Liberals Lose the Plot

You've probably heard vaguely about the Rotherham 1400 in England. How "Asian" (read immigrant Pakistani) men ran a rape operation that preyed on underage girls for years right under the noses of city officials who did nothing for fear of being labeled racists.  Here's the BBC report. This flap has occurred in the wake of a report that identified the coverups going back into the 1990s.  And why did it occur? Here's what rank-and-file bureaucrats had to say:

Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.

Golly, I wonder how the lifer bureaucrats got that idea?  By the way, you might not have realized it, but pretty well all the politicians in Rotherham are Labour.  Did you know that pretty well all the politicians in and around Ferguson, Missouri, are Democrats too?

By the way, a high proportion of the victims were known to authorities because they had been identified by the child protective bureaucracy because of dysfunctional family issues.  Oh, and they were white.

You could get a look into the British government bureaucrat culture that condoned all this by reading the Inspector Gadget police blog. Only you can't, because the police inspector that ran the blog has shut it down as ordered by his superiors. OK, it's still on the Wayback Machine.  Again and again, Gadget illuminated the multi-culti left-wing culture that was forced on British policing by the higher-ups.  And he would write about "The Swamp" where the white welfare underclass lived in government housing in utter social collapse.

If you read Victor Davis Hanson you will experience that a similar project is going on in the US.  The liberal welfare state vigorously enforces the law on white middle-class suburbaners.  But when it comes to the Hispanic folks living out in the rural California Central Valley where Hanson lives there seems to be no attempt at law enforcement.  You can see how that works.  Liberals believe that Hispanics are victims and thus exempt from full responsibility.  And individual law enforcement officers know that enforcing the law on "immigrant communities" means nothing but trouble.

Let's return to the block quote up above.  These bureaucrats go to diversity training where they are trained to be super sensitive to any action that might be construed as racist.  So it's not surprising that they act as required by their training.  Most people -- up to 85 percent -- are conformists that do what they are told.  And as for bureaucrats with lifetime tenure...

Let us rehearse what has happened here.  Liberals, in their devotion to the struggle against injustice have upended the good old system that called for the law to apply equally to everyone.  Nobody got a pass, not the noble in his castle, not the peasant on his farm.

But under liberalism, under the necessity of wiping out racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia, the rule of law has been bent and broken.  You can't expect the victim classes to be subject to bourgeois law.  That would be unjust!  That would be like saying that the rich and the poor have an equal right to sleep under the Seine bridges in Paris.

There's another consequence of the necessity of wiping out racism, sexism, classism, and climate change.  You have to exempt the ruling class from the rule of law, as well.  We see this in the actions of the Obama administration.  It's so important to implement universal healthcare that the administration has to be able to make law up as it goes along.  It's so important to amnesty millions of illegal immigrants that we can't wait for Congress to get around to passing a law.  It is so important to dig out the racists in the Ferguson, Missouri, police department that the Attorney General of the United States needs to show up and whip the investigations along.

The point of the rule of law, of the separation of powers, of equality under the law is that anything else leads to mistrust and conflict.  Liberals think that their moral superiority franchises them to bend the rules a little in order to push along the march of progress.

They are wrong, of course, and they will pay for their folly.

Unfortunately the rest of us are going to have to pay for liberal folly as well.  Big time.

Buffett Stock Tip: Sell Obamas

The thing about a chap like Warren Buffett, described by some as the world's foremost stock picker, is that he has to be careful.

A rich billionaire has to keep his friends close and his enemies closer.  Because billions.  Everyone wants a piece of Warren, including the tax man.

So Warren Buffett has sailed a very clever course during the Obama administration, as Andrew B. Wilson reminds us.  Back in November 2010 Warren wrote a letter to his Uncle Sam (printed in the New York Times) thanking his uncle for getting us through the Crash of 2008.

A grateful president gave Warren a Presidential Medal of Freedom not three months later.

And Warren has chirped up a couple of times about the benefit of increasing taxes.

Earlier this year, Fox News reported that Warren had given $1.2 billion to abortion groups since 2001.

I tell you what I call all of that.  I call that taking care of business.  A big billionaire like Buffett is a target for political activists.  It's a good idea for someone like him to kow-tow to the liberal household gods and buy a little protection.

But now it turns out that Buffett is helping finance the "inversion" of Burger King, as the burger business merges with Canada's Tim Horton and proposes that the resulting corporation be a Canadian corporation and lower its US tax bill.

Chaps like President Obama call the inversionists unpatriotic.

Wait!  I thought that dissent was the highest form of patriotism!

So what is Warren Buffett's game?  He has been making nicey nice with the Dems ever since he endorsed Obama in 2008.

I will tell you what Buffett is saying.  He is saying that Obama is now a busted flush and so he doesn't have to suck up to Obama and his Chicago machine any more.

In other words, the world's foremost stock picker is telling us that it is time to sell Obama.

Obama Era: A Rendez-vous with Reality

I have said it before, and I say it again.  The reason I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 with all the kiddies was because I felt that Democrats needed to own foreign policy.

Democrats needed to be in charge and experience for themselves what the US needed to do with respect to the forces in the world. Otherwise they'd just play politics like they did from the day after 9/11.  Remember? The first liberal meme on 9/11 was that the Bush administration had failed to "connect the dots."  Then they put Jamie Gorelick on the 9/11 Commission even though she was the one that put up a wall between the FBI and the CIA.

On Iraq, Democrats were for it before they were against it.  And now, it seems, per Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal, their bellwether liberal writers are weather-vaning back in favor of it: at least to the extent of favoring "doing something" about ISIS.

OK.  I'm not a genius. I wasn't thinking that some years down the road a complete conflagration in the Middle East would turn liberal eyes back towards the late 1990s consensus on foreign policy.  I just wanted the liberal ruling class to get its fingers on the levers of power and make up its mind what it wanted.

The other good thing about the Obama era is that Democrats have been in charge during the discouraging years immediately after the generational Crash of 2008.  Imagine if John McCain had won the election and stumble-bummed his way through 2009-12 like Barack Obama!  He'd already be down in the presidential basement and everyone would agree that he was worse than Herbert Hoover, and he would be proof, as if any proof were needed, that Republicans didn't care about ordinary people and only cared about The Rich.

Here we are, with Obamacare, ISIS, corruption, economic stagnation, race riots, and it's all hanging around Obama's neck.  So now Republicans have a chance for real economic reform.

But the basic problem is still there.  The American people really don't know from bupkis when it comes to the economy.  As Instapundit Glenn Reynolds writes, we still retain our paleolithic economic intuitions.

What do we need to do?  It's not rocket science.

We need to X out all the stupid economic regulation from minimum wage to child labor that makes it extremely hard for marginal people to get ahead in America.

We need to end the generational injustice of Social Security and Medicare.  Here's my idea of justice.  So long as you are able to work, you get to retire when you have saved enough money to yield an income to retire on.  That means, if you wonder, that the old 'uns like me have saved enough to create jobs for the people whose work will support us in our old age.

We need to make welfare time-limited.  That was the idea behind the reform of 1996, but Obama has quietly repealed it -- without the consent of the governed.  And the American middle class needs to be socialized to believe that it is the personal responsibility of each American to relieve the sufferings of the poor.

We need to go back to sound money.  Of course.  But the lesson of the 20th century is that you can't have sound money with big government, because Big G is always screwing up the economy and needing to devalue the currency in order to get out of a jam.

We need to get the government out of education.  Maybe the best thing to do is to repeal compulsory attendance.  Middle-class kids will grow up to be literate and numerate anyway.  So that means we can concentrate on the children of the  poor.  And it would be better if: a) the poor paid for their kids' education as they do in the Third World  (see James Tooley and The Beautiful Tree) and b) the slack were made up with money from billionaires and time from middle-class volunteers.

I know what you are saying.  Good luck with that.

That's why I say that the only way out is through a moral/religious awakening that sweeps away all the dogs-in-a-manger -- that's you and me -- that won't go with the program because they won't give up their own personal little benefit from the government.

But at least the Obama era will have given many of us a rather compelling rendez-vous with the reality that progressivism doesn't work.

And the result will be some sensible piecemeal reforms that will heal the economy until the next Obama era thirty years from now.

Understanding 200 Years of "Counter Ideologies"

Why do they keep coming?  I am talking about what Abram N. Shulsky calls "counter-ideologies" to liberalism (i.e., classical liberalism).

Despite its overall success, liberalism has for two centuries been dogged by a series of counter-ideologies. So far, they have all been defeated, but sometimes only at great cost.

We are talking about Romanticism, bohemianism, avant-gardism, "extreme nationalism," fascism, and "various forms of communism and leftist extremism." And now Islamism.  What is going on?

After much to-ing and fro-ing Shulsky comes to the conclusion that the weakness of classical liberalism is that its intellectuals no longer believe in it and "there are seemingly ineradicable longings of the human soul that it ignores or pretends do not exist."

Yes, but.

I take the position that of course there have been lots of "counter-ideologies" to our present world of --well, let's call it "global responsible individualism."  When you turn the world upside down, what do you expect?

When you write history, you write it as though your kind naturally acceded to world dominance by the grace of God of the inevitable march of history.  And to call your ideology "liberalism" kinda hides the truth.  Because the process was not liberal; it was instead a brutal process of creative destruction.  Old ways and empires and forms of dominance from one end of the world to the other were trashed and thrown on the ash heap of history.  And replaced with something different.

Of course people objected to this.  Of course the Islamists are hopping mad.  "We" are tearing their world up by the roots and, worse, treating the Middle East as a savage backwater that can be conquered and remade at the will and the convenience of our commerce and our power.

Let's unpack the term I've used "global responsible individualism."  I use that term because until just yesterday life for most humans was local, was subservient, and was collective.  People lived and died pretty near to where they were born.  They belonged to a small community that was profoundly hierarchical; there was a lord, and in your particular family there was a patriarch.  You did what you were told.  And life was collective.  You didn't think of "I"; you just lived the way of the ancestors and the tribe and the village without thinking that there could be another way.

But now that's changed. Let's start with global.  Both my grandfathers, I think, were born in England. But my father was born in Russia and my mother was born in Japan.  I was born in India.  My children were born in the US.  Two of my grandchildren were born in England, two in France, and two in the US. Just to make it fair!

Then there is the "responsible individualism."  In my view, starting in the Axial Age of the first millennium BC, the idea got about that people were responsible for the conduct of their lives individually to God. And there were consequences: Heaven, Hell, reincarnation as a dog.

My feeling is that few people were affected by this ideological revolution until Gutenberg, until the Reformation, until the industrial revolution.  The People of the Responsible Self were a small, but growing minority.  Then the movement went critical and conquered the world.

Now responsible individualism is hard.  Everything about your life is piled on your back; "you" not "they" is responsible. And the weight can become intolerable.  Of course people revolted against this revolution.   Artists didn't like the idea that creative inspiration was being devalued by reason and steam engines. Intellectuals didn't like the idea that the market economy was self-regulating and didn't really need people like them to run the trains. Workers were confused as they migrated out of rural idiocy into the rough and tumble of city work and life.  The rich didn't like the cities busting out and destroying their parks and shrubberies.

Of course there is unrest; of course there are counter-ideologies.  Of course there are wars and movements and religions and cults and disasters.  This is the biggest thing ever.

Meanwhile, as Instapundit Glenn Reynolds reminds us,

most people’s economic intuitions are — quite literally — paleolithic. Whole political ideologies have flourished by taking advantage of that.

Which is merely saying the same thing as Shulsky and me.  Here we are, billions of humans still mostly programmed for life in the Old Stone Age that was local, subservient, and collective.  And we are being forced to life in a world that is global, responsible, and individual.

Many people would rather go back to the old ways.

What Three Things Should We Do? Sorry, I'll Have to Punt on That

I just had a spirited discussion with a new acquaintance, a Seattle businessman, and eventually we came to the businessman's big question:  What three things would you do to fix the government?

And I punted.

That's because I think we are nowhere near being able to do big things about the current mess.

Let me be clear.  I have plenty of big ideas to fix things.  I just don't believe that this is the time for big things.  Not yet.

Here's my Three Point Plan.  Actually, it is a Four Point Plan.

First, middle-class Americans should pay for their own retirement.  The current system is a system of intergenerational injustice where older, richer seniors get paid pensions by younger, poorer workers.  My plan of intergenerational justice is that middle-class people get to retire when they have accumulated the savings to create enough productive jobs for the young 'uns to support the old 'uns.

Second, middle-class Americans should pay for their own healthcare in retirement.  Of course we want to do the right thing by seniors like me, but not at the expense of young people trying to buy a home and raise a family.

Third, American children should not be sent to government child-custodial facilities for twelve years to sit on benches all day with no time off for good behavior.  Yes: can you spell J-A-I-L?

Fourth, the system of welfare where people trying to get off welfare pay higher marginal taxes than billionaires is unjust.  If we are to have a system of government welfare it should be focused like a laser on getting people back to work now.  Settled science says that people lose job skills from the day they are laid off.

In my ideal world workers wouldn't be paying swingeing taxes to pay grandpa's Social Security; income tax payers wouldn't be paying for grandma's frequent trips to the cardiologist, neurologist so that she needs two sets of weekly pill organizers.  They wouldn't be sending their kids to school but the neighborhood mothers would organize home-school cooperatively.  And the poor would be helped by the ABCDEFG method developed by charity professionals in the 19th century, backed up by mutual-aid associations that also flourished in the 19th century until the welfare state killed them both stone dead.

But there isn't a chance in hell that my four step program could be passed today.  That's because change -- real change -- can only come as a result of a great moral movement.  Think Reformation, Puritans, Great Awakening, Anti-slavery, Islamism.  And don't forget the secular moral movements like romanticism, socialism, nationalism, fascism, communism, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights.

Right now there is no moral movement that is organizing and socializing people to change the welfare state.  The average person accepts the current system and merely grumbles about minor indignities.  People are afraid of any change and rightly worry that any change would hurt them.  They are right to be afraid.  When political change comes to town the current generation gets screwed.  Ask the Indians after the Puritans showed up.  Ask the signers of the Declaration of Independence.  They almost all lost their lives, their fortunes, and I'm not so sure what happened to their sacred honor.  The Civil War?  Wiped out a generation of young men and condemned the slaves to a century of Jim Crow.  War against Nazism?  Great for the US, but whacked Europe and Russia for a generation.

Yeah, it would be great to solve the great injustices of the current era, but if you ask me things are going to have to get worse before they get better.  Eventually the "worse" will lead to a new moral movement of renewal.  Which may fail.  Even if the moral movement succeeds and rebuilds the culture and politics on new foundations, it will still exact an enormous cost on the generation that lives through it.

Gee.  I just Googled myself and I find that I wrote this whole thing back in 2010.

Race Card Tactics -- and Strategy

Nobody doubts that the tactics of the race card is effective.  Jump on a white-on-black incident and exploit it to the skies.  African Americans get outraged and whites get surly.

Yeah, but what about Hispanics?  Anybody checked on them lately?

Never mind about tactics; what about race-card strategy?

I am thinking about this because I am reading Alexander Hamilton: A Life by Willard Sterne Randall.  We are up to 1780, just before the campaign of 1781 and the surrender at Yorktown.  The point is that tactically, the Revolutionaries sucked.  They fumbled and bumbled through most of the battles.  In the middle of it all in the winter at Valley Forge, Col. Hamilton rewrote the army training manual -- a kid from St. Croix -- and he helped Steuben retrain the army using a simplified quickie course that they'd cooked up together.

Tactics, scmactics.  In the end, the Brits lost because they bumbled the strategy; they got distracted by the entry of the French on the revolutionary side, and retreated from Philadelphia in 1778.

But nobody could tell in 1778 that the Brits had made a fatal strategic error.  They were all playing politics and blaming people and challenging each other to duels, and trying to get in with the rich babes.

Fast forward to today and the Dems' race card.  How's that race card turning out, strategically?  I'd say, not so well.

Because I'd say that the stumbling and bumbling over Ferguson, as over the Zimmerman case and the Duke lacrosse case and the stupid O.J. case...

Hey!  What do you remember most about the Rodney King case: the cops beating Rodney King or the rioters dragging white truck driver out of his truck and beating him?

If I were a black voter right now I'd be as angry as can be, but I'd still be hearing a still small voice in my head channeling Hillary Clinton: "What difference, at this point, does it make?"

What's the point of electing a black president if nothing gets better?  What's the point of all this demonstrating if nothing changes?

Let's switch to longshoreman Eric Hoffer in The Ordeal of Change.  He writes about the ephemeral nature of enthusiasm.  Hence enthusiasm is "unserviceable for the long haul."

The attempt to keep people enthusiastic once they have ceased to believe is productive of the most pernicious consequences... The Communists started out with faith and extravagant hope, then passed to pride and hatred, and finally settled on fear.  The use of Terror to evoke enthusiasm was one of Stalin's most pernicious inventions.

It is telling, I think, that liberals these days find they have to resort to fear, using the IRS, using trumped-up prosecutions, using political correctness, using riots in the streets, using pressure groups to suppress heretical thoughts.

The problem with all politics and all government programs is that it begins in enthusiasm and talented activists.  But then the activists go on to their next gig and the programs and the government gets taken over by lifers.  And one thing the lifers don't want is renewed enthusiasm that would disturb their untroubled life of watching internet porn and counting the days until retirement.

(The same thing applies to the corporate world, of course.  Talented enthusiasts create a business startup and build it into a great corporation.  But then the lifers take over and when the market changes the lifers just don't have the talent or energy to adjust.  Time for a government bailout!)

Of course nobody knows what the future will bring.  But if you are like me you are constantly trying to peer through the noise of the day-to-day to try and discern the bigger picture.

Sometimes you mistake the bigger picture; sometimes there is no bigger picture, just sound and fury signifying nothing.  But usually there is more going on in the world than just the surface effects.

Yea.   Just what is the Democrats' long-term strategy on race?

Put Not Your Trust in Princes

As Foghorn Leghorn might have said: there's something Ugh about folks what publicize their sorrows.  I am thinking first about reality TV.  What kind of a fool would get involved with that? And yet people are eager to get involved.

Reality TV is a lie, of course, just as it's a lie that the friendly woman on the morning TV show is like one of your friend in your neighborhood coffee klatsch.  No she isn't your friend; she just plays one on TV.

So it is when the race-card sharps descend on the latest race killing.  Trouble is that reality is not the same as reality TV.  Reality TV is an illusion, but when you deputize the race-card sharps to publicize your sorrow, you get humiliated.

That's what is developing in the Ferguson, Missouri race incident.  It's turning out that Michael Brown was not just a kid walking down the street.  As Bob Tyrreli writes, Swisher Sweets, the cigars that Brown strong-armed just before his fatal encounter with the police, are used in the mixing of pot and PCP. Here's a report on the manufacture, consumption, and effects of "street fry".  You take a Swisher Sweet, replace the tobacco with marijuana, and soak the result in embalming fluid [!] laced with PCP.  Effects can include walking in the middle of the street oblivious to the traffic.

I keep returning to my notion of government as force, and political supporters as the soldiers in the politicians' army.  I do that because I think that people that loiter around politics hoping for free stuff are like soldiers in the old European armies.  You join up like any 19-year-old with a vision of mayhem and loot, and you end up diseased and starved and dying by the side of the road a thousand miles from home.

This is what is happening to African-Americans as the Democrats march them on their road to the next political battle.  Complete and utter humiliation.

We are supposed to be all worked up about a 300 lb 18-year-old dope-head?  We are supposed to make a national issue about a kid going wrong and riling up a local Neighborhood Watch volunteer?  We are supposed to get upset about the travails of a jealous over-the-hill athlete? We get to burn up Los Angeles because some thug got beaten up by police after resisting arrest?

I've been reading Victor Davis Hanson and David Goldman in the last few days as they have talked about the later stages of the Civil War.  The decisive battles were fought in 1863, but the South wasn't ready to quit, so 1864 was about the slaughter of the South in Grant's Wilderness campaign and the humiliation of the South in Sherman's capture of Atlanta and his March to the Sea.

Strictly speaking, they argue, the South could not have won after 1863.  But it took a lot more defeat and humiliation before the South could surrender.  And even then, don't forget, it was General Lee that surrendered, not the politicians that sent hundreds of thousands to their death.

Let's think instead about LBJ's Great Society and the War on Poverty and the current Democratic coalition of minorities and women.  The intellectual battle was won decades ago by George Gilder in Wealth and Poverty and Charles Murray in Losing Ground.  The War on Poverty was a terrible idea that hurt the very people it was supposed to help. But liberals were not ready to admit defeat.

So now it is 30 years since the intellectual battles were fought, and mindless politicians like Barack Obama, who are like the young bucks that Scarlett O'Hara flirts with at the start of Gone With the Wind, are still leading women and minorities to perdition.  They are all for the cause, filled with the rhetoric of catchphrases and interest groups of a century of leftism.

Only it's all lies, lies that sauntering politicians tried out years before, and that shallow minds picked up and repeated.  That's what we got with the Reverends and Barack Obama and Eric Holder and the execrable hosts from MSNBC.

Right now everyone is pretending that the US Senate is up for grabs in November.  Harry Reid says he's confident that the Democrats will prevail -- but he has to -- and Republicans are confident but restrained.  I suspect that the result with be a shocker, a blot from the blue.

And the result will issue from the fact that the rank-and-file foot soldiers of the Democratic coalition are demoralized.  They have been marched and drilled and pushed and pulled and manipulated and lied to.  Hey, they still believe in the cause, sort of.  But now they are just tired.  Because they thought that by now they would be enjoying the benefit of hope and change, peace and justice.

Then there are the people that didn't vote in the last couple of elections because the Democrats did such a good job of defining Republicans as the party of the rich and the party of politicians that don't care about ordinary people.

So between the exhausted rank-and-file and the millions of folks angered and betrayed by the Obama gang (I'm looking at you millennials) it truly is Time for a Change.

But really, Americans, the best policy is not to put your trust in politicians in the first place.  That is the whole point of the middle class and its philosophy of the responsible individual.

There's only one thing you need to remember about politicians.  They only want your vote.