Liberals! Don't Push Yourselves Off the Cliff!

Conservatives and Republicans, whatever our faults, can point to two decisive domestic policies of the last 30 years that really made a difference. The first was supply-side economics. The second was "broken-window" policing. The first policy ushered in the Reagan Revolution and ignited a twenty year economic boom from 1980 to 2000. The second made New York City livable and cut the murder rates in the Big Apple by over 50 percent.

But liberals seem to have forgotten the lessons of the past. No doubt that is why Republicans are surging to political power everywhere in America except the two left coasts. Here is a lifeline to my liberal friends before they push themselves off the cliff.

Supply-side economics is why Bill Clinton ran as a "new" Democrat to split the difference between the Sixties Left and the Reagan Right. When he betrayed his promise and raised taxes and pushed HillaryCare he got himself a Republican Congress in the 1994 midterms. In 1996 he passed welfare reform in order to win reelection and prove he'd learned his lesson.

"Broken-window" policing was an idea advanced by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in 1982. It was implemented in Boston and New York by Bill Bratton, famously while Rudy Guiliani was mayor of New York City in the 1990s. The idea was to pin-point high crime areas and harass young men that committed minor crimes of vandalism, thus sending a message to the street that disorder would not be tolerated. It was a counter-strategy to the "police brutality" politics of the Sixties and 1970s; police had responded by retreating from the streets and career trouble, and letting crime rage unabated.

If liberals were smart and if they truly believed in science they would have read, learned, and inwardly digested the theory and the evidence. But they didn't, and you can see that by reading the Wikipedia links above. They equivocate; they dance and jive. So if you are a genuine NPR/NYT liberal you don't pay no nevermind to the lessons of supply-side economics and broken-window policing.

But there is a penalty for ignoring reality; you get punched upside the head. The Clinton generation of Dem politicians knew that they had to pay their respects to supply-side economics and pretend they supported the cops even if they didn't believe a word of it. They had to pretend because the "stupid" voters believed it. But then a generation of liberals grew up that knew not Reagan. Call it the Vox generation, after young Ezra Klein's website. They went to college and got their economics straight from Keynes and their politics straight from the left, and so they never got taught that Keynes and cop-baiting was poison for Democrats, quite apart from the fact that they were poison for the economy and for society.

So let's rehearse for our lefty friends why they must take their supply-side and broken-windows medicine if they want to resume the aborted drive for a new Democratic majority. Look, I get that leftist politics is all about benefits and justice for the poor. But you don't get to do it unless you have the economy working and the streets safe.

So let's do the elevator story on economics that every liberal should know.

Supply-side economics The basic thing to grasp is that Keynesian economics is like a relief pitcher for government. It's a get-out-of-a-jam dodge. It says, in the middle of a financial crisis: oh gosh, we can't reduce government benefits while people are unemployed; we can't let our favored corporate friends go bankrupt. So we must keep spending and we must print money. Unfortunately that doesn't get the economy back on track. Supply-side economics says: yes, you must bail out the banks to prevent a credit collapse, but then it's back to hard money. Yes, you don't want the unemployed rioting in the streets, but the way to stimulate the economy is by cleaning out crony subsidies and regulations and taxes and lowering the marginal tax rates on work and investing.

Here's the elevator story on broken-windows policing that every liberal should know.

Broken-windows policing The basic problem of every city since the Industrial Revolution is that you get a strategic concentration of young lower-class males with few skills that tend towards the instincts of all young men down the ages: the dawn raid. Starting in the 1830s with the London Metropolitan Police the response of the middle class to the criminal gang activity of young lower-class urban males has been vigorous policing. The job of British "bobbies" and America "cops" has been to get in the faces of the young thugs and say, like Dirty Harry, Go ahead, make my day. When the cops do this the young thugs retreat and the city becomes safe. When they don't, as in New York City in the 1970s, the young thugs rampage around and make life hell for the poor.

Let us turn to Karl Marx and my copy of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He begins:

Hegel says somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

He means, I assume, that if we don't learn our lesson the first time around, we will be forced to learn it the second time, only this time in the corner wearing a dunce cap.

Supply-side economics was a response to the tragedy of economic "stagflation" in the 1970s. The Keynesians said that they had figured out the business cycle and how to avoid economic reverses. The 1970s proved them wrong, and supply-side economics proved that there was another way, and it worked.

Broken-windows policing was a response to the anti-police politics of the Marcuse Left in the 1960s and the crime wave that followed in the 1970s. It said that, whatever the "root cause" of poverty, there is no alternative to aggressive policing right in the faces of the young lower-class thugs. When implemented in Boston, in New York, in Los Angeles, broken-windows policing worked.

So come on liberals. Stop the madness while you still can. Go with the settled science and stop being deniers about supply-side economics and broken-windows policing.

Freeloaders, Freebooters, Work and Freedom

According to Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct, "Nothing is more corrosive to a group's cohesion than free riders." He is talking about the freeloaders that show up when the goodies are being handed out but are mysteriously absent when there is work to be done.

So all we need to do it to get the government to put the shirkers to work.

Would that were all it took. The problem is that every government relies on a group of freeloaders to serve as its supporters. They could be the temple priests of early Mesopotamian civilization. They could be the great land barons of high feudalism. They could be the patronage appointees of 19th century governments in the US. And every government relies on the soldiers that, while eating their heads off most of the time, are the men that stand ready to defend the borders against the enemy.

Today, of course, the freeloaders are the beneficiaries of government entitlement programs and corporate subsidies. Don't ever mess with their benefits, Mr. Politician, or you'll find yourself defeated at the next election.

In fact every government must keep its supporters happy; otherwise it is not long for this world. So governments are willing to bankrupt the territory they govern rather than cut back on the benefits going to their supporters.

Longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer has an interesting view of this question. In "The Readiness to Work," an essay in The Ordeal of Change, he observes that down the ages work has traditionally been sneered at. It was "viewed as a curse, a mark of bondage, or, at best, a necessary evil." But not in the modern Occident. In the west, the assumption is that people want to work, and the government is not long for this world that fails to provide job opportunities for all that desire them.

In fact, Hoffer writes, a society has two choices. It can deputize the government to set people to work; that is the age-old solution. Or it can deputize the people to find work for themselves; that is the modern approach. Either solution is a heavy burden. In the subordination of a top-down society the worker is stigmatized with the "mark of bondage;" in the freedom of the individualist society the worker is burdened with the responsibility "to prove his worth," and that means, for the average man or woman without exceptional "capacities and talents," merely "keeping busy."

You can see the problem with government. The more that it delivers benefits to its supporters the more it must compel the people to work, for someone must create the wealth that the government distributes to its supporters. We know the end point of this philosophy; it is the 20th century totalitarian state, where everyone is a beneficiary of social justice and everyone is a slave that is put to work under the command of the overseers. The problem with this system is illuminated by the Soviet era Russian joke: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us!"

If government leads to the dead end of universal freeloading and slavery, then, as Lenin said, "What is to be done?"

The answer is: religion. People have to believe in giving rather than receiving; they have to fear divine judgement for their sins. They must be filled with a faith in themselves as individually responsible to their families, their society, their God for their lives.

Government can't do this, for the difference between a robber band and a government is, as St. Augustine wrote, the addition of impunity. Corporations can't do it, because they are strategic actors in pursuit of profit. What it takes is something similar to the "Protestant Ethic" that Max Weber discovered in the "Spirit of Capitalism."

We are talking about a moral/cultural thing that infuses the culture, that sets the taken-for-granted rules by which politicians canvass for votes and CEOs advertise for customers.

That's why people like me say that we need a Greater Separation of Powers to keep the moralists and the politicians from getting together, as in socialism and "progressivism," and the politicians and the capitalists from getting together, as in crony capitalism.

It probably means that we all agree, by faith, that we must and will care for the poor ourselves, individually, and not deputize the responsibility to government.

And as to what would happen if the moralists and the capitalists ever got together, we can only shudder.

Forging the New GOP Majority

The last Big Idea to come along in politics was The Emerging Democratic Majority proposed by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira. Democrats were looking at a generational majority based on minorities, women, the youth and the educated, they wrote.

Well that was ten years ago and now the Congress of the United States is as Republican as it's been since the onset of the Great Depression 85 years ago.

So what went wrong? Let us introduce the idea of Steve Sailer. As far back as 2009 he was calling for rebranding the Democratic Party as the Black Party.

You see, ten years ago the Democrats were the party of the rainbow coalition while everyone knew that the Republican Party was the White Party. So Uncool. Why would Hispanics and Asians want to belong to the Uncool Party?

But suppose, Sailer suggested, that we start to rebrand the Democrats as the Black Party. Then, perhaps, the Hispanics and Asians wouldn't be quite as enthusiastic about voting Democratic. It shouldn't be that hard, starting with the fact that Hispanics think blacks are lazy. That's when they are not actually expelling blacks from their neighborhood.

So it shouldn't be that hard for cunning GOP politicians to turn Hispanics against African Americans with artfully designed dog whistles that inflame already existing prejudice against blacks.

The only question is: Who will bell the cat? Which GOPer would ever have the cojones to do such a thing?

No need! Our post-partisan post-racial President Obama, assisted by Attorney General "Cowards" Holder and Mayor de Blasio are willingly doing the job that no Republican dares to do.

When Obama & Co. decided to amp up their base over the Trayvon Martin killing it turned out that the target of their rage was not a geniune white racist but a "White Hispanic."

When Obama & Co. decided to amp up their base over the police killing of a black gentle giant, it turned out that the gentle giant had just held up a convenience store and menaced an Asian shop assistant.

When Obama & Co. decided to continue their days of rage and organize demonstrations and riots all over the country, the first thing a deranged black activist did was kill two NYPD cops. Yay! But the silly fool didn't kill a couple of white cops. Instead he emptied his gun on two non-white cops, an Asian and a Hispanic, as they sat in their patrol car.

And who are the chaps organizing continuing demonstrations and riots in New York City? It's a coalition of black and Muslim organizations.

In other words, it is the left that is rebranding the Democratic Party as the Black and Muslim Party.

The point is that when the Democrats are in the ascendant, you can call them the majority party of minorities, women, youth, and the educated. But when you blow away the fluff and you put a lefty Obama administration in charge for six years what you get is a party of blacks, feminists, young "activists" and gentry liberals. And that doesn't add up to a majority.

I keep saying that the Republican Party is clueless. It doesn't know how to build a majority. That's because it's not the white party, not the rich party, not the corporate party. It is just the party of the responsible middle class.

You'd think that the clueless party would not be long for this world.  But it has a recruiter that keeps replenishing its ranks. From time the time the Democratic Party throws off part of its coalition and that rejected limb hobbles its way over to the Republican Party. Thirty-five years ago the Dems threw off the Reagan Democrats. Thirty years ago the Dems threw off the fundamentalist Christians. Most recently they threw off the white working class. And maybe next they'll throw off the striver Hispanics and Asians.

A word to the wise among my liberal friends. You guys should really cool the anti-police rhetoric. The whole point of urban policing, starting in London with Sir Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police, is to keep the young single lower-class males under control. That's what the middle class wants, and that what it gets. It got it in 1830 when the threat was Bill Sikes and the Artful Dodger. It got it in New York in the mid 1800s when the threat was the shanty Irish. It got it in the 1990s when the threat was black teenagers.

When you liberals go after the cops you just remind the middle class what the police are for. The police in the modern city are there to protect the middle class from the under-class thugs.

But don't mind me. I'm just an old white guy.

The Three Liberal Conceits

It feels like 9/11, watching the twin towers burning, thinking about "one hour buildings" and wondering what comes next.

I'm talking, of course, about the mid-term elections last November 4. We are looking at the Democratic Party as it trails a black cloud of smoke and we are wondering: could the whole thing come down in a great crash? And if it did come down would it be in that dreadful slow motion descent of the twin towers, or the sub-second dump of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis? One moment it was there, the next moment it was in the river.

Everything is collapsing on the liberals all at once. Their multidecadal war on the private sector, where they want to boss banks and corporations around to help workers get good jobs or to help minorities buy a home, is in ruins, as their confident Keynesian stimulus has failed. Their war on want is a mess as the administrative manipulations of a thousand social programs make dependents out of proud workers.  Their was on global warming is consuming itself in second rate science and third rate politics. Their war on tradition is a mess as the sexual revolution turns into a re-commodification of sex and pathetic attempts to fix it with politics -- like the "rape culture" mania.

There are, I think, Three Conceits at the heart of this liberal meltdown. Let's take them one by one.

First, there is the Economic Conceit, the idea that government can run the economy. There certainly is a need for the government to commandeer the economy in case of all-out war. But the record of the last century is that, absent war, government should keep its cotton-picking hands off. Government shouldn't muck around with monetary policy and the credit system. All it does is institutionalize inflation and play favorites with the credit system. Government shouldn't muck about with corporations vs. labor vs. the consumer. The wreck of the auto companies ought to tell us that. As George McGovern found out when he opened a resort hotel and then went bankrupt, business is incredibly difficult. Politicians shouldn't make it harder.

Secondly, there is the Social Conceit, the idea that government can spread the wealth and alleviate poverty, that government can run the education system and supervise the health care system. No it can't. The education system is dead in the water, and has been for a generation. The reason? It's been captured by the producers who don't give a damn about the consumers, children and parents. The Obamis are in the middle of bollixing up the health care system by leaning on it to serve an additional 30 million people who are reluctant to pay for their own health care. Government just can't do this efficiently and effectively.

Thirdly, there is the Moral Conceit, the idea that government can muck around by legislating morality. Oh yes, liberals believe in legislating morality all right. That's what all the fuss about abortion and gay marriage and the "rape culture" is about. Liberals decided to change, by judicial fiat, the moral rules on babies and marriage. Now everyone wants to use the government to force their moral views on the rest of the nation.

What is going on here? What do liberals not understand?

I think that we need to look at society in a new way. Think of a circle, divided into three sectors. One is the political sector, with the institutions of government at all levels. This is the sector of force. Then there is the economic sector, of businesses and consumers, producing and consuming products and services. This is the sector of stuff. Then there is the moral/cultural sector, with various non-economic institutions, churches, schools, charities, foundations, and voluntary associations. The point about these institutions is that they are not immediately economic. They have moral or social goals, not economic goals. This is the sector of faith.

The big mistake that liberals have made, as reflected in the Three Conceits, is that the political sector can supervise and co-opt the other two sectors. It can't. The political sector is the sector of force, and force is the only thing it knows. When you do force in the economic sector you get serfdom. When you do force in the moral/cultural sector you get a clash of faith, a religious war, and even a religious civil war. The three sectors need to be separate and equal in a Greater Separation of Powers. None should dominate another sector, and no two should gang up on the third.

This is all very well, but there is something missing. It is people. It one thing to understand the relationships of the institutions in society, it is another thing to figure out the people.

The people, I believe are a circle in the middle. Call it the personal sector. The personal sector is the face-to-face sector, where people deal with each other verbally. It is the sector of trust.

The whole universe of society is a question of trust, but trust is only possible between face-to-face people. Without people in the middle you have nothing but force, the mechanical interactions on inanimate objects rather than the personal relationships of trust.

So when we say that the three sectors should be separate and coequal, and kept so by a Greater Separation of Powers, we understand also that this social compact is made possible by the folks in the middle, in the personal sector. These people in the middle act in face-to-face relationship with other people and it is the trust that they develop over time that creates the delicate balance between the sectors.

It is people representing institutions in the economic sector that link with people representing institutions in the moral/cultural sector and put material content into moral concern. It is people representing institutions in the moral/cultural sector linking with people representing institutions in the political sector that define the boundary where moral disapproval turns into legal restraint. It is people representing institutions in the economic sector linking with people representing institutions in the political and moral/cultural sectors that define the boundaries where a bad deal turns into a fraudulent deal.

In this Christmas season, let us not forget that our liberal friends are good people. But they were tempted by vanity, and vanity turned into conceit. And now conceit is turning into humiliation.

Let's cut the political sector down to size and reanimate the spirit of trust that turns adversaries into friends.

Georg Simmel: Wrapup

Georg Simmel was a German sociologist and contemporary of Max Weber, also a German sociologist. But his work is independent of Weber and clearly not "influenced" by Weber like 20th century sociologists.

So Simmel is clearly a 19th century voice, commenting on the world that the 19th century created. But his great virtue is that he doesn't have a political ax to grind, like Marx and the Fabians. He doesn't regard social hierarchy as prima facie as scandal. Nor does he descant on the horrors of objectification as the Marxists do with "reification" and "commodification."

So let's review Simmel's ideas, as developed in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff.

Groups and Lowest Common Denominator. People are at their best as individuals, at their worst in a group. That's because a group must define itself by what the members have in common.

Sociability as Play. We tend to think of pure sociability as "superficial" and we sneer at the professional hostess. But sociability is sociation as play, and play is how humans learn things. So maybe sociability is how humans learn to be social.

18th and 19th Century Freedom. Simmel describes the 18th century idea of freedom as the idea of "freedom in general" and the 19th century idea of freedom as the freedom to be different. The thing is that freedom, any freedom, immediately permits the strong to exploit the weak and the clever to outpace the stupid.  We used to worry about aristocratic privilege; now we worry about economic inequality.

The Sociology of Small Numbers. Simmel starts with the isolated individual, then moves to the "dyad" of two people -- friends, business partners and married man and wife -- and the "triad" of three people where the question usually involves various two-against-one scenarios.

Numbers and Groups. Once you get beyond the sociation of the kindred you see numbers appearing, particularly in the notion of the "Hundred," a subdivision used in Anglo-Saxon England and elsewhere.

Subordination. However we may long for freedom and equality, social relations almost always means the domination of one person by another. Simmel looks at three kinds of social domination: subordination under a monarch, under a plurality, and under a principle. He makes the important point that we humans are very seldom held under complete coercive domination. It's just that, most of the time, we judge the price of freedom too high to take advantage of it.

The Secret. One of the most important qualities of social life is that we don't tell everything to the other people we know.  We hold back, and not just the guilty secrets. In fact discretion and privacy are a vital part of social life. It starts with the fact that we cannot know what another person is thinking.

Faithfulness and Gratitude. They are both pretty important as the social glue that goes beyond the mere performance of promises.

Objectivity in Modern Life. Marx makes a scandal out of "reification" and the way that production for use becomes production for exchange. But Simmel shows that objectification is inevitable as society develops from face-to-face relationships to the global exchange economy. We naturally treat objects like money and products as if they have a life of their own. We do it because it works.

The Stress of Modern Life. The "intensification of nervous stimulation" is the defining aspect of life in the city. It provokes everyone to cooperate with the rest of society yet also work hard at individuating from the mass. Modern life is a constant battle between "individual independence and the elaboration of individuality itself". It is the conflict between the 18th century "general human being" and the 19th century "qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability." We want to be equal to our fellows, and we want to be special as well.

Back to the beginning: The Unknown Sociologist.

Georg Simmel: The Metropolis and Mental Life

Back in the old days primitive man fought like mad just to provide for his bodily existence, writes Georg Simmel in George Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff. But now modern man must take arm against a sea of troubles "to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life."

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

The 18th century commanded each individual to take arm against the old hierarchies in state and religion and economics; the 19th century commanded us to seek "functional specialization" in our work and compare ourselves with others. Nietzsche saw life as a ruthless struggle between individuals; socialism saw the complete suppression of all competition.

[I]n all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists to being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism.

What we have, in the metropolis, is "the intensification of nervous stimulation... and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions." It requires an intellectual response to life different than the tenor of rural life "which rests more upon deeply felt and emotional relationships."

This intellectuality is symbolized by the money economy. In the exchange economy of the metropolis everything "is reckoned with as a number."

Money is concerned only with what is common to all: it asks for the exchange value, it reduces all quality and quantity to the question: How much?

 In rural affairs, producer and consumer are acquainted.

The modern metropolis, however, is supplied almost entirely by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter the producer's actual field of vision.

The calculating nature of metropolitan life tends "to transform the world into an arithmetic problem" even to the necessity of promptness and "the punctual integration of all activities and mutual relationships into a stable and impersonal time schedule."

These traits must also color the contents of life and favor the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive, sovereign trains and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within, instead of receiving the general and precisely schematized form of life from without.

It is precisely this that thinkers like Nietzsche and Ruskin hated.

The neverending stimulation of metropolitan life has provoked a defense mechanism, the "blasé attitude," which deals with stimulation by refusing to react to the turmoil and intensification of experience of the urban experience. Thus, to the eyes of "small town people", the city dwellers seem "cold and heartless."

Against this is the fact that the metropolis "grants to the individual a kind and an amount of personal freedom which has no analogy whatsoever under other conditions." Small-town life sets up external and internal barriers against individual independence and expression that can only be overcome in the larger stage of the metropolis, its division of labor, and its geometrical expansion of horizons.

The objectivating spirit of the metropolis has yielded up amazing advances "in things and in knowledge, in institutions and in comforts" but also a "retrogression" of the spirit. This provokes some to extremes of individuality, "summoning the utmost in uniqueness and particularization, in order to preserve his most personal core... to exaggerate this personal element in order to remain audible even to himself."

Thus the metropolis provokes both "individual independence and the elaboration of individuality itself". There is a conflict between these two, the 18th century "general human being" and the 19th century "qualitative uniqueness and irreplaceability."

The external and internal history of our time takes its course within the struggle and in the changing entanglements of these two ways of defining the individual's role in the whole of society. It is the function of the metropolis to provide the arena for this struggle and its reconciliation.

Next: Wrapup. 

Georg Simmel: The Stranger

By the notion of "The Stranger" we are not talking about the person who is here in the community today and gone tomorrow. We are talking, according to George Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff, about "the person who comes today and stays tomorrow."

[H]is position in the group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself.

We are not talking about people living on another planet; we are talking about people living in the community who are not quite of it. The stranger's relation to the community "involves both being outside it and confronting it."

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

The archetypal stranger is the trader, for he brings "products that originate outside the group" and probably lives outside it. Because trade sees opportunities that the local person does not, it is suitable for the stranger and suitable for a group like the European Jews, and the stranger is typically not "an owner of soil." This status alone makes him a stranger.

His activity in intermediary trade and finance also evokes mobility, one who comes in contact with many individuals and becomes less "organically connected" with "kin, locality, and occupation". This mobility and extensive contact also creates objectivity, for "the objective individual is bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given." This objectivity, and standing apart, is often abused by persons wishing to blame someone for an uprising or other social disaster.

We relate to the stranger through general features such as nation, occupation. But with our intimates with more specific qualities. This is notable in erotic relationships, where "lovers think that there has never been a love like theirs". But estrangement "usually comes where this uniqueness vanishes from the relationship."

The peculiar situation of the stranger is illustrated by the medieval Beede in German cities. For the Christian this tax "changed with the changes in his fortune" while for the Jew it was fixed as a head tax. Locals were treated as individuals; strangers were all alike.

The stranger is a member of the community; yet he is held at a distance. There is in the stranger a peculiar tension between "nearness and distance."

Next: The Metropolis and Mental Life.