusal to privilege victimhood, and the rule of law. These do not translate well into visible benefits for individuals, firms, or industries, and thus do not keep the vital dollars flowing into the coffers of the party, the independent groups, and the K Street lobbying firms where old donkeys and elephants go to get rich.

In other words, the Democratic voters and interests are united in getting (voters) and furnishing (interests) more stuff for “deserving groups.”  Republican voters are merely interested in values and concerns around the question of individual responsibility and rights and therefore aren't offering “more stuff” for anyone, not for voters, not for special interests.  Obviously the Republican voters can't get what they want unless their values and concerns become more universal, or unless the administrative state fails to deliver on its free stuff for the dependent classes and the middle-man elites.

You can see what is going on here.  Right now, in the United States divided about 50-50 between the two parties, we have a stalemate between the two parties.  The Democratic voter V&C plus the bureaucracy-elite-academia-crony looters are about equal to a Republican voter V&C that's warring with its own RINO elite.

The solution is obvious.  Republicans and conservatives must reduce the legitimacy of the free-stuff-for-victims V&C and the hall pass that the  bureaucracy-elite-academia-crony looters get from supporting the agenda of free stuff for victims.  Short term, Republicans can win by picking up some independent voters that are just annoyed by the failures of the Democratic ruling class and think it is Time for a Change.  But long term we are talking about religion and faith.  We must reduce the faith that people have in the ruling elite, and the tribal instinct that the village big man, aka the ruling class, can deliver the free stuff people have come to expect not just as a mess of pottage but as a birthright.

Short term, we can bid for the independents; long-term, we must change the culture from freeloading to responsibility.  But what about the medium term? What can we do to limit the damage from the springtime for freeloaders that has resulted from the politics of the authoritarian welfare state?

That's what we'll look at in the next installment of this series.

What Went Wrong: Collective Mind or Collective Mindlessness?

We've been looking at what went wrong, pre and post Obama, at the tactical and strategic political level.  (Beginning of series here.) Now let's look at the decisive point: do we believe in collective mind or collective mindlessness?

The decisive character of humans when compared against the rest of Nature is that we can understand and practice barter and exchange.  We have the instinct to exchange something we value for something we value more.  From this simple idea comes the whole impossibly complex market economy and global exchange system.  Ships are sailing the seas, trains are rumbling over the fruited plan, people are working away, and nobody is in charge.  The whole thing works because people are willing to exchange.  They are willing to exchange a particular good for money, their time for money, and their money for food and shelter and products and services.  There is a name for this amazing phenomenon: the collective mind.

But government is different.  Government is mechanics.  Government is a Newtonian opposition of forces not an exchange of voluntary services.  Government is the seizing of wealth and income as the price of defending people against enemies.  Government says you must pay payroll taxes if you want to work at a job; government says you must not get on an airplane without submitting to government's security theater.  You could say that there is a word for this phenomenon: collectivism, but really it is collective mindlessness, the thuggery of the clunking fist.

You can see now where we have been going wrong, and where the Obama administration has been going wrong in spades.  We have been steadily increasing the amount of government in America and reducing the amount of free cooperative exchange.  We have been increasing the amount of collective mindlessness at the cost of shrinking the collective mind.  And for what?  To make the ruling class feel good about itself.

So we must change, and we must start to change today.  But there is a problem.  Nobody wants to give up a dime of their free stuff.  Grandmothers say things like: “'they' better not cut my Medicare.”  Seniors say: “I paid for my Social Security with my taxes.”  And so politicians dare not touch the sacred “entitlements,” the third rail of American politics.  Probably we cannot reform entitlements short of total government meltdown.  We should not be hard on our fellow citizens for their dog-in-the-manger attitude; our problem is not just a question of selfish freeloaders wanting to keep their free stuff.  The modern welfare state panders to the eternal yearning in every human heart to escape the contingency of human life, to obtain if not eternal life, at least a job for life, or a pension for life, or health-care for life.  But, of course, the person that wants politicians to give him a pension for life is not looking at the fact that he is exchanging his birthright for a mess of pottage.  He does not understand that he is putting his hands within the hands of his liege lord and surrendering his freedom and his dignity as a free person for three squares a day, as the English peasant could do a millennium ago.

The freeloader forgets that when he places his hands within the hands of his liege lord, whether warrior noble or The One who will bring Hope and Change, he is transferring the ownership of risk in his life, for good or ill, from himself to his lord.  And that risk has a price, not just in money but in human freedom and dignity.

Not everyone wants a life of subservience and serfdom.  Some people say: I don't want that deal.  I don't want to live in subordination to a lordly liberal ruling class, and I wouldn't want it even if liberals were really as sensitive and compassionate as they imagine themselves to be.  I want freedom and the responsibility that goes with it.  I want the monkey on my back, not on the government's back.  I want the right to choose how to make my own contribution to society and take the consequences rather than dutifully follow the dictates of my bureaucratic supervisor or my precinct captain who, I've noticed, isn't very sharp at anything except currying favor with his political bosses and playing favorites with his subordinates.

But is there any way that the responsible individuals can influence our politics, or are they doomed, doomed to be overrun by freeloaders and corporate looters?  See the next installment in this series.

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.