Casualties in the Left's Gender Politics

I was a little disappointed in Joni Ernst. In her response to retiring Sen. Tom Harkin's (D-IA) remarks about her as "attractive" she played a straight base hit, staying precisely on message, saying that she was "offended" by his remarks.

And she got the chance to note on Fox & Friends that, if a Republican had said something like that, there would have been hell to pay.

And in fact when conservative radio host Dennis Prager poured scorn on the left's current rape-on-campus campaign the lefty blogosphere went incandescent with rage. How dare he make light of the claim that one in five college women experience sexual harassment!

What's going on, says Prager, is the Democrats trying to gin up division.

"On issue after issue, these are manufactured divisions: the black-white division, the male-female division, and the old-young division. These are all manufactured. There is no 'war on women.' It's absurd. It is just an absurdity. It is a lie. It's a gargantuan lie to get votes. It's as big a lie as 'culture of rape' on your campuses. What nonsense. There is a 'culture of rape' on campuses run by the feminist left? Why are you trying to sell me this nonsense?

The germ of truth in the left's campaign is that, of course the "hook-up" culture is demeaning to women. In fact I remember Dennis Prager interviewing a group of college girls on his radio show a few years ago. What they missed was romance and courting.

Now, how could romance and courting have disappeared from the life of young people? Why, because of the left's sexual revolution, that's how! Now we are seeing the "unanticipated consequences" destroying the old culture of courting leading to marriage. And now the foolish virgins of the feminist establishment are trying a government band-aid to heal the sucking wounds of young women in the meat market of today's college scene. See Tom Wolfe, as usual, in I am Charlotte Simmons.

But back to Joni Ernst, U.S Senate candidate in Iowa. I wish she should have made light of it. I wish she could have been sarcastic.

I wish she could have said something like: "I don't believe that a Democrat could have said that! Because everyone knows that only Republican men are capable of sexist remarks. Surely an ur-liberal like Tom Harkin could never have said that. Tell me it ain't so!"

Or she might have said: "Earth to Tom Harkin: most politicians need to be physically attractive to get elected. Humans like physical beauty and they like it in their leaders. I expect that, back in the day, even the young Tom Harkin was known for his good looks."

But, of course, she can't say intelligent stuff like that. Because running for office is a deadly serious business and you cannot go off-script, not even for a moment.

The reason we got Tom Harkin saying stupid stuff is that he's about to retire. He doesn't have to worry about staying on-message all the time. He's outa there.

Pity that he couldn't keep his mouth shut to help his fellow Democrat accede to his seat in the United States Senate.

But who ever imagined that a career politician like Tom Harkin cared about people like Bruce Braley?

Dems Dig Their Political Grave

The big problem with the Obama administration is its foolish way of doing things in backrooms. The problem is that the Obamis never manufacture a political consensus for their policies.

There is a word for this kind of politics. It is "chickens**t."

As I keep saying, politics is division. There's a problem with division.  The more you divide the more you provoke people into fighting each other. Eventually it could end up as civil war. That's why I paraphrase Clausewitz and say that "politics is civil war by other means."

That's why I have a problem with the idea of the "permanent campaign" proposed by Jimmy Carter's pollster, Pat Caddell, after Carter's presidential win in 1976. Sidney Blumenthal renewed the idea in 1980. You remember him; he was a hit man for the Clintons.

If you have a permanent campaign it means you are permanently dividing people. You are permanently getting people mad at each other. What would that mean in practice?  Exactly: civil war.

The art of governance, on the other hand, is to take a divisive issue and solve it by creating the notion of a "consensus" and trying to give everyone something to take home. As Noam Chomsky says: manufacturing consent. He's sneering at the idea, but that's what politicians do when they get home from winning the election. That is why presidents are famous for calling congressmen and "arm-twisting" them. The idea is to get a super-majority in favor of the president's program and end up with a bipartisan signing statement at the White House.

Yes. How did Ronald Reagan pass his program in 1981, including defense budget increases, tax cuts, and domestic spending cuts? How did he do it with a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives? And how did he manage a tax reform act in 1986 with the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski?

The answer is that Ronald Reagan didn't spend most of his two terms bad-mouthing the opposition. He put out the idea that he and Speaker Tip O'Neill could battle all day on politics, but they could still share a joke after work was done. (Actually the two didn't like each other).

But that was back in the day before average lefty minds had been hopelessly infected with tropes from Herbert Marcuse and Saul Alinsky. Today young lefty heads full of mush think that "activism" and getting in peoples' faces is the alpha and the omega of politics.

Now we are hearing that President Obama plans to introduce his immigration amnesty plan as an executive action after the election. And it sounds like his people are thinking up ways to get in the faces of the Republicans and make them look bad and provoke big clashes over the budget.

Maybe so. A lot depends on whether the Republicans win the close ones or lose them in the Nov 4 election. But I'd recommend that the president ease up on the executive action and the budget crises.

The job of the president is to play the hand that's dealt him and do the best he can for his country. He and his party don't seem to understand that the permanent campaign is not a sure thing that is bound to benefit the president's party. It could just as easily stir up a rebellion.

Remember Winston Churchill? He recommended: in victory magnanimity; in defeat defiance.

I wonder what he meant by that, Barack.

Three Big Things We Must Do

Let's face it: the Democrats are tapped out. Back in 2008 they thought they were going to roar to a generational dynasty. Their Obamacare would give everyone affordable health care; their Keynesian stimulus would bring the economy back, and their green energy program would heal the world.

In fact Obamacare has been a experimental verification of Hayek and Buchanan: big government bureaucrats cannot organize the economy. Stimulus has been yet another proof that Keynes is all wet. And the death of fossil fuel has been greatly exaggerated. And has for wind and solar, words fail me.

That's why Democrats are reduced to beating their base voters to the polls with wars on women and returns to Jim Crow. And I thought the cowskin whip went out with slavery.

It's not just the big things where liberal are wrong; it's the little things too, as Kate Bachelder writes in the Wall Street Journal, listing "The Top 10 Liberal Superstitions."

1. More money helps education
2. Government spending stimulates the economy
3. GOP candidates have more money than Dems
4. Raising minimum wage helps the poor
5. Global warming causes violent weather
6. GM food is dangerous
7. Voter ID laws are racist
8. Obamacare is gaining popularity
9. Keystone XL pipeline will cause oil spills
10. Women are paid 77 cents on the dollar

But never mind all that. What should Republicans do if they get into power in 2014 and 2016? What three big things? Here's my agenda.

Get out of QE and ZIRP. That's the Fed's "quantitative easing" and its "zero interest rate policy." I don't know exactly how we are going to do this without another recession, but it is essential to get back to a "normal" economy. That means normal interest rates, declining debt as percent of GDP, and an end to the subsidy for home mortgages with Fannie and Freddie.

Fix the economy. I'd say that a tax reform package to balance rate cuts with tax loophole elimination would be a start. Then a redo of the hyper-regulation in Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank. Then an end to green energy subsidies and frack, baby, frack.

Redo Obamacare. I'd say the thing to do is to turn the subsidies on the Obamacare exchanges into "mini-med" plans that subsidize routine health care for the working poor. Since the working poor don't have assets they don't need catastrophic insurance coverage, because they can just declare bankruptcy. For the rest of us, just clear out all the mad mandates and regulations and let us buy the insurance coverage that makes sense. For a real stretch, slowly remove the tax deductibility of corporate health plans so that corporations push health care onto their employees who then have an interest in getting the best bang for the buck.

I'm in the middle of reading Charles Murray's In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State. His idea is to replace all social programs, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, student loans, housing subsidies (but not K-12 education) with a simple $10,000 per year grant paid to each American over 21 for as long as they live. Of this, $3,000 would be a lifelong health insurance plan. He thinks it would encourage the poor to work (because they wouldn't be facing their current 50% plus marginal tax rate) and also encourage the poor to marry (because there wouldn't be an advantage to single-motherhood). It's pretty intriguing, but it's clearly a "nuclear option" that looks like pie in the sky. At least for now. Here's The Atlantic saying it won't work 'cos the numbers don't add up.

Never mind about the nuclear option. What we can do is make a start: on the Fed, on growth and energy, and Obamacare. Let's do it.

How Does Hume Separate Sense Impressions and Hallucinations?

Back in 1839, philosopher David Hume couldn't hold back any longer, so he sallied forth, at the grand old age of eighteen, to write his Treatise of Human Nature. Why not? The Scots are notoriously dour and flinty, and certainly exposed at a young age to the reality of a long winter, so a young lad raised on haggis and mutton ought to have a clear and unclouded mind uninflamed by the fripperies of London and its Sassenach coffee-houses.

He starts out, as any philosopher must, by clearing the ground. In young David's case, he tells us the difference between "impression" and "idea." The difference between the two, he writes, consists in the "degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness."

There should be no problem in discriminating between the two, he writes, even though "in sleep, in a fever, in madness... our ideas may approach our impressions."

Oh yeah?  Just how then do we do it? How close can an hallucination approach us in force and vivacity before we dignify it with the rank of "impression?" Other than the classic professorial put-down that it's obvious?

In fact, of course, scholars and wrangled about this forever, because it's a rather glaring aporia (that's Greek for no way through) in Hume's system.

Here's one chappie's effort. He says that there's a difference between a representation and an actual presentation, or experience. You can have an idea of the Acropolis, but until you've actually been there and seen it --  well, it's just a hallucination.

Hume himself deals with the problem later in Book One of the Treatise. Sure, he says, a "lively imagination very often degenerates into madness or folly" as does any "chimera of the brain." But you and I are able to differentiate such phantasms and similar poetical effusions. The fact is that we can tell the difference between the fiction and the real, he asserts.

Well yes. That's the definition of sanity, I reckon. You can tell the difference between the voices in your head, however forceful and vivacious, and the relentless reality out there in the world that eventually turns our hair gray. Anything else is madness.

The "Election About Nothing"

The chaps at the Weekly Standard have caught the Democratic operatives with bylines up to their old tricks. They've all decided, all on their little lonesomes, that the 2014 midterms are "the election about nothing." Stephen Hayes:

The Washington Post may have been first in declaring the coming midterms “kind of—and apologies to Seinfeld here—an election about nothing.” But the Daily Beast chimed in: “America seems resigned to a Seinfeld election in 2014—a campaign about nothing.” And New York magazine noted (and embraced) the cliché: The midterm election “has managed to earn a nickname from the political press: the ‘Seinfeld Election,’ an election about nothing.”

Soon enough this description was popping up everywhere—the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Bloomberg, Politico, and many others. The 2014 Midterms, the Seinfeld Election.

On top of that, the network newscasts have barely mentioned the midterms. I wonder why?

Of course, the MSM have a point. It seems that the GOP establishment has chosen not to "nationalize" the midterm election. Probably that's because last time they tried it, by impeaching President Clinton in 1998, it boomeranged on them, ending up mobilizing the Democrats to get out to vote rather than the Republicans.

And there's one other tiny little point. If the Republicans ran against President Obama the whole corps of Democratic operatives with bylines would be crying "Raacism."

It's easy for Democrats to "run on something" because the MSM automatically falls in line and echoes their talking points. But when Republicans say anything you get the "but critics say" graf to neutralize their talking points.  The MSM blows smoke and confuses the issue. Sharyl Attkisson tells it like it is about agenda-driven journalism:

“We do stories on food stamps, but only to the extent that we prove the cast that they’re needed, without also examining well-established fraud and abuse. We look at unemployment but only to the extent that we present sympathetic characters showing that benefits should be extended rather than examining, also, the escalating cost and instances of fraud. We cover minimum wage but only to the extent that we help make the case for raising it, without giving much due to the other side, which argued it will have the opposite effect than intended.”

The only time that the GOP gets to tell its story is in a presidential campaign, and even then it's not easy. Ronald Reagan did it, and everybody said he was a fool.

Now it looks like Ted Cruz is planning to run a presidential campaign that will try to change the narrative. Here he is speaking to the Values Voter Summit. A couple of days ago he wrote an op-ed commemorating Ronald Reagan's "Time for Choosing" speech in 1964. Can he do it? Can he blast through the liberal counterblast that is already teaching Americans to think of him as a loose cannon? Can he frame a new conservative narrative that will win a presidential election?

That's the conservative challenge. It's not whether the midterm is about something or nothing. It's whether the next GOP presidential nominee can articulate a conservative narrative that will create a mandate for change.

And I don't mean change as in more government programs, but change as in pruning government back.

And don't forget, even the great Ronald Reagan didn't do much pruning back, and what he did was done under the radar in the intricacies of the budget process.

I'd say that the job of the next Republican Congress, if we get one next week, is to "work with" the president to help the American people. And, as difficult as the president may be, the Republican leaders should never get angry.

They should merely shake their heads, more in sorrow than in anger, and wonder aloud just what it is that the president wants for this country.

While they lay the groundwork for real reform in 2017.

Big Government and Big Business: What They Leave Out

In the middle of the 19th century, when sensitive souls first noticed the industrial revolution, they all agreed that the solution to the Moloch of bourgeois capitalism was more government.

And they had a point, for it looked as though the capitalists would rule the world. It took another 50 years to demonstrate that capitalists weren't much interested in power. After building their businesses, they turned to philanthropy, eradicating hookworm in the South and building universities and medical research insititutes and peace foundations.

But by then the momentum towards big government was irreversible, and so big government is what we got.

The trouble with government, all government, is that it is just an armed minority occupying territory and taxing its people, and it stays in power by rewarding its supporters with pensions and subsidies. It really doesn't give a damn about the rest of the people, the ones that don't support it. In fact it typically brands them as dangerous radicals and extremists.

The other little problem with government arises out of its nature as an "armed minority." It is organized for warfare, whether warfare against foreign enemies or domestic enemies. To government everything looks like a war to fight, because to a hammer everything looks like a nail. Republicans, over the years, have preferred foreign wars, but Democrats have concentrated upon domestic wars: against poverty, against pollution, against the rich, against fundamentalists, against the Koch Brothers. And there's one very tricky problem with government. Like an army, it is organized to pursue victory at all costs; it does not demonstrate the flexibility needed to navigate a complex world. It is very difficult for government to change its mind, on entitlements, on dietary fat, on health care, on education, on anything.

Now the other great modern invention, capitalism, is different, but similar. It ceaselessly roams the world looking for business opportunities, and when it finds them it turns things upside down. We talk easily about buggy-whip makers, but the truth is that business is putting people out of business and workers out of jobs all the time. Joseph Schumpeter called it "creative destruction" and people on the receiving end of creative destruction don't like it at all.

But there is another thing about business that people don't like. It is a certain blindness to people that aren't in the swim, that aren't one of us. The Venetians and the Genoese ran a pretty good trading system bringing goods from the East to Europe. But they also did a nice little trade in slaves: Circassian girls for the harems of Arabia, and young men for the slave armies of the Mamluks. Then, of course, it was Venice that invented the western sugar plantation, starting with Muslim slaves on Cyprus and then expanding westward across the Atlantic using slaves from Africa. Nobody seemed to have a problem with that, from the 13th century to the 18th century.

The Frankfurt School and Jürgen Habermas explain why both government and business can be so blind to other people, and use them up like resources rather than treat them like fellow humans. The problem is that both government and business are "systems" based on the application of instrumental reason, in which people act strategically. In government the strategic aim is to increase raw power over people and minds. In business the strategic aim is to increase power in the market, wealth and profits.

The solution is not hard to find. It is do develop the moral and cultural consensus that government's power over people should be limited, and that business's "creative destruction" should not destroy people.

This means that we have to look into the very foundation of our modern world and its worship of reason, for, as Horkheimer and Adorno wrote in the 1940s, we use reason to dominate nature and other men, for "What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men."

Now the point about human society and humans as social animals is that within the bounds of society we do not use pure reason and domination to force our way. We abjure force and resort to communication and cooperation. If we disagree about means and ends we talk with each other to try to discover a way that we can compromise our objectives so that everyone gets something out of the compromise. We set limits on what can be done to other people, the limits on treating them as means to an end. We think a little about other peoples' needs as well as our own needs. We "care" about other people, and we share in their suffering, through "com-passion" rather than merely obsess on our own problems and needs.

What is this thing that can moderate the strategic impulse of instrumental reason and its systems? It is, of course, everything, from friendship to kindness, to neighborhood groups to churches to charities to love. As Kant said, it is treating people as ends in themselves rather than means.

The question is, of course, how? In our society of vast instrumental forces from government to business to political movements, how do we dial back the relentless strategic drive for power and substitute communicative dialog and friendship?

That is indeed the question.

Hoarders and Wreckers: How Socialism Ends

I like to compare political party supporters to soldiers in an army. That's because I experience that government is always about war.

It's not that hard. Governments fight foreign wars -- or at least border wars; that's just what they do. So the war is always about forcing the neighbor state to recognize the borders, or to submit to the adjustment of the borders in favor of our side. Governments also fight domestic wars. They descend on the productive sector and force it to cough up revenues, because social justice. These revenues are then distributed among the government's supporters.

Yes, of course these monies do wonders by helping the poor and educating our children. But stripped of "narrative" we are talking about taking money from the "other" and giving it to people that vote for our side.

Take Obamacare. Recent polls show that Democratic supporters say that they have benefited from Obamacare; Republicans say they have not. Here's Byron York on a recent Gallup Poll:

Looking just at those who said they have been affected by Obamacare, 27 percent of Democrats said they had been helped, while 15 percent said they had been hurt. 

Well, that's the way it's supposed to be! That's what Democrats vote for. But the rest of the nation isn't so happy:

Among independents, the numbers were almost the opposite: 16 percent said they had been helped, while 27 percent said they had been hurt. And among Republicans, just 4 percent said they had been helped, while 40 percent said they had been hurt.

I'll bet you wouldn't see numbers like that on Social Security and Medicare. That's the problem with them. Even though they are going to bankrupt the nation people still support them because they want to continue to get their checks from the government.

Here's my point. Once you sign on to the government's entitlements you are hooked. Everyone in America is hooked on Social Security and Medicare because almost everyone would take a hit if they were wound up and reformed into real savings programs.

But things are much worse for the average rank-and-file Democrat. Scratch a Democrat and you'll likely find someone with a government job. Or on welfare. Or getting some crony subsidy from a Pentagon contract or a crony green subsidy or a climate-change research grant. So if you try to cut any government program an angry wail will go up from the Democrat rank-and-file and the gentry liberals.

The result? Democrat politicians absolutely refuse to cut spending, calling it "austerity," and Republicans are hesitant to cut spending because the cuts will energize the Democratic opposition and may cost them their seats.

So the government stumbles on, trying to square the circle and appear to fix things, or fix things indirectly so that people don't notice.

The end game is what we see in Venezuela. From Instapundit:

SOCIALISM ALWAYS ENDS THE SAME WAY: Venezuela seizes warehouses packed with medical goods, food. It always starts with hope, change and social justice, and it ends with assaults on the “hoarders and wreckers.”

Think of the Venezuelan government as an army. It is marching to final victory over social injustice. But on the way it must keep its soldiers fed and content. It does this, like any army, by requisitions. It starts with taxes and nationalization of the oil business and continues with minor expropriations of unpopular corporations.

Then it gets into inflation and price controls and rationing.

Now the thing about a real army in a real war is that the generals know they need to get the war over as soon as possible, because the army takes resources away from the productive sector to feed its war machine. At some point the army exhausts the economy with its requisitions. At some point there is no more money. If you are in the predatory war business you want to get the war over, disband the army, and get the people back to normal productive work.

The progressive political army can never so this. It must keep upping the ante to keep its supporters happy. It eats its seed corn because the more that it extracts from the economy to give to its supporters the less is left to the businesses in the economy to make products and services and create jobs. But it can never tell its supporters to ease off on their demands, because the basis of its support is the hand-outs to its supporters.

So it all ends in an economic collapse and default with the government screaming at "hoarders and wreckers." The poor lose their benefits and their jobs, if any, and the widows and orphans lose their government bonds. Inflation destroys the savings and the wages of the middle class. Only the rich, who own real or productive assets, are left with anything, and if they have any sense they get the hell out before the government thugs come and expropriate their wealth.

The solution? Keep the government out of everything that isn't related to genuine war needs: defending against foreign enemies and domestic criminals. Because the human appetite for free stuff is unlimited.

And don't get seduced by William James and his "Moral Equivalent of War." That's the problem. Our progressive overlords are into moral equivalents of war on everything from saving our kids to saving the planet. But the failure of government education and green energy will not make them sadder and wiser. They will just think up something else. Because if we can go to the moon...