National Security on the Cruising Frontier

ON BOARD GOLDEN PRINCESS, SKAGWAY, AK  Hey, John Derbyshire!  You have a problem with five cruise ships docked at the bustling metropolis of Juneau, Alaska, population 33,000?  How about four ships docked at Skagway, Alaska, population 800?

Yesterday in Juneau there were two Holland America, one Princess, and one Celebrity boats; today in Skagway we have one Holland America, two Princess, and one Celebrity.

Imagine!  Skagway has docking facilities for four or more thoroughly modern cruise ships.  Think of a little place like that having thoroughly modern docks like that! Somehow, I reckon that I paid for those docks, courtesy of Uncle Sam and his cute little tax collector at the IRS, Lois Lerner.

Anyway, we had a great time at Juneau yesterday.  In the morning we went out to watch the whales in a nice little tender sporting three 250 HP outboards.  Yep, with that kind of power you can get the tourists out to the feeding humpback whales in half an hour at a healthy 30 knots.  That's fast enough to do four 2-hour whalewatching trips per day.  The guide for our trip, Brian, was a photojournalist that gave us a quick digital camera lesson while we were in the bus traveling from the cruise terminal to the whale-watching marina.  You'd be surprised how few of his students had ever shifted their digital cameras out of Auto.

And were those whales hard at it. Feeding on herring, I mean.  And I'm glad to say that they were ably assisted by a bunch of Stella's sea lions.

You may know that our national government's whale enforcement officers have decreed that our nation's whale-watching boats should not approach closer than 100 yards to a whale: a sensible and thoughtful environmental regulation.  You can imagine our consternation when a whale or two carelessly approached our whale-boat well within the legally prescribed limit.  Oh no!  Would the local whale-watching enforcement SWAT team swoop down in a cigarette boat with a 0.5 in machine gun locked and loaded on the foredeck?  It was nip and tuck for a moment, but fortunately nothing happened.  I imagine that the whale-watching enforcement SWAT team was on a break during the fateful minutes when our boat was in violation of the national whale-watching enforcement regulations.  Or maybe the whale enforcement interagency security evaluation team had met that morning and decreed that we were only at WHALESEC0, which does not require the whale-watching SWAT teams to leave their ready room back in Juneau.

Still, it was good to get our cruise cards checked by a security officer sitting next to a MARSEC1 sign. He seemed in the last stages of personal disintegration.

When you get out of the big city you really get to appreciate the exquisite care that our national government takes to ensure our safety.  On the approach to Juneau we were escorted by two US Coastguard cutters, one on the port and one on the starboard, each with a helmeted gunner on the foredeck attending a 0.5 in machine gun.  And that was only for MARSEC1. While sailing into the Strait of Juan de Fuca we encountered a Trident missile submarine on its way to the open ocean. The ineragency nuclear threat evaluation team must have decreed NUCSEC2 that day because there were four US Coastguard cutters accompanying the submarine, one up ahead, one astern, and one on each side of the sub.  (I am assuming here that you can tell how many US Coastguard cutters are needed to escort vulnerable and/or valuable US assets by dividing the SEC number by two).  And you can be sure that there was a skilled Alaskan gunner on the foredeck of each cutter with his hands on the locked and loaded 0.5 in machine gun.  Just in case.

Yes. It's comforting to know that while we sleep peacefully each night in our teeming cities our national government has arranged this robustly planned and executed national security theater performance for our protection.

If only the regular foreign and national security policy establishment that deals with ordinary Islamist proto-states and eternal thug dictators were as robustly organized and executed.

At Sea aboard the Golden Princess

ON BOARD THE GOLDEN PRINCESS 8:00AM MONDAY Here we are sailing eastward through the Frederick Sound into Juneau, Alaska and the humpback whales are spouting.  There are a couple on the port bow, and wow, there are six, no ten whales, no twenty whales spouting on the starboard bow!  Most unusual, says the steward delivering breakfast to our stateroom down in the bowels of the ship on Deck 5. Hey, when the salmon are running we whales gotta get our brekkers before the little monsters escape up the rivers for sex, sex, sex.

Meanwhile up on Deck 15 they are crowded along the rail, with gigantic telephoto lenses ranged alongside smartphones, with everyone snapping away.  But nobody seems to be taking selfies with the whales.

Lady Marjorie and I are sailing on an Alaska cruise out of Seattle with a group doing Argentine tango.  We do a "practica" in the afternoon from 2:00 to 4:00 at the Wheelhouse bar and dance in the Vista Lounge from 10:00 to midnight.  That's early, of course.  In Argentina they start their milongas at midnight, dance till 3:00 or 4:00 am and then go to work at 9:00am.

Yeah.  Now you know what's wrong with Argentina's economy.

Music?  No problem.  We just plug an iPod or a smartphone into the room's sound system.

It's the first cruise for Ordinary Seaman Lady Marjorie and Admiral Chris, so we'll be deciding whether we want to do it again.  Admiral Chris is a veteran sailor, with years of sailing boats from 14 ft sailing dinghies to 30 ft sloops. I've been doing a bit of guerrilla navigation with my smartphone, and I can report that the captain navigated safely from Seattle out through the Strait of San de Fuca and up the west side of Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands.  Really, these young chaps don't need to know nuttin'.  Just flick out the smarthphone and start up your GoPilot GPS.

The Golden Princess is rather like a vertical Mall.  There is lots of shopping, an atrium, shops, and bars and restaurants.  100,000 tons of it with 2,500 passengers and 1,000 crew. On Deck 14 are the swimming pools, the all-you-can-eat buffets and the outdoor Movies Under the Stars® screen where football fans can watch the NFL on Sunday while reclining on beach loungers all muffled up in parkas and blankets.

After a couple of days we've decided that we really want to eat in the dining rooms.  The food is "free" either way, but the buffets up on Deck 14 are something of a crowd scene, rather like the free breakfast "bunfight" at a US motel.  It's a little undignified for educated class folks like you and me.

We are having a great time at the Argentine tango.  Lady Marjorie and I met at a tango ball, and we did a lot of tango dancing in our early years together.  But now we have to get it together quickly to deserve to dance with the serious dancers -- like Irene the Russian who dances tango five nights a week and displays the most exquisite ornamentation with her flashing feet.  But there are also the rank beginners, like the young couple from Phoenix that just happened to be in the Wheelhouse bar when we started our practica on Sunday.  We soon had them in the hands of experts, showing them a move or two and getting them eager to Google "Phoenix Argentine tango" when they got home.

The thing about dancing is that, for men, it's all about cherchez la femme. But women of every age absolutely love dancing.  Really, guys.  You should do it.  Not for the children, but for the ladies.

The Failure of GOP Messaging

The First Amendment is supposed to provide for freedom of speech.  And so it does, in a way.  But the civil war of politics is still driven by the contest to control what you are allowed to say.

What you are allowed so say is usually as Democratic talking point.

Here's newly minted Democrat Charlie Crist running down this year's Democratic talking points.  He mentions

equal pay for women, raising the minimum wage, expanding health care to everyone who needs it, and making sure that everyone has a fair shot at success.

What you can't say in America is that the minimum wage is a disaster for young inexperienced workers, and we passed equal pay for women 50 years ago, and "expanding health care for everyone who needs it leads to the disaster of Obamacare.  Why?  Because all those talking points "poll well," and Democrats are going to push them as long as they can get votes with them.

Here's the first Senate debate in North Carolina and the moderator Norah O'Donnell asked the Republican Thom Tillis if "$7.25 was enough" on the minimum wage  Tillis waffled, and you can see why.  Republicans know that the minimum wage is a stupid idea and it creates unemployment.  But there's this:

The minimum wage is one of the few issues, if any, that Democrats can possibly make inroads with white, working class men, who support minimum wage increases.

As if the government can mandate prosperity by legislation.

Actually, the whole debate was about government free stuff from Medicare to education and attacks on Republican attempts to staunch the bleeding.

Or there is this, from a Democratic strategy memo:

[F]or Democrats to make any gains in November, they must increase their advantage among women. Democratic candidates can do this by emphasizing a broad range of women’s issues—including the economy, reproductive health care, and Social Security and Medicare—and weaving these issues into existing advantages among women on such key dimensions as “standing up for the middle class” (+14 Dem overall, +20 Dem among women) and “representing middle class values” (+12 Dem overall, +15 Dem among women).

I suppose you could say that nothing says failure of GOP messaging than the fact that Democrats, the over-under party of the rich and the poor, are considered as "standing up for the middle class" and "representing middle class values."

It's ironic.  The party of big government, whose policies are aimed like an arrow at middle-class autonomy and freedom, is considered by voters to be the party of the middle class.

Cudgeling My Brain on Freeloading

Back when Alger Hiss was trying to pitch himself out of a jam on the Pumpkin Papers and the naughty accusation from rumpled Time writer Whittaker Chambers that Hiss had spied for the Soviet Union, he knew that he had a problem. And so he told Congressman Richard Nixon that he had been cudgeling his brain on the way down to testify about whether he knew Whittaker Chambers.  So long ago, back before the War, but Chambers had testified to numerous details about Alger Hiss's domestic arrangements.  How would Chambers know all that if, as Hiss said, he didn't know Chambers?

Well I'm cudgeling my brain right now about the question of freeloading.  I want to show that our liberal ruling class -- and the educated ruling class elsewhere around the world -- has ruined the nation with its reactionary return to feudal politics.  By that I mean that the handouts of free stuff to the voters of the Democratic Party is the same as the handouts that any feudal regime, or any tribal lord, distributes among its supporters.  Just for supporting the ruling class, these supporters get loot. Like the lilies of the field, they neither toil nor spin.

And that's a problem.  It's a problem economically, because every hand that doesn't contribute to the national commonwealth has a mouth that must be fed by the labor of other people.  And it's a problem morally, because as Nicholas Wade writes, "nothing is more corrosive to a group's cohesion than free riders."

The point is that where you have government you have freeloading.  That's because every government that ever lived depends on its supporters, and its supporters want loot.

There is another way.  It is to anathematize government handouts (from green crony capitalists to middle-class entitlement beneficiaries to welfare recipients) and to base society on the principle that everyone goes out to find work and provide services for other people.

We know what this system is: it is called capitalism.  People go out from their families into the exchange economy and figure out how they can be useful to their fellow humans.  They accept the verdict of the market.  If the market doesn't reward them as much as they would like, they understand that they need to up their skills or improve their service in order to give more and receive more.  No fair complaining to government that life is unfair.

Eric Hoffer ingeniously wrote a confirmation of this notion.  He observed that there are two ways to get the work done.  Either the government can issue orders from the top down.  Or the worker figures it out on his own.

You can see what is implied here.  If the government is making all the decisions then we will never escape the vice of oppression vs. freeloading.  The government will always be making decisions with one eye on its supporters, so it will always deliver a result that is unjust, because it will always favor its supporters.

But the exchange economy is different.  Here there are no little darlings of the ruling class getting their special handouts.  There is just talent and skill and hard work and, above all, being in the right place at the right time.  And it is up to each individual to figure out how to become useful to his fellow humans.

The great question then is why, starting in the middle of the 19th century, there arose a moral and political movement that denied the basic equity of the exchange economy that was already starting to deliver cheap textiles, cheap food, and cheap transportation to the masses.  Why did these moral and political revolutionaries insist that this new industrial exchange economy was nothing but exploitation and oppression?  And why did they think that government, the vehicle of force, was the answer?

The answer is, I suppose, that it doesn't matter.  The Marxians and the Fabians and the Progressives all decided that government -- run by people like them -- was the answer. Period.

Our job is to found a new movement based on the moral argument that all government is unjust, but smaller government in less unjust than bigger government.  And we have such an argument to hand, from lefty Jürgen Habermas.  He argues that all systems, government and business, are inherently dominatory.  If we want to get out from the shadow of domination then we have to treat each other with respect and work out our differences with rational discourse that tries to find a consensus rather than strategically bending other people to our purpose.

But humans will always been tempted to reach for the power of government and cudgel the insolent folk that dare to oppose them.

Hello Liberals: Let's Talk

Here's a telling August 29 tweet from @rogerlsimon:

Not a single #liberal friend of mine wants to discuss politics now. They're humiliated by Obama.

That's a pity, because I'd say that now is a time when conservatives could have a really fruitful talk with their liberal friends.  It wouldn't be the kind of talk that liberals wanted to have back in 2006 when it was all "Bush Lied, People Died."

No, the kind of talk I'd like would be strictly governed by the rules of lefty Jürgen Habermas' discourse ethics, a truly intersubjective communication and sincere exchange of truth values between respectful equals.

I feel it's a good time for a talk because exactly because Roger L Simon's liberal friends have all gone silent.  They know that something is wrong.  When people have gone silent like that maybe it is time to have a quiet chat.

As in.

Maybe the feminist concern about a "rape culture" on campus is not quite as important as the race-based grooming and rape of young underclass white girls in the British city of Rotherham.  Maybe there's a problem when normally timid bureaucrats are intimidated with the "diversity" agenda that the left has been pushing for the last generation.

Maybe George W. Bush wasn't a complete idiot about the Middle East.  After all, "regime change" in Iraq was a policy in the Clinton administration. And the Obama policy of retreat seems to have encouraged all kinds of bad actors to emerge from under rocks.  Maybe we should stop the finger-pointing and do a little cooperating.

Maybe liberal activist groups need to dial back a bit on the "killer stats" they use to push their agendas.  There's a piece by Christian Hoff Summers about "Five Feminist Myths That Will Not Die." They range from women's property ownership, sexual slavery, domestic violence, campus assault, and 77 cents on the dollar for women's jobs.

Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to shove Obamacare at us on a bare partisan vote.

Maybe the climate is not quite such a problem as we thought.

Maybe it's not such a good idea to "out" opponents to gay marriage so that they lose their jobs because of their beliefs. Wasn't that what McCarthyism was all about?

Maybe, liberals, it's not such a good idea to turn everything into a political issue.  Look, I get how liberals believe that government is the name for things we do together.  But suppose you are a libertarian or a conservative and you believe that government is force, the apparatus of coercion. If liberals believe that government is a benevolent expert with a rational plan to end oppression and conservatives and libertarians believe that government is force and liberals are legislating liberal morality with their programs, how do we come to a consensus?  We conservatives recall that back in the mid 2000s liberals did not have such a benign view of government.  They saw the Bush administration as a gun to the head of liberalism.  How do we reconcile such radically different views of government?

You see, I think that the idea that government is the name for things we do together, or the idea that "with taxes I buy civilization" is a typical ruling-class delusion. No doubt every ruling class down the ages has a warm feeling about its rule, and thinks of itself as a pipe-smoking father benevolently presiding over a fractious family.  The reality is that, again and again, the people who are not in the ruling class get really angry about the things that the government does to them.  They get the feeling that government is not something we do together; they become convinced that government is something that is done to them.  It doesn't matter if the ruling class decides that the rebellious youth of the day doesn't have a grievance. There's a good argument to be made that the American colonists didn't really have a case against King George.  But they thought they did, and they brought it to a clash of arms, which they ended up winning by the skin of their teeth against the most powerful empire in the world at the time.

That's where I think we are today, liberals.  We conservatives and libertarians don't experience the Obama administration as an administration of hope and change.  We experience it as a corrupt and lawless Chicago-style political machine.  We see President Obama taking all kinds of illegal shortcuts and administrative actions because he can, because the establishment media won't call him on it as they would if he were a Republican.

Maybe all this is just so much noise, and the liberal way will win out and in another ten years we will go to single payer on health care, and we'll have $20 an hour minimum wage and a carbon tax and a successful program to get women into STEM jobs.

But maybe we are at an inflection point.  That, presumably, is what the silence of Roger L Simon's liberal friend means.  His liberal friends are afraid.  They feel the shaking of the foundations and they fear for the future of liberalism.

Maybe Barack Obama will make "progressivism" into just as much of a pejorative as George McGovern made of the word "liberal."  Maybe he will help usher in a generation of Republican governance to replace an utterly discredited Democratic Party.

The Symptoms of Big Government

If you are any kind of conservative or libertarian you probably want to end deficit spending.  You'd like to end the pay-as-you-go entitlement programs that politicians voted for a generation ago and that we have to pay for.  And you'd like to end the Federal Reserve Board's policy of stimulating the economy with cheap money to create jobs.

I'm all in favor of balancing the budget -- but not by increasing taxes.  I'm in favor of putting the obligations of the entitlement programs front and center -- but not if it means increasing payroll taxes on the American worker.

And I froth and the mouth about the Keynesian consensus that the Fed can and should goose the economy to stimulate employment.  But I look at the Fed as a relief pitcher that the government calls in when it's got the economy in a jam with all the bases loaded.  There is no substitute under the present political economy for a central bank as the lender of last resort to lend money during a liquidity crisis.

The real problem is that we get liquidity crises like the Crash of 2008 because of big government.  So long as government is goosing the housing market with loans to sub-prime borrowers we are going to need the Fed to come and clean up the mess while continuing to pay a trillion a year in pensions and a trillion a year in health care.  And so long as we have wars we are going to need the Fed to help the government finance the war.

So long as the American people believe in programs like Social Security and Medicare in which rich older Americans stand under a geyser of benefits paid for mostly by younger, poorer Americans then it doesn't matter what we do about balancing the budget or facing up to the real future costs of the programs.  And we will need the Fed to come in and clean up the mess with a blast of inflation every ten years or so.

And frankly, I don't see that changing in my lifetime or the lifetime of my children.  The basic reality of all politics, from a guerrilla insurgency to a continental empire, is that the government buys support by offering loot to its supporters.  In the United States government offers pensions for people and subsidies to special interests.  And anyone that raises an objection is anathematized as someone that wants to hurt "seniors" or the "poor" or the "traditionally marginalized" or "working families."  If you ask a senior about Medicare or Social Security they will remind you that they already paid for their benefits.

We are not going to change big government by treating the symptoms.  We have to treat the disease, and the disease is the idea that the welfare and security of the American people are founded upon a government safety net.  Until that idea fails and is replaced by another idea then we are stuck with the current system.

It's pretty obvious how we would get to a place where things change.  First the American people would have to believe that the current system had failed.  They will only do that when enough Americans personally suffer horribly from the failures of the current system.

When a sizable minority of Americans get really riled up because they have been unjustly treated by the current system then they will be ready to become foot-soldiers in a movement to change things.

But frankly, the American people are probably more likely to support a system of total government control of everything than to vote for a system that dismantles the current system and returns America to freedom and limited government.

Who's the Real Freeloader?

Humans are social animals; we work together for the sake of society. But humans are not just social, we are also selfish.  And we like free stuff, from grocery coupons to government subsidies and handouts.  We are willing to work for our daily bread, but we wouldn't pass up an opportunity to get it for free.

Every human society has to deal with this human characteristic.  When other people sign up for free stuff, we call it freeloading.  When we do it, we call it "rights."

Longshoreman Eric Hoffer nails it as usual in The Ordeal of Change.

In practically all civilizations that we know of, and in the Occident for too many centuries, work was viewed as a curse, a mark of bondage, or, at best, a necessary evil.

In all those civilizations, it would appear, work happened because the ruler ordered it.  And that is also what happened in the modern socialist states.  The work of the people was organized in massive Five Year Plans that specified in mind-numbing bureaucratic detail, what work was to be done.  It was a set of marching orders for the people.

In such a system, the Russian people have joked, "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

You could call such a system Springtime for Freeloaders.  People only do the minimum amount of work that will keep them out of trouble with their administrative bosses.  Their work and their emoluments are decided by higher-ups, and they have no opportunity to improve their lot by individual action.

But there is another way.  In this other way the worker is responsible for finding work that is beneficial to society and then doing it.  He may do it well, or he may do it badly. Either way, there are consequences to him.  In this system, it is clear, the freeloaders go to the wall.

Hoffer does not say this, but it seems pretty clear that the old way, in which work is a curse, the ruler takes responsibility for ordering the work to be done.  It is in the new way, in which work is a virtue, that the worker shoulders the responsibility for figuring out what needs doing and getting the work done.

That is why it is proper to call the first, age-old, system, collectivism, and the new worship of work individualism.  In the first system, social responsibility is collective; in the second system social responsibility is individual.

Collectivists like to advertise that collectivism is gentle and compassionate, while individualism is cruel and harsh.  And they are right, up until the first moment when there is work to be done.  At that point, the collectivist system starts to rely on coercion.  It may be the shaming by the tribal group, the physical presence of the village Big Man, the charisma of the feudal lord, or the Terror of the Communist commissar.  But force is needed.  The proof is in the failure of 19th and 20th century communes, starting with Robert Owen's New Harmony, Indiana, that lacked the power of coercion over its members and failed from an excess of freeloading.

Individualism is different.  It is true that it seems a most frightful thing, the individual pitched alone against the world, and its frightfulness would be true if man were not a social animal.   Man's social nature means that this aloneness is his fear that he might not discover what he can contribute to the world.  Once he has taken the first step to offer his services to the world his aloneness begins to soften.  Under individualism, the successful man is the one who has most to contribute to the world, and to whose charisma the whole world flocks.

On my view, individualism has been developing and spreading for over two millennia. Following Robert Bellah I date the birth of individualism to the Axial Age when the modern religions from Judaism to Hinduism to Christianity burst onto the world.  For these new religions began to dissolve the old idea of collective, tribal gods, and established an individual relationship to God.

But these religions did not immediately take over the world; they were city religions for people that were casting off their rural habits and entering the commercial world of the city.  In China, individualism went universal about 500 AD when feudalism collapsed and was replaced by imperial bureaucracy.  In Britain individualism started to spread in the 13th century when tenant farmers began to buy and sell their copyhold land as individuals in the local manor court.

But clearly individualism did not hit a critical mass until the industrial revolution when all of a sudden the British rural masses in their millions migrated from the land to the mining villages and the textile towns, and ran headlong into the global exchange economy and its culture of responsible individualism.

This industrial revolution has been going on now for over 200 years, and its flame front has burnt outwards from Britain to Europe and North America to Asia and to Africa. It is clear that the revolution has meant a startling change in the experience of life for those people that experience it.  The sudden exposure to full frontal individualism is terrifying and insulting to many people that first experience it as they immigrate in their millions to the city each year.

If there is one clear political fact of the last two hundred years it is that the immigrants to the city are not yet ready for individualism.  Socially, culturally, politically, they seek socialization under the old regime.  They celebrate their old ethnic origins and join ethnic fraternal associations to maintain their old solidarity; they join labor unions to mobilize against their employers; they vote for political machines that offer them benefits in return for their vote and their loyalty.  In fact they vote to continue the old regime of compulsion and coercion that obtained in the old country, the land they left when they decided to find opportunity in the New World. They are not reactionary in doing this; they are merely continuing their old traditions in the new place, and the old tradition said that you need a patron, a strong man, on your side if you are to survive in this brutal world of power red in tooth and claw.

Eventually the immigrants takes to the culture of individualism, but usually not in the first generation. Eventually they come to believe that the industrial economy rewards skills and effort and they step away from tribal affiliation and the old faith in safety inside the fortified castle walls of a patron lord.  They take up a new faith; they become People of the Responsible Self.  They socialize and connect to their fellow humans not by subservience to the patronage justice of a noble lord by by surrender to the justice of equality under the law of the market.

But meanwhile the immigrant feels that the only way to achieve safety and a decent standard of living is by picking up the crumbs from the table of economic redistribution.  He experiences corporations as exploitations, and small businessmen as cunning middle-men.  He cheers when government brings a corporation low and boosts the tax on rich people; else the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Only government can guarantee security.

From the point of view of responsible individualism the world-view of the city immigrant is self-destructive freeloading.  The immigrant votes for politicians that take money from hard-working citizens and spread it around among their political cronies, their contributors, and their lesser supporters.  These are monies ripped from the productive economy as much as a robber rips the purse of a citizen on the street and are then put to use in maintaining a political army that produces little or nothing of economic and productive value. It is the conflict between the idea that economic transaction are positive-sum events, a so-called "win-win" situation, and the idea that all transactions are zero-sum events, where one person wins only at the expense of a loser.

The zero-sum world-view is as old as the hills.  It stands to reason that if the tribe of the bull starts hunting in the lands of the tribe of the antelope that there will be less food for the tribe of the antelope.  If Farmer Adam and Farmer Bob each have identical acreage, the only way for Farmer Adam to increase the yield from his farm is to take some acres from Bob.  If I take a fish from the sea then there is one less fish for others to catch.  It just stands to reason that you have to fight for your share of the pie, and the only practical way to do that is to find a powerful patron that will defend you from the exploiters. And if some rich person earns more money than you, it stands to reason that somehow that rich guy stole it from the likes of you.

There's only one problem with the zero-sum world view. In the human exchange economy of the city it's dead wrong. It's wrong because when people specialize and exchange their goods and services both parties to each exchange benefit.  It's a positive-sum, win-win world in the city.

This is the great divide in the modern era.  It is the divide between the people that look at a corporation and see a predatory beast or a robber baron and the people that see a productive enterprise showering the consumers with mass products.  It's the divide between people that revolt at the idea of corporate "personhood" and people like Mitt Romney that say that corporations are composed of people.  One kind of person believes we must tether and yoke corporations before they impoverish us all; the other kind of person wants to set corporations free so they can commit "creative destruction" and bury the world in products that enrich us all. One kind of person thinks that we must tax the freeloading rich in order to bring justice to the poor; the other kind of person thinks that taxation is theft, and the people on the receiving end of government spending are freeloaders.

Now we can understand the major dimensions of modern politics.  There must be a political party to represent the world-view of the zero-sum believers, and there must be a political party to represent the world-view of the positive-sum believers.  In the United States the Democratic Party represents the zero-sum believers, who include many recent immigrants, African Americans still struggling to make it in the city, feminists and gays that believe government power is needed to fight discrimination, and the educated class that stands to gain from the opportunity to administer big government programs.  In the back row are the rich, who benefit from a big government that regulates business and looks after its well-established friends. The Republican Party represents the middle class that has risen up from indigence and believes in hard work and opportunity. Typically Republican Party voters are more religious than Democratic Party voters because they naturally take up the Axial Age religions that encourage the transformation of consciousness from a collective to an individualistic, self-responsible world view.

The history of the last two centuries seem to suggest that as immigrants live their lives in the city they begin to learn its ways, and their children learn it even better. They gradually come to recognize that they can make it in the city.  They begin almost helpless, ignorant of the ways of the city; they eventually graduate into full membership in the freedom of the city.  If this is true then it makes sense for a zero-sum political party to provide benefits to immigrants in their early years of indigence and ignorance of the ways of the city. And it makes sense for a positive-sum political party to sell the idea of the American Dream, that opportunity is available to all, provided we don't throttle all opportunity with a too-large and too-powerful government that plays favorites and substitutes the judgement of fallible politicians and experts for the daily judgements of the market.

The question is how to balance these two opposing positions: how to give comfort to the helpless beginners struggling to learn life in the city while also providing the environment that allows talent to flourish and businesses to grow without an overweening government that siphons off wealth to reward its supporters.

In other words the challenge is to soften the hard edge of the two positions: one that regards corporations and wealthy producers as freeloaders skimming the profits off the economy; the other that looks at the timid people just learning the ways of the city and branding them as freeloaders and welfare cheats.

That is the challenge for Americans in the waning years of the Obama era.