Obama Leads Dems into the Wilderness

The original narrative for the Obama years came from Judis and Teixeira and The Emerging Democratic Majority back in 2002.  The idea was that the Dems were forming a majority coalition of minorities, women, youth and the educated, and that they'd rule for ever after.

I feared it, but not after the Obama administration got started. I feared that the Dems would incrementally move the country in a liberal direction by finding bipartisan majorities on issues the Republicans couldn't refuse. Kinda like Medicare Part D which Bush passed in part to defuse a Dem "issue."

But Obama turned out to be the wrong president to consolidate and extend the Emerging Democratic Majority, because he pursued a divisive and partisan strategy to implement as much as possible of the liberal agenda by any means possible as soon as possible. So we have the Obamacare cramdown, the endless executive orders, the revising of statute law by fiat.

He violated the Moynihan Rule, that you want a 70-30 vote in the US Senate to pass big items like Medicare.

The result of Obama has been the most Republican Congress since before the Great Depression. And huge gains for Republicans in the states.

Now comes John Kraushaar in the National Journal to argue that "Obama Changed His Party, Not the Country." He's gotten remarkable support from his base and from the Democrats in Congress. But what does it matter if he hasn't brought the country with him too?

By ignoring the electorate and steering the country in an unmistakably progressive direction his final two years in office, he's ensuring that his presidency will be more of an eight-year mirage for liberals, rather than one known for winning lasting support for policies that would move the country in a leftward direction.

And so now John B. Judis is writing about an Emerging Republican Advantage.

Back in 2012 Chief Justice Roberts was the deciding vote to allow Obamacare to proceed. You can see why he did that and angered Republicans and conservatives. He knew that for the Supreme Court to roll back Obamacare in 2012 would be dangerously divisive, and would be viciously attacked by liberals and Obama. But not any more. Obama's a lame duck and Obamacare is unpopular. My nickel goes to say that the current Obamacare issue before the Supreme Court, the question of whether subsidies can be applied in states that didn't set up their own health exchanges, Chief Justice Roberts will be on the side of those that cut Obamacare down.

And the problem with all those executive orders is that they can be reversed by the next president.

It is said that Abraham Lincoln advised us to fight only one war at a time. We might revise and extend his remarks to say that all governments look for a war to fight. But they'd better not get caught in a two-front war. Now it is clear that the war Obama is fighting is the war against conservatives and Republicans. For his and his liberal base, the real enemy is racism, sexism, homophobia. So for them the problem with Islam, or the aggression of Putin's Russia are distractions from the real war.

But conservatives and Republicans are different. We don't really want to crush our domestic political opponents; we just wish they weren't so determined to wreck America and all it stands for. Enemies, if any, can be found beyond the borders of the United States and North America. The enemy used to be the Soviet Union; now it is radical Islam.

So, from my conservative perspective, the idea that Obama has led his party into the wilderness without getting the rest of the nation to follow him is a beacon of hope. It will be much easier for the next Republican president to lead the nation to sunny uplands of economic growth and social peace if President Obama has flown the Democratic Party up a box canyon and wrecked it on the canyon wall.

But, as I have already written, I expect the Democrats to break and run before they get too far up the box canyon. Politicians are not fools; they can see the writing on the canyon walls.

But usually the rank and file in an army wait to desert until it is too late. They are only human, after all.

Women Changing the Public Square

My friend Stephen asked about women presidents the other day, and I responded with waffle about the Empress CiXi in China, about whom I'm reading in Jung Chang's The Empress Dowager CiXi: The Woman Who Launched Modern China. So yeah, women can be amazing heads of state, although that doesn't mean that the failed Hillary Clinton should be our First Woman President.

And, of course, there is the problem that five years after the death of CiXi China descended into 30+ years of civil war.

But now comes an interesting piece promoted by Instapundit that touches the question of women faculty in law schools. The article is about the proposed merger of two Rutgers law schools, one in Camden and one in Newark. It appears that the law schools are heavily in into law-and-social-justice.

Not surprisingly for a school that emphasizes race, gender and philosophy and has a history of misleading employment statistics, the Camden law school has had trouble attracting students.

This provoked a commenter to comment:

I was wondering when someone was finally going to address this issue. A large number of junior ranking faculty are trying to transform law schools into something completely different. These professors, who are largely female, want to talk about anything but traditional law. Their focus is instead on abortion, parenting, racism, sexism, human rights violations and the environment. I get that there will be some overlap between these topics and the law, but they should be restricted to when the topic actually comes us and not woven mercilessly throughout the general curriculum. Since traditional topics still need to be taught for the bar exam and some business courses need to be offered, schools end up with a bloated faculty just so that they can have a strange panoply of socially progressive seminars that fit each faculty member’s niche interest.

That's interesting, and I get it. It is much more congenial to be talking up liberal social justice issues than the uncongenial hard work of teaching law which is, after all, a patriarchal concept that men have worked out over the last several millennia with very little input from women.

Now, I've written that, as George Simmel the German sociologist put it, women in the modern age are in the middle of adapting the public square to "a more feminine sensibility." When liberal women law faculty are moving the law school curriculum from law to social justice, is that a case of women adapting law "to a more feminine sensibility" or is it just mind-numbed liberals doing their thing?

Government is force; social animals deal in pecking orders and hierarchy. Men are fighters; they reduce everything to a battle. Women are lovers; they reduce everything to manipulation and persuasion.

So if you ask me we have an unholy mess with the current liberal administrative welfare state, staffed mainly by women. Government is force, yet its practitioners are women that instinctively want to move the culture towards manipulation and social shaming.

Marxists had a good way of understanding this sort of thing. They liked to talk about the "internal contradictions" of capitalism. But think about the "internal contradictions" of liberalism, and the internal contradiction of having women, the manipulators, winkling away at law, which was men's way of resolving fights into agreed-upon rules. And the even bigger internal contradiction of having women, the manipulators, in charge of government, the enforcers.

I suspect that at the end of the modern era, women will retreat from the public square where it requires male-style combat and head-banging, and specialize on areas that require loving attention and relationships. But we are going to get there by learning the hard way, and the journey is going to be hell.

The Real Problem "Ghettoside"

We've all gotten used to the liberal "police brutality" meme, where police target minorities for abuse. That's when the police are not ignoring murders and concentrating on arresting minorities for minor infractions.

Now comes Jill Leovy with Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (H/T Steve Sailer) and she's getting a soft-focus interview on NPR's Fresh Air in "'Ghettoside' Explores Why Murders Are Invisible In Los Angeles:" as in

Our guest today, journalist Jill Leovy, argues that black communities suffer deeply from too little law enforcement, or at least law enforcement of a certain kind.  

You see, murders in the black ghetto get very little coverage in the media, and so Jill Leovy decided to sit down and document every murder in Los Angeles in a blog, The Homicide Report, and now she's written a book about it. Murder in the black ghetto may be routine, but it shatters the lives of families on the receiving end. And to compound the agony, very few murders of young black men are "solved."

Well, looking at numbers from LAPD from about '88 through the early 2000s, around 40 percent, if the victims are black men.

And injury shootings have an even lower "solved" rate, at 25 percent. What is going on here? Here is what is going on:

[Leovy:] I spoke to a mother, once, in South Bureau - black woman - her son had just been murdered. I think this was maybe a couple of days after the murder. I had gone to her door. And it was one of these cases where the police just had no witnesses. The case wasn't going anywhere. The mother told me that since the murder, the killers, who she knew, who were, I think, the gang members who lived on her street, had been knocking on her door and taunting her and laughing at her - her grief.  

Here's the black grievance: on the one hand, police are too heavy handed. On the other, they don't bother to solve the big stuff, the murders.

[Leovy:] [A] a standard black grievance against police that you hear in South LA, that has to do with the generally understood problem - too much consent searches, we say, in LA, too much stop-and-frisk, too heavy of law enforcement, too much presumption of guilt when you take stops.

What I hear, when I'm in these neighborhoods, is a combination. It's a two-pronged grievance. There's another half of that. And the other half is, I get stopped too much for nothing, and the police don't go after the real killers. They don't go after the really serious criminals in this neighborhood.

Then there's the intimidation:

[Interviewer:] You know, you write that most of these cases are made not by physical evidence, you know, fibers or that kind of thing, but by witnesses and a phrase that you hear a lot in some of these communities after a homicide is, everybody knows who did it. But it's the reluctance of witnesses to cooperate that is such a huge barrier. You want to just explore that for a moment and talk about what fears witnesses have and why?

LEOVY: Well, witnesses I think justly fear retaliation. There's a lot of kind you might call it soft retaliation - signals, hard stares. I had one witness on a case who a couple days after she - the perpetrators clearly saw her at the scene, woke up in the middle of the night, and they're banging hard on her windows, bunch of guys walking slowly around the house banging, banging on each window for a long time. And they didn't hurt her, but that's terrifying. And it's very clear what that's saying. What that's saying is, think about what we will do to you.

You can see why the police are running around harassing the homeboys. They can't get any witnesses for the murders, but knowing who the culprits are, they can at least get them for the small stuff.

End of facts, beginning of analysis.

Many years ago, I read a policeman that said that the dirty little secret of policing is informers. If you don't have informers you don't know what is going on and you can't prosecute urban crime. And that's what we just read about above. "Everybody knows" who did it, but nobody is willing to testify.

And, of course, these urban killings are, really, combat deaths in the contests for turf, the border wars, between rival urban gangs.

Now my theory of government is that every government is an armed minority occupying some territory and defending it from enemies, foreign and domestic. It supports itself by taxing the inhabitants of that territory. Period.

On this theory, urban criminal gangs are proto-governments that carve out territory within the territory of a larger national government. They defend that territory from other proto-governments and they tax the inhabitants for their "protection," And the larger national government tolerates it.

This has been going on in the United States for at least a century and a half, ever since the Irish came over in their "coffin ships." First it was the Irish gangs, then the Jewish gangs, then the Italian gangs. Now it's the black gangs and the Latino gangs.

But why? I think the main reason is that the immigrants on the lowest rung of the ladder don't have the connections and the credentials or the skills to enter the formal economy (which today taxes labor at up to 25 percent, including payroll taxes, unemployment, workers comp and mandatory benefits). So they have to operate outside the law. So they are vulnerable. They may work "off the books" or they may aim higher at the risky trade in illegal or highly taxed substances. But they have to work outside the law because they don't have the education, or skills, or experience, or connections, or whatever, to be competitive in the formal economy.

Remember the cruelties, Voltaire is supposed to have said. He was talking about the cruelties of the ancien régime. We too have our cruelties, and the poor have their grievances.

And so we can see a two-point program to solve this problem. Point One is to reconquer the urban ghettos and smash the gangs. Point Two is to abolish the cruel "helping" state interventions in the economy that make it impossible for unskilled people to work in the formal economy.

Otherwise, the problem of "Ghettoside" is insoluble. But maybe the ruling class likes it that way.

"Questions Linger" about Scott Walker

Just like everyone else, I couldn't resist the headline at Drudge and the cute picture and clicked over to the Washington Post's breathless article by David A. Farenthold on the unanswered questions about GOP presidential candidate Scott Walker's college career: "As Scott Walker mulls White House bid, questions linger over college exit."

Oh no! What could it be? What shameful and hidden scandal could have caused Scott Walker to leave Marquette University without getting a degree?

You do know that Scott Walker doesn't have a university degree?

Yeah. It seems that Scott Walker didn't really study too hard at college. In fact he was really only interested in college politics, at which he was a failure. Then he quit and went to work for the Red Cross. And never went back.

It was amazing to watch the comments section at the WaPo, labeled "5000+", as new comments, mostly from conservatives, came in every other second. And just about every other comment wondered about President Obama's college career, about which we still know next to nothing.

Now, for me, the point of this article is obvious. As is well known, there are only two kinds of Republican candidates for president. There are the "stupid" candidates, like Ronald Reagan and Ike and George W. Bush. And then there are the "evil" candidates, like Richard Nixon.

Wait! By 2004, George W. Bush had become an "evil" candidate! So it's possible for a Republican to be both "stupid" and "evil."

You can see that the "Walker didn't finish college" meme is all about defining Scott Walker to be as dumb as a post. Liberals apparently have a need to be able to marginalize the "other" in politics, and so articles by folks like David A. Farenthold cater to that basic human need.

And just to help out, the Brits just asked Scott Walker about "evolution."

Do you wonder who will be the "evil" candidate in 2016? Wonder no more; the answer is obvious. It is Ted Cruz. The "stupid" meme doesn't work for Ted, because Ted Cruz is brilliant. Just read the "Education" section in his Wiki article. Princeton, debate star, Harvard Law: Alan Dershowitz called him "off-the-charts brilliant." So it stands to reason that Cruz is "evil."

But if you ask me, "questions linger" about why liberal journalists at the mainstream media always find it necessary to do this kind of article about GOP rising stars. And why liberals, the tolerant ones, always need to instruct their charges in the "stupidity" or the "evil" of GOP political frontrunners.

The Conservative Reform Agenda

Yesterday I was feeling a bit sorry for myself, so I wrote about the dreadful record of liberals, starting with 50 years since Moynihan's "Negro Problem" and things have just gotten worse for the Negro family. I was talking about the fact that nothing happens when liberals screw up. They keep on keeping on, wrecking and sabotaging, and nobody holds them to account. Where's the conservative Hope and Change?

But now comes Peter Ferrara at The American Thinker to tell us about the secret conservative reform agenda being cooking up by Paul Ryan and others, what we may all hope will be "The Post-Obama Triumph of Conservatism."

First of all there's a plan to balance the budget, starting with the House and Senate budget resolutions for FY 2016.

But the prospect now is that new House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-GA) and new Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi (R-WY) will propose identical budget resolutions that will balance the federal budget within 10 years.

Oh yeah? But Ferrara says that the budget will include "careful, politically sensitive entitlement reform" of Medicare and welfare. That means moving Medicare more towards Medicare Advantage and the remaining 79 welfare programs towards block grants, like with TANF in 1996.

But not Social Security Reform. Not yet.

Then there's tax reform.  Paul Ryan has a plan over at House Ways and Means.

[It] would apply a 10% federal income tax rate to family incomes up to $100,000, and 25% after that.  Under that plan, close to 90% of working families would be subject to only the 10% rate.  The federal corporate income tax rate would be reduced to 25% as well.

Yay!

Then there's Obamacare. Here, Peter Ferrara is talking about "shoulds" so I suppose that the "repeal and replace" he proposes is just his idea. Anyway, Ferrara has a two point plan:

(1) targeting public assistance to help the poor buy essential health insurance, and (2) providing means for those uninsured who have developed highly expensive pre-existing conditions, such as cancer or heart disease, to obtain essential health insurance.

The poor would get subsidized insurance plus subsidized HSAs. The pre-existing conditions guys would pay on a means-tested basis.

It all sounds great. But now we need to sell the ordinary middle class on these ideas: people that don't want to change their Medicare and don't want to change their Social Security and don't want to pay for pre-existing condition health insurance, and don't want to give up their mortgage deduction.

The thing is that conservatives don't get to bully the American people into accepting their agenda like liberals do. Liberals can call everyone that disagrees with them racists, sexists, and homophobes, and it works.

But conservatives have to persuade, and I wonder just how persuadable people are, even after eight years of Obama's fundamental transformation.

Liberals Screw Up and Nothing Happens

Guess what: it's the 50th anniversary of Pat Moynihan's report on "The Negro Family" and its firestorm.

Moynihan argued that the rise in single-mother families was not due to a lack of jobs but rather to a destructive vein in ghetto culture that could be traced back to slavery and Jim Crow discrimination. 

Of course this went against mainstream settled social science that "economic conditions determine social conditions," so it had to be squelched.

And Jason L.Riley at the Wall Street Journal wants to remind you about what Moynihan said.

When the report was released, about 25% of black children and 5% of white children lived in a household headed by a single mother. During the next 20 years the black percentage would double and the racial gap would widen. Today more than 70% of all black births are to unmarried women, twice the white percentage.

Since then there has been a ton of social science research that demonstrates that children of married parents are seldom poor, but children of single parents often are. Also, children of married parents seldom exhibit social pathologies; children of single parents often do. But we still have the Great Society programs that pathologized the poor.

You'd think that liberals would be hanging from lampposts for continuing the unjust subsidization of non-work and single parenthood and the ruin of millions of lives, but they haven't.

Here's Kevin Williamson reviewing Peter J. Wallison's history of the mortgage meltdown, Hidden in Plain Sight. No it wasn't deregulation; it was regulators allowing "financial firms to park certain holdings off balance sheet." No it wasn't Fed easy money; the bubble started in the 1990s. The culprit was the easing of lending standards.

The real problem was the collapse in lending standards, with each of the big three — borrower credit rating, size of down payment, and borrower debt-to-income ratio — eroding practically overnight.

And why did that happen? Because liberals insisted, the federal government mandated, and Fannie and Freddie implemented it and then lied about it.

You'd think that liberals would be hanging from lampposts for tempting millions of low-income minorities into this wilderness of debt and ruin, but they've managed to persuade us all the "greedy bankers" did it.

Here's RedState's Moe Lane commiserating with a self-employed Obama supporter profiled in The New York Times. Her post-Obamacare health plan isn't working out. She couldn't keep her doctor; she faced higher premiums; her deductibles went up; her co-pays went up. But what really frosted her was having to drive to Connecticut for a follow-up doctor visit -- 14 miles away.

You'd think that liberals would be hanging from lampposts for screwing up the health plans of good Democratic supporters, but it seems that it's Republicans that are to blame for not supporting the president.

I suppose that we should all be encouraged. There is no way we could tell if anything were changing because in Obama's America you are not allowed to criticize Democrats on anything. Because racism, sexism, homophobia.

All you can do is vote for the most Republican Congress since the Great Depression.

It's just that I'd really like to live in an America where a politician could actually call for reform -- of entitlements, of welfare, of housing finance, of health care, of education -- without being shouted down as a bigot who wants to push grandma off a cliff or hurt little children.

And I'd like liberals to get the blame, for once, so that I could then step forward and forgive them.

You are Missing the Point, Mr. Krugman

The New York Times columnist and Keynesian apologist Paul Krugman has been on a tear this week with not one but three pieces explaining debt to us. There are a couple of blog posts: "Debt is Money We Owe Ourselves" and "Debt: A Thought Experiment," followed by a full-dress oped: "Nobody Understands Debt."

Naturally, everyone wants to get in on the act, including Steve Keen at Forbes with "Nobody Understands Debt -- Including Paul Krugman," so why shouldn't I join in the fun?

In "Debt is Money We Owe Ourselves" Krugman cranks up a chart of UK National Debt -- also available here at ukpublicspending.uk -- and says that, hey, after the Napoleonic Wars the Brits had a National Debt of 250 percent GDP and what harm did it do them?

Britain did not emerge impoverished from the Napoleonic Wars; the government ended up with a lot of debt, but the counterpart of this debt was that the British propertied classes owned a lot of consols.

True. But suppose the Brits had lost the Napoleonic War and defaulted on the debt? Then all the British propertied classes would have been a "foul way out." And suppose they didn't have the industrial revolution helping out?

Then Krugman returns with a hypothetical:

Here’s a thought experiment that may clarify matters (or alternatively make the usual suspects even more enraged.) Suppose that for some reason the government were to decree, arbitrarily, that every American whose last name begins with the letters A through K now owes $100,000 to a special government agency; meanwhile, every American L through Z is given a $100,000 bond to be paid by that agency.

The net balance is zero, he explains:

Clearly, the overall level of debt in the U.S. economy has suddenly increased (actually by about $1.6 trillion). But has the nation become any poorer?

The answer is: not unless the government defaults on the debt.

So later on, Krugman writes his usual oped about debt and austerity. In "Nobody Understands Debt" he keys off a McKinsey Global Institute report that not much deleveraging had taken place since 2008 to complain that, in fact, savage retrenchment had taken place, and it hadn't helped.

 But we have, in fact, had unprecedented austerity. As the International Monetary Fund has pointed out, real government spending excluding interest has fallen across wealthy nations — there have been deep cuts by the troubled debtors of Southern Europe, but there have also been cuts in countries, like Germany and the United States, that can borrow at some of the lowest interest rates in history.

All this austerity has, however, only made things worse — and predictably so, because demands that everyone tighten their belts were based on a misunderstanding of the role debt plays in the economy.

 Foolish people say that all this debt is robbing our grandchildren. No it isn't, writes Krugman. "Families who run up debts make themselves poorer... the world economy as a whole owes money to itself." So, if the peripheral countries needed to tighten their belts, the Germans needed to loosen theirs.

Forbes' Steven Keen faults Krugman for not seeing the difference between "peer-to-peer" lending and bank lending. But I have a different beef.

My point is that Krugman is wrong about debt. When families "run up debts" they don't necessarily make themselves poorer; they are just making a bet on the future. They are betting that they will have the income to service those debts. The same with the Brits in the Napoleonic War; they were betting that they would win, and to the victor the spoils. There is no problem if the bets pay out. But if the bet fails, then we have a different story.

And so we return to a piece of wisdom told to me by a communications engineer. The interesting case is not the successful transmission of data, he said. The interesting case is what you do when things go wrong.

When a debtor fails to service a loan, it is because he is poorer than he expected; his bet on the future has not panned out. But then the question is: who is going to pay for his mistake? The answer is: everyone. The debtor must surrender his collateral, such as it is, and the creditor most likely must take a haircut. Everyone is poorer.

That's what might have happened at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. If the Brits hadn't won, or if the industrial revolution hadn't come along and flooding the nation with wealth and the government with revenues, well then the British propertied classes wouldn't have been sitting on their £1,000 a year, they would have been sitting on a lot less and would have had to get out and get a job, like Charles Dickens, son of a bankrupt.

Nobody understands debt. Least of all Paul Krugman. Every investment is a bet on the future. With debt, I say that if I can invest money in a project right now I can make enough money to service the debt and pay it off, and if there are any profits then I get them all. With equity, I say that if I can invest money in a project right now I will share the profits, if any, with my partners.

If the bet pays off, then we are all winners. If the bet goes bad, then we are all losers.

The problem with the world right now is that we are arguing about who is going to take the losses from the bubble of the 2000s. Should it be the Greeks? The Germans? Krugman's "usual suspects?" The minority homeowners who got loans on a "dream house" that went south? (Yeah. Did you know that minority homeowners were hardest hit in the mortgage meltdown?)

The problem for the Paul Krugmans of the world is that the liberal ruling class made all kinds of promises to all kinds of people: vote for us and we'll give you loot -- pensions, subsidies, jobs, health care, you name it -- and they paid for the loot with debt. Now they can't pay out on the promises. What to do? Blame greedy bankers, blame "austerity," blame the rich, blame the Germans.

So what do they want to do? They want the rest of us to pay for their blunders.

The whole point of Keynesian economics is to avoid the truth, that government screwed up and pumped up the economy with easy money, and now we will all have to pay the piper.

That's one thing that government can never admit: it's time to pay the piper.