On the Other Hand: Bubba Bait for Progressives

Yesterday I worried that President Obama's tax and spending ideas for the FY16 budget were bubba bait for the middle class. Because what working woman doesn't want more sick leave and maternity leave mandates? Who doesn't want to stick it to the Rich?

But now I think that I'm wrong. The president isn't trying to separate the middle class from Republicans. He's just throwing red meat to his progressive base. Because the one thing he must do is keep his base home and energized. Otherwise the Democrats won't be voting to sustain his vetoes.

When soldiers get into a firefight, when aviators get into an emergency, they all do the same thing. They fall back on their training. When politicians get into tight corner, they go back to their instincts. The president's instincts are the left-wing shibboleths he learned as a teenager with black Communist Frank Marshall Davis, the liberal-left politics he learned in college, the machine politics he learned in gentrified Hyde Park palling around with baby-boomer lefties like Bill Ayers.

I don't know what the best strategy should be for Republicans in countering this foolishness. I suppose the best thing to do is to ignore it and to structure the appropriation bills in the fall to make them as difficult as possible to veto. Apparently Republicans have already been doing this, by stuffing funding bills with all kinds of riders but featuring one or two items that are poison to the president and his base. When the president objects, they kill the poison and leave the other stuff in.

But it is obvious that the president is not interested in, e.g., a comprehensive bill to simplify and reduce rates in the federal corporate income tax.

But the bigger issue is how to turn the whole culture around, how to sink the progressive political culture of expressive individualism combined with lower-class tribalism. The modern world is founded upon responsible individualism, but we have a ruling class that believes in self-expression. That makes it hard to win the fight for responsibility.

On my best days I imagine that conservatives and libertarians will win the culture war. But on normal days I realize that things will only change in the crisis when the current ruling class runs out of money, and can't deliver rewards to its supporters.

The responsible world of the exchange economy changes in response to the day-to-day signals of the price system and to crises like bankruptcy and business failure.

But politics doesn't work that way. It responds to the day-to-day power plays of special interests and the crises of war and revolution.

In a way, the two systems are the same. They go on, blindly hoping for the best, until the whole world collapses about their ears. The difference is that bankruptcy doesn't involve war and rapine and loot and plunder and starvation and death camps. The exchange economy just takes resources and labor away from failed business projects and sells them, often at a few cents on the dollar, to folks with a better plan for economic growth.

The trouble is that, instinctively, we are all tribesmen. When things go wrong we look for a strong leader to save us, someone to lead us in marches and protests, when what we really need is a good bankruptcy lawyer.

But tell that to President Obama's progressive base and see where it gets you.

Obama's Bubba Bait for the Middle Class

I get it, Mr. President. Your proposals, presumably to be unveiled in the State of the Union speech, are bubba bait for the middle class.

Your proposal for free community college is obvious. Poor kids get community college free already. Rich kids don't care. So it ought to appeal to the middle class. And it's more money for the education blob, which is a Democratic special interest. What's not to like? The Huffington Post reports that the idea polls well. Why wouldn't it? Everybody likes "free."

Your proposal for paid maternity leave and sick leave is the same. Of course mothers should get paid leave after they have a baby! Who wouldn't support something like that?

And now we have your proposal to increase taxes on capital and the rich and increase tax credits for the middle class. Hey, why not? Make the 1% pay and give the middle class a break!

The only problem is that these proposals don't grow the economy. And the only way to help the poor and the middle class long term is with a healthy growing economy with reduced opportunities for graft and crony capitalism.

Free community college? But the subsidies that we have already flung at the education system from K thru research grants have increased costs enormously. The result is that nobody can afford to education unless subsidized by the government. I don't call that free; I call that indentured servitude. And at the back of it all is the question: how do we reform the education system to, e.g., actually deliver basic literacy and numeracy to poor children, when it is utterly dominated by special interests with the ear of politicians?

Paid sick leave and maternity leave? Sounds great, but studies (from Jonathan Gruber!) show that labor is simply a cost to employers. If employers are forced to pay mothers for not working then that will reduce the wages of other employees. In other words, paid leave is simply another tax on labor.

Tax the rich? Sounds great, except that the higher you fix the marginal rate on taxes the more you encourage the rich and the well-connected to bribe politicians to give them little carve-outs that nobody notices, but which distort the economy. Politicians like that sort of thing because giving favors to supporters is what they do.

New free stuff, new mandated benefits, more tax-the-rich. Who knows what Obama's grand plan really is? Maybe he will seduce the middle class into voting Democrat with this bubba bait. Or maybe he won't. Or maybe he will destroy his party with his war on the loyal opposition.

But I am still slightly shocked that the president is so intent on bashing the opposition. It makes me realize how seldom presidents do that. Even Bill Clinton liked to pretend that his partisan initiatives were really "bi-partisan."

My guess is that presidents hurt themselves, hurt their party, and hurt the country when they govern in the divisive way of President Obama. That, I suspect, is why most presidents don't do it. That may be why the president's party has lost so many seats in Congress and in state legislatures during Obama's presidency.

Let's look at it this way. The whole effort of the left since the 19th century is that the only way to help the marginalized -- the workers, the women, the racial minorities -- is by positive legislation that mandates monetary and in-kind redistribution. We declare that workers must contribute X% of wages to a government pension plan. We declare that all seniors will get government subsidized health care. We mandate handouts to the poor. What? Don't you care about the poor?

But the lesson of capitalism is that nothing is fixed in stone. Everything is fluid, everything changes when new ideas and practices and technologies surprise us and change the terms of trade. All the mighty edifices of the welfare state are founded in sand, and sooner or later the wave of history sweeps up, undermines them, and topples them. Under the administrative system of the welfare state, the good intentions of reformers eventually get worn away by the natural forces of politics: the special interests get more and more carve-outs and the bureaucrats do less and less for more and more money. Eventually you get a corrupt system that rewards its supporters for doing nothing.

The record of the Obama administration is witness to this truth. The biggest winners have been the 1% and our stock portfolios. Then come the environmentalists and Big Green. Then come all the other Democratic constituencies. The poor? They have done well, if you consider that increased subsidies for not working benefit anyone in the long term. But inevitably, when you have the economy dominated by ruling class political action, the unorganized middle class gets screwed. Because the middle class is at the end of the line when goodies are being handed out to Democratic party supporters.

President Obama seems to be recognizing that he needs to suck up to the middle class. The question is: will the middle class take the bait?

Or will they decide that in 2016 it is Time for a Change, no matter what the politicians say or do?

Mohammed meets Marcuse

When economic Marxism collapsed of its own internal contradictions after World War I, because the working class hadn't collapsed into "immiseration" and had fought bravely for their nations, the Frankfurt School came along to give it a new life.

It wasn't just the working class that was exploited, they explained. It was marginalized people everywhere: suffering Asians and Africans under the boot of colonialism, African Americans, women, gays, etc. And each needed government to fight their corner. Because exploitation.

After World War II and the successful economic recovery in the Fifties and Sixties, this doctrine became not just an academic parlor game but an electoral necessity for working class parties in the West. The working class was becoming bourgeois and was starting to move away from class-warfare politics. You might say that civil rights and feminism came along just in time.

But there aren't many blacks in Europe and feminism is a professional-class thing. So the leftist politicians of the West came up with a cunning plan. They would refresh their proletarian voting base with immigrants from rural poverty in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

And the whole apparatus of political correctness and diversity and quotas could be deployed to attract the loyalty of the new immigrants and dish the evil right wing, whether libertarians, conservatives, or "far right" nationalists. Then there was Herbert Marcuse's contribution. It was right and proper for the left to be intolerant of right-wing intolerance and bigotry, he wrote.

After the success of Reagan and Thatcher, the left was desperate to attract new victims and their votes. So the Blair government in Britain in the late 1990s opened the gates to unlimited immigration, and the Clintons in the US passed the Motor Voter Act and started to turn a blind eye to the off-the-books activities of illegal Hispanics in the US while liberal activists in liberal cities declared them to be "sanctuary cities." In France the Muslim immigrants naturally started voting with the Socialists. As in 93 percent voting for François Hollande!

If you want to understand why President Obama just can't say "Islamic terrorism" now you know. I suspect that the president is not merely a cynical operator -- like the Clintons -- but actually believes the multicultural gospel. He certainly behaves as though it is Republicans that are the enemy rather than Islamic jihadists.

But they that sow the wind will reap the whirlwind. What seemed like a cunning political ploy half a century ago has now become a gigantic clash of civilizations. People and politicians are being forced to pick sides, just as they were forced to do in the fight against fascism and the fight against communism.

These fights always put the left in a spot. In the 1920s the left was all in favor of fascism. It wasn't till the 1930s that Stalin drew a line between the fascists and the communists in the Spanish Civil War. After that we could all fight together against the fascists. But in the Cold War the left could never decide which side it was on. In the aftermath of Vietnam, especially, it chided us for an "inordinate fear of communism." After Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II defeated communism with no help from liberals we learned, all of a sudden, that communism was headed for defeat anyway, and we were on the same side all along.

In my view, the Islamic reaction against the West is nothing new; that's why I call it the "Muslim Question" to emphasize its similarities with the Social Question of the 19th century. The problem is that the modern exchange economy is a brutal experience for the folks immigrating to the city from rural poverty. Everything from their religion to their marriage customs to their work culture is ill adapted to life in the city. And like humans everywhere, they fight like mad to avoid change.

Looking back, we have to admit that there's no avoiding a fight. There was a big fight over fascism, a big fight over communism. And now there's a big fight over Islam. And like the fight over fascism, it starts with vacillation and appeasement; like the fight over communism it blows hot and cold.

I think the reason for all this appeasement and vacillation is natural and inevitable. It arises because we moderns live by surrender to the gods of the market. We learn by experience that the only way to live with the market is to accept its verdict. Anything else is foolishness. So, when our way of life is challenged we do not think immediately of counterattack and punitive expeditions. We hope that the anarchists and the terrorists will go away or get with the program. And often they do.

But sometimes they don't, and it's getting more and more likely that this is an occasion when they won't.

In that case we will have to limber up the western economy to fight a knock-down drag-out war against Islamism. The politicians will have a grand old time and We the People will pay for it in blood and treasure.

But is Islamism an existential threat? Here's Anthony Trollope writing in the 1870s in The Prime Minister about a fictional Navy minister that wanted to build "four big ships" for Britain.

Sir Orlando Drought had not been able to build his four big ships, and was consequently eager in his fears that Britain would be invaded by the combined forces of Germany and France, that India would be sold by those powers to Russia, that Canada would be annexed to the States, that a great independent Roman Catholic hierarchy would be established in Ireland, and that Malta and Gibraltar would be taken away from us;--all which evils would be averted by the building of four big ships.

You see there is nothing new. There are always existential dangers. The question is: which dangers are real, and which will give up and just go away? Calvin Coolidge:

Never go out to meet trouble. If you will just sit still, nine cases out of ten someone will intercept it before it reaches you.

The question is what to do about the remaining one case out of ten.

But there is one good thing. The meeting of Mohammed and Marcuse is not likely to end well for either the jihadists or the lefties.

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.