Moynihan: "Programs are for People"

At the end of a "balanced" article about the programs of 1965, Medicare, Medicaid and SSDI, and how they are eating the federal budget, Charles Lane in The Wasthington Post quotes Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1970:

Programs are for people, not for bureaucracies.

"Tell that to the IRS," says a commenter. And that's the truth. You start a government program, and the bureaucrats will eventually eat it for lunch. Charles Dickens knew that a century before the Great Society when he put the government's Circumlocution Office and its bureaucrats, the Barnacles and the Stiltstockings, into his novel Little Dorrit. The motto of the Circumlocution Office, Dickens wrote, was "How not to do it."

In the US we talk about the "iron triangle" of Congress, bureaucracy, and interest groups. But really the problem is We the People. All governments run on the principle of handing out free stuff to their supporters, and our government is no exception. The iron triangle is jusst the way we do it in America.

So the words of the young policy intellectual Pat Moynihan are baloney. Programs are for the government's supporters, Pat, old chap, and that includes the bureaucrats and their pensions. Forget the bloody people.

In the end, of course, The People realize they've been had, although they usually don't really figure out why. That's what the Tea Party was all about.

When you are an immigrant to the city you want free stuff in the form of free education, Social Security, welfare, health care, and housing allowances. And you vote Democrat.

But when you have learned to thrive in the city then free stuff looks a bit different. The Tea Party chaps wanted to cut government and screw the bailouts, but they certainly reckoned they'd paid for their middle-class entitlements in full, and deserved to get them paid out in full. And the Tea Partiers vote Republican.

Meanwhile what about the bailouts to bankers and auto companies?

We can't really do anything about the government spending crisis until the great mass of people rebel against the middle-class entitlements. And maybe they never will. They'd have to be a chap like me, and say look, cash me out, pay me the present value of my Social Security benefits that I've already paid for in a special issue of US Treasury Bonds, and then leave me alone.

But you can see that an ordinary big-company employee that likes her big-company pension and benefits isn't going to vote for a solution like that. That's because, for all we talk about freedom, we mostly want to tuck ourselves up in a life-time job with pensions and benefits. We'll only give it up when they take it out of our cold dead hands.

But there is hope. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is now Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which means he's the most powerful man in the House, after the leadership. And Paul Ryan has plans for the middle-class entitlements.

Even the liberal VOX website run by young Ezra Klein recognizes that it's a big deal that Ryan is Chairman of House Ways and Means and that he has decided not to run for president. They remind us that it is Congress that passes the laws, and that Ryan has been defining the agenda of the Republican Party for the past few years from his perch as Chairman of the House Budget Committee.

On the Budget Committee you can set an agenda but you can't enact it. On the House Ways and Means you can, especially with a Republican President and a Republican Senate.

What Rep. Ryan needs to persuade us, if he wants to reform entitlements, is that "programs are for people" is a crock. Government is force, and politics is civil war by other means. The only thing that government knows how to do is to go to war. It may go to war on poverty, as LBJ did in the Sixties, or on Islamists, or as with the Obama Justice Department, on gun dealers. But it's always a war.

Only one problem with governments and their wars. We humans are social animals. Within our communities we are supposed to be about cooperation, not force.

If we want to make America great again then we must hand the government programs over to the people and put the people to work on them. You'll be amazed at the difference.

The Story So Far, from Juergen Habermas

There I was, chuntering along happily reading Between Facts and Norms by German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas, when I came to a dead stop.

"Excursus!" said Jugi.

And then he proceeded to tell the "story so far" according to Jürgen Habermas, the narrative of how we advanced lefty westerners got to where we are from where we were. So let's take a look at "3.1.3 Excursus." We might learn something.

Our modern society is based on the "two ideas of human rights and popular sovereignty." Under the notion of natural law that comes down to us from Aristotle through St. Thomas Aquinas, these two ideas are just given, because "tradition and settled ethical conventions."

But under the process that Habermas calls "the rationalization of the lifeworld" these received notions have "come under the pressure of reflection." In Aristotle "ethics" requires only analysis; it amounts to "exemplary instructions on the virtuous life and recommended models of the good life". But with the modern era, with confessional self-examinations from people like Rousseau, Kierkegaard, and Sartre

one finds a increasingly pronounced, abstract demand for a conscious, self-critical appropriation, the demand that one responsibly take possession of one's own individual, irreplaceable, and contingent life.

In other words, the modern does not just pick up a set of life rules; he must ponder over these things in his heart, like the Virgin Mary.

Another thing is that self-understanding today issues not just from "religious and metaphysical self-interpretations" but from history and from the stories of nations. But even dogmatic national narratives are disintegrating, and so "ethical-political discourses that reach into the depths have become both possible and unavoidable" not just for individuals but for societies.

But how is this discourse into moral and political questions to be done without "the backing of religious or metaphysical world-views that are immune to criticism"? Answer: they can only be conducted in "rational discourse... from the reflexive forms of communicative action itself."

Which is what Jugi wrote The Theory of Communicative Action to define: discourse that was discourse, not domination.

What on earth does all that mean? Well, for Habermas, as I describe it in "A Critique of Social Mechanics," we

live in a community immersed in a cultural tradition, a lifeworld that “appears as a reservoir of taken-for-granteds, of unshaken convictions that participants in communication draw upon in cooperative processes of interpretations” that is “always already” familiar. 

When we talk about the "rationalization of the lifeworld" we are talking about people bringing the "always already" familiar into question. It is this process that brought the modern individualist agenda to dominance: self-expression, freedom, economic opportunity; and also the social agenda: utopias of solidarity, a society that operates in the interests of all and distributes social wealth justly. Today, the lifeworld of the always already familiar is different from the lifeworld of 200 years ago, and it was the "rational discourse" that changed it.

But with the world "robbed of its sacred foundation" of the taken-for-granted the legal system must bear a bigger burden of "fulfilling the integrative functions for society as a whole." Law cannot just be a world, a self-satisfied system unto itself; it must blend with modern ideas of justice and solidarity and the self-conscious life -- post Rousseau, post Kierkegaard -- of personal responsibility.

That is a big challenge, and that is why Jugi wrote his book.

A Proper Government Cannot Allow "No Go" Areas

One of the little factoids that has popped up to my attention in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings is the existence of the French "Zones urbaines sensibles" -- or "no go" areas, where the police don't go to enforce the law of the land.

Sorry, Charlie, but that won't wash. Let us inquire of the political philosopher, Norman Tebbit, once minister under Margaret Thatcher in Britain. Says he:

A state must have a territory over which it is sovereign, and a people who owe it allegiance.  It must have the capacity (and the will) to defend its territorial boundaries and its people from aggressors. It must provide not only external but internal security, allowing its citizens to go about their lawful business freely, and criminal and civil justice systems as well as a currency and the regulatory and legislative infrastructure needed for agriculture, industry and trade.

That's in the first chapter of my magisterial American Manifesto; it is called "Government and the Technology of Power." Notice the key words: "territory over which it is sovereign." That means no "no-go" zones.  Did you know that in 2006, according to Daniel Pipes, there were 751 "no-go" zones in France?

Of course, one of the points of "The Technology of Power" is that most of what government does these days has nothing to do with these basic jobs. But after a while I talk about proto-states, like the territory controlled by an insurgent group, or the Red Base in southern China occupied in the 1930s by Mao ZeDong and Zhou Enlai. These proto-states operate exactly like a real state. They tax, they spend, they draft soldiers, and defend their territory from other states. Go on, read about it.

There are, of course, no-go zones in the United States. I am thinking about criminal gangs and South Chicago, where businesses pay protection money to the gangs, and the writ of the police is weak.

After the disaster of urban crime in the 1970s, conservatives decided to come up with a solution to urban crime. That's what "broken windows" policing is all about. It is about prosecuting criminal activity even in the most pathetic inner-city ghetto, and its technology, CompStat, is a system to measure how well the cops are doing, individually and collectively in suppressing criminal activity. That, of course, is what President Obama and Attorney General Holder have been attacking in Seattle and other cities across the US. Only it looks like the assassination of two NYPD cops recently might have put their cunning plan on hold.

I've had a bit of an epiphany in the last two weeks that relates to all this. No, not from the cop assassination and the Charlie Hebdo killings. Not at all. I expect that sort of thing, and I expect it to get worse before it gets better.

No, my little epiphany came from reading the early chapters of The Sources of Social Power by sociologist Michael Mann. In writing about the first agricultural societies, Mann talks about "caging." The early irrigating farmers were caged, because they could no longer escape from their governments. They needed government to defend their improvements and the mechanisms of their alluvial irrigation.

If the caging idea is true about the first agriculturalists, then it is doubly, triply true about us, living in the post-industrial west. There is no way we can survive for a day, let alone a season, unless the whole apparatus of modern society keeps running, and running well.

So we expect our governments to do their job, dammit, and do it well. Because if we are caged, then we insist that Muslim immigrants be equally caged and subject to state power.

It is, I suggest, absolutely unacceptable for modern multicultural governments to allow Muslim "no-go" zones in their cities. First of all, governments must insist that everyone, even the little darlings of the ruling class, obey the law. Second, a real government cannot allow the formation of proto-states within its territory, any more than the United States allows Russia the right to operate military bases in the continental United States.

Government is force. Government must be sovereign, force-wise, within its own territory.

When the Appeasement Has to Stop

We like to sneer at the appeasers of the 1930s, the British and French politicians that appeased Hitler until they could appease no more.

You have to say, it worked for them. They could appease and appease until the moment that they had to put Winston Churchill in as First Lord of the Admiralty, or Navy Secretary.

You can see the parallel with the current situation. The western elites, like the French elite, are still the only game in town, according to the French Rush Limbaugh, Eric Zemmour.

While widely perceived as incompetent, these elites, Zemmour argues, nevertheless keep to themselves the right to define the political and social agenda, including, pertinently, the burning question of who can be trusted to speak for France in the current crisis, which, moreover, only they can define. 

Sound familiar?

Look at it from the elite point of view. They want to continue their spend and elect, bribing their supporters election after election with new free stuff, and part of that strategy is to put off "doing something" about Islam.

In Europe today the "far-right" nationalist parties that want to "do something" about Islam are gradually gaining strength, but are kept outside the magic circle by the ruling elite. Really, there is nothing to stop the ruling elites doing a 180, at some point, and co-opt the policies of the "far right," and drop the hammer on the Islamists, while still keeping the "far-right" politicians out in the cold.

Or they might blow it and wake up one morning with a "far-right" election victory. I wonder what they will do then.

In my American Thinker article this week I am proposing to call the current crisis the "Muslim Question" to compare it to the "Social Question" of the 1900s that brought in the welfare state. But our modern welfare state didn't get where it is today without existential battles for decades against the anti-capitalist Communists and Fascists. And at several moments it was uncertain who would win.

My point is that capitalism and the exchange economy have always had powerful enemies, and the immigrants to the city have often voted for the radicalisms and terrorisms of Communism and fascism as they tried to deal with the challenge and frustrations of learning how to live and thrive in the city. Why should things be any different for today's Muslim immigrants to the western city?

For the last 100 years the educated ruling class has dithered and flopped around as it followed this or that rabbit down a rabbit hole. Several wars and revolutions and terrors later, it achieved an inflection point with the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Western Europe and the turn towards capitalism if not democracy in China.

But no sooner had the Communist and Fascist reactionaries given up the game than we discovered new reactionaries riling up the struggling immigrants in the city, only these reactionaries are fundamentalist Muslims rather that radical lefties and fascists.

In other words, nothing new.

Of course, we plebs want to know, right now, whether our ruling class can or will push back against Islamism and solve the "Muslim Question."

My guess is that it will, if only because in my view Islamism cannot provide the ideological basis for a global exchange economy. (If you are a Marxist you have my permission to insist that we are talking about the internal contradictions of an Islamist superstructure built on the current global productive forces.)

In other words, I don't think that Islam can coexist with a world power that can dominate the world. It must destroy the nest it occupies just as the reactionary and nostalgic religions of Communism and Fascism destroyed their nests in Russia, Germany, and China. What killed Communism and Fascism was that they did not work well enough to defeat welfare-state capitalism and democracy.

But because of the rhythm of Appeasement followed by global war, I suspect that things are going to get worse before they get better.

Changing the Societal Security Code

I'm listening to the mindless blow-by-blow CNN Paris feed at my daughter's house in California, and I'm thinking how clueless the liberal conventional-wisdom journalists are as they interact with their contacts in the security bureaucracy.

But yesterday I read the piece by Richard Fernandez titled "Security Code." Riffing off the female Charlie Hebdo staffer that punched in the security code to let the terrorists into the building he writes:

Do you think our elites won’t punch the door buttons to let the killers in to shoot us? They already have. They already have.

Soon enough, he writes, things will have to change. Our ruling class is clinging desperately to its religion, the religion of "multiculturalism, social deconstruction and redistribution". It is in too deep to "doubt the faith now." It must maintain "the innocence of Islamism as an article of faith", it must. Because the alternative is unthinkable.

So nothing can happen in the west until we "tear our politics apart" with our ruling class ripped from its comfortable kneelers in front of the altar of political correctness. In other words the cognitive dissonance for our ruling class has to get unbearable for them before we can deal with the Muslim menace.

Yesterday I wrote about the two lefty responses to the industrial revolution, the revolutionary response that organized the working class to defeat the bourgeoisie and the "little darling" response that mommied the working class with legislation and benefits. Our modern ruling class, it seems to me, is a coalition of both traditions. The "little darlings" of the liberals, who today are blacks, Hispanics, educated women and gays, are encouraged by the "activism" culture to think that they are bravely protesting and marching against the Man, when really they are little darlings of the liberals sucking at the teat of Mother government and indulged by their doting parents.

But the challenge of the industrial revolution is to take the hicks from the sticks and turn them into nice disciplined middle class citizens. No problem with the girls; you can take them straight from the farm and put them to work in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts or the iPhone sweatshops of China. But the boys are a different story. Usually they terrify the bourgeoisie for a generation and socialize themselves into menacing criminal gangs, like the Irish, the Italians, and the blacks in the US.

Really, when you think about it, leftist politics couldn't be better designed to delay and prolong the socialization into the responsible middle class of the young immigrants to the city. Up to now, that hasn't been a devastating problem because the immigrants assimilated into the middle class in spite of leftist politics.

But now we have the great global Muslim migration to the city and this time it may be that the leftist "little darling" politics of cultural Marxism is going to succeed in preventing assimilation of a good percentage of the Muslim immigrants.

Do you see what I am getting to? I am saying that up to now the internal contradictions of leftist politics were not enough to prevent the socialization of the immigrants into the middle class. But now it may be that the assimilation of the Muslim immigrants to the city will be halted and even reversed unless we neutralize leftist politics and violently suppress the pre-modern culture of Islam in western cities.

As Richard Fernandez suggests, we can't solve the problem of the rebellion against the culture of the city by the latest cohort of immigrants -- who happen to be Muslim -- unless we neutralize the poison of leftist politics that runs in the veins of our center-left ruling class.

So our ruling class has a choice. It can counter the Muslim threat before it gets replaced by an angry electorate. Or it can wait until after it gets replaced.

Either way, We the People are going to have to change the security code pretty soon.

Muddling Along with the Islam Question

What do we do about Islam? That's the question in all our minds after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris on January 7, 2015.

My short answer, frankly, is: Nothing.

That's because I don't think we are at a moment where we can gather the western world into a unified political, military, economic and ideological response.

It is clear that the Bush response after 9/11 didn't work. Sure, the US could throw Afghanistan into a mess, and remove the revolting Saddam Hussein from power. But then what?

On the other hand, we conservatives wring our hands over the center-left ruling class response. The one thing our ruling class knows is that fascism is the worst thing in the world and that the European people will turn into brownshirts and blackshirts the moment that "our" educated evolved backs are turned. So they are terrified by "islamophobia" and a return to the politics of 1935.

Maybe. But my take on the danger of fascism and right-wing extremism is that 20th century fascism was a response to the failure of the European ruling class.

All any ruling class needs to do is provide the political and economic basis for ordinary people to make a decent living. No wars, no inflations, no depressions. Failing that, it's Katy bar the door.

The trouble is that sensible economic policy and politics requires a ruling class that thinks less about its power and more about its service. And the record of history is that this is too much to ask of a ruling class, because people get into politics because they like to fight and they want to acquire power. So it gets into the most frightful messes. And then the people lose faith in their leadership and look for alternatives.

Let's back off and indulge in a Chris Chantrill tour d'horizon. That's French for the view from 30,000 feet.

We humans are in the latter stages of the greatest transformation that humans have ever seen. The people of the earth are giving up life as farmers and taking up life as city dwellers. People used to live on farms and mostly grow food for their own consumption. They also exchanged the fruits of their labor for products and services, but not much.

Today we live in cities and almost all our life is lived in the exchange economy where we exchange our labor for money, and money for everything in our lives from food and shelter to the myriad of consumer goods.

As is the way of revolutionary change, we were right in the middle of it before people woke up and said: What's going on here! Attitudes changed from the chap in 1688 who wrote that the new manufacturing could make us all ten times richer, to the revolutionaries of 1848 who said that the world was coming to an end because everyone would be immiserated to a bare existence by the pitiless actions of the market.

You could say that there have been three responses to the industrial revolution in the West. The first, what we might call the Protestant Ethic, is to adapt our lives and our culture to the demands of the new city exchange economy. We might call this the "get with the program" response. The second, the revolutionary response, is to damn the leaders of the exchange economy, the bourgeois bankers and industrialists, to hell for exploiting the workers and to fundamentally transform politics and economics to remove the devil in our midst. The third, the "little darling" response, is to treat the folks struggling to make it in the city as helpless children, and soften their lives with a government safety net and a welfare state.

My own response is contained in my ebook, The Road to the Middle Class. I argue that the best way to thrive in the city is to get evangelical Christianity and become a responsible individual, get an education, get involved in mutual aid associations, and learn how to live under law. But there is a problem with this approach. It lacks a leading role for the ruling class, and that is a very big deal.

Today's ruling class in the west is a mixture of would-be revolutionaries like President Obama that believe in "fundamental transformation" and would-be mommies that want to keep their "little darlings" safe in a patronage-clientage relation with the political elite. The problem is that both approaches are founded on the idea that it is not the new arrivals to the city that need to change; it is the "system."

So it was that for a century the ruling class babied the working class, giving their labor unions extraordinary monopoly powers so that they killed their host corporations, and instead of teaching the working class how to save against a rainy day and for retirement with the magic of compound interest bought their votes with government pensions paid for out of taxes, not out of saving and investment.

When the ruling class tired of the working class they found new victims and "little darlings:" blacks, Hispanics, well-born women and well-born gays.

The latest group to arrive in the city are the Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East, and naturally they are having a rough time adapting to the revolutionary difference between life in the country and life in the city. In a country like France with a full-blown welfare state it is very hard for the new immigrants to break into the urban economy. Government regulation of the labor market makes it extremely expensive to hire people, especially untutored, un-acculturated Muslims. So the Muslims fester in the banlieux of Paris on welfare and their assimilation and acculturation to the exchange economy of the city is hampered and delayed.

Life for immigrants to the city is extremely frustrating, and none more than young immigrant males. They typically form gangs and terrify the previous generations of immigrants to the city who now have figured out how to live and thrive in the city. In the end, they seem to get with the program.

In my view, the number one job of human society is the socialization of young males.

Ever since the dawn of agriculture we have tried to socialize young males away from their instincts, which is to conduct dawn raids on the neighboring village, and teach them to be disciplined and dependable workers and husbands. It was hard enough to do in the agricultural village; it's a bigger challenge in the city with its anonymity.

Now it is my recent assertion that the two gods of the modern era, freedom for the right and liberation for the left, are false idols. Let me tell you why. The fact is that, in the city exchange economy, there is no freedom; there cannot be. We cannot do what we want; we are all fettered, chained to the market system. We must toil day by day to serve our fellow citizens and there is no escape. Nor is there liberation; liberation in the city is a fantasy. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) inadvertently told us that when she said that Obamacare would let artists and writers quit their day jobs. (Oh yeah! You try it!) Wrong! The truth is that there is no liberation from the market economy. Oh sure, the market economy has poured a bounty of wealth into our laps. But that bounty comes at a price, and the price is that we are all "caged" into the exchange economy and there is no way out.

But what about the Muslim terrorists? The answer is simple. The modern economy cannot endure such a challenge to its regime of peaceful cooperation in the city. If the Muslim terrorists succeed they will destroy the city exchange economy, and we will see a collapse in the global economy that will make the collapses in the Little Ice Age look like a walk in the park.

There is only one way forward. The young Muslims attracted to the age old culture of the "dawn raid" must be socialized to the life of the city. They must be tamed, just like all the other young men that immigrated to the city before them.

Unfortunately, our ruling class, both its revolutionary adepts and its "little darling" adepts, aren't yet ready to see that. So things will have to get worse before they get better.

The Glamour of "Activism"

Ever since a friend told me last year that she'd always wanted to get into "activism," I've been thinking. What is it about "activism?" And why don't I like it?

I carried the question in my mind through the activism over the Ferguson shooting and the "rape culture" autumn and the Staten Island asphyxiation.

To say nothing of the social media butterflies at Islamic State.

Now comes Virginia Postrel, libertarian writer. I have a copy of The Future and Its Enemies but I never got around to reading it. But in 2004 Postrel co-wrote with Phil Patton and others Glamour: Fashion, Industrial Design, Architecture. Then she went solo in 2013 with The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion. But wait, there's more. Back in 2013 Postrel wrote a piece for Time on "Glamour and Terror." And now she's written a piece for Bloomberg which gets right to the point: "The Glamour of Islamic State."

And now this morning we have the terrorist attack in Paris complete with glamorous AK-47s and rocket launchers.

But let's not be shrinking violets here. Let's not just talk about the glamour of a terrorist bloodbath. The attraction to "activism" among nice educated middle-class girls in college is the glamour. I think of Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain: "If we bring a little joy into your humdrum lives, it makes us feel as though our hard work ain't been in vain for nothin'."

Whaddya think I am, Lina? Dumb or somethin'?

That's the point. For all the promise of wonderful prosperous educated professional lives, it all comes down to hum-drum. Oh sure, some guy will get to be a Peter Thiel and some gal will get to be a Sheryl Sandberg. But for most of us, it's a life of hum-drum, working in the middle of some bureaucratic organization.

Glamour is the cheap way out of that. And today in the schools and the university they teach young skulls full of mush that the way to find meaning in your life is in activism.

Now, in reality, leading a group of marginalized people, as President Obama did for a season back in his twenties, is a rather dull and unrewarding experience. That's why the future president bagged the community activist stuff and sought the glamour of bigger game. He got into the swim of Chicago liberal politics and wafted aloft as everyone's Magic Negro.

But for most ordinary, dutiful, young middle-class kids, activism is a direct route to glamour. It is, as Tom Wolfe realized half a century ago, "radical chic." Think Che Guevara tee-shirts. That's what the stone-stupid Brunch Bunch think as they disrupt nice Manhattan liberals at their Sunday brunch. Yeah, don't worry; Michelle Malkin is on it. You can tell Brunch Bunch have all taken their Activism 101 class because they all spout the same stultifying non-negotiable demands rhetoric in their tweets that we've grown to know and love.

Of course, it makes complete sense that the over-under Democratic coalition should teach its "over" youth how to lead the "under" part of the coalition in "peaceful protests" and "marches." But if you are in the middle, a responsible individualist in the working class or the middle class, you may wonder how long this is going to go on.

The answer is simple. It will go on until we, the majority in the middle, put a stop to it.

Because the whole point of the culture of responsible individualism is that you don't reach for glamour and you don't worship it either. The ethos of responsible individualism is that you just think about what to do next to contribute to your world: at work, in the family, towards friends and neighbors.

Glamour has nothing to do with it.