The Entire Left Adrift in Denial

Peggy Noonan, America's intelligent aunt, usually tells us where the zeitgeist is. This week she calls out the Obamis as "An Administration Adrift on Denial." She writes about "willful denials and dodges" and mindless talk about "root causes" and "lack of opportunity for jobs."

Actually, I get it. As the airline safety guys say: when aircrew experience an emergency, they instinctively follow their training.

Same thing with community organizers and lefty activists. "Root causes" and relative deprivation is what they learn in activism school. Their silly shibboleths explain everything for them. So this week the Obama administration stages a White House Summit on Violent Extremism opening with a Muslim prayer.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Look, I get it. The left, since its inception with the Communist Manifesto has been pushing an impossible idea.  The left argued that the working class in 1848, then in an epochal transition from rural indigence to urban prosperity, were the most outrageously exploited group in human history. Under the flawed exploitation of the bourgeoisie the workers would sink into "immiseration."

So of course when the going gets tough the left looks like idiots.

Since the 1840s billions of peasants have made the transition from rural poverty  to urban competence, and still the left insists that our times are the worst thing since the Crusades and the Inquisition.

Right  now the folks making the transition are the world's Muslims. Achieving strategic concentration in the cities of Europe they are enraged, as groups before them, with their backwardness and the shame of their situation as struggling immigrants.

So time after time, the left encourages a group recently arrived in the city with approval for tribalism and clientism, assuring them that they can continue their tribal ways in the non-tribal world of the city. The young men form criminal gangs and the left whines about police brutality. Eventually it all works out in spite of the left as the young men get jobs, get married, and learn how to thrive in the city.

Look, I get it. We middle-class whiteys don't want to get too rough and tough with the Muslims in our cities, and we don't want to have to sweep across the Middle East cleaning out nests of crazed rapists and beheaders. Meanwhile the huge dust-pile of the welfare state with its benefits, its taxes, its credentialism, its crony corruption, its regulations makes it hard for the new immigrants to make a new life for themselves.

Here at home President Obama and his supporters look like idiots for denying the obvious, that the West has a problem with Muslims enraged by their backwardness and their marginalization and their failed states.

And I couldn't be happier.

That's because the world is working the way it should. The ruling class screws up yet again and eventually, at the last moment, the people vote for a new administration to clean up the mess. Because this is America, and in America we do the right thing, but only after trying everything else.

The confusion, the mess, the denial, the lies, the evasions, the stupidity: they are all necessary stages on the way to a solution.

The glorious destiny of Barack Obama is to screw up in such an epic scale that nobody except a mind-numbed Democratic partisan will fail to see that in 2016, it will be Time for a Change.

The Bright Side of Obama's "Strategic Patience"

Everyone is worrying that the 2010s is the 1930s all over again. They want to get up and deal with the Islamic menace before it gets any worse. And maybe they are right.

President Obama, of course, advocates "strategic patience," which means what, exactly?

Should "the West" follow a forward strategy, and whack the Islamic State right now? Or should we stand back from the Middle East and let the chips fall where they may?

I'm a conservative, so I've tended to support the forward strategy, memorably enunciated by Ronald Reagan at the time of the Cold War: "Here's my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose."

But the funny thing about Ronald Reagan is that he won the Cold War with hardly firing a shot. He talked a good game, he cranked up the Defense budget, he got the spies helping the Lech Walesas behind the enemy line, he got the US economy out of its stagflationary Keynesian slump, he whacked the dime-store Commies in Grenada. And the rest is history.

One of the things that liberals harped on about during the Cold War was US support of right-wing dictators. It forced US apologists like Jeane Kirkpatrick to insist that there was a difference between right-wing authoritarian dictators and left-wing totalitarian dictators. And maybe she was right, in the bipolar days of the Cold War.

The reason to support authoritarians is usually "stability." We support right-wing dictators because they are a lot better than lefty totalitarians. But what about the Middle East? Should we support, e.g., Saudi Arabia, because they are a bulwark against radical Iran?

The problem with "stability" according to the Black Swan guy, Nassir Nicholas Taleb, is it tends to freeze things in place. What happens in the spring when the ice breaks up? You get a world war.

Now the West has basically kept the Middle East in a fast-frozen mode for the last century, ever since the Ottoman Empire broke up at the end of World War I. And the reason, of course, is Oil. The Middle East, ever since Winston Churchill switched the British Royal Navy from coal to oil, has been the source of the world's cheapest oil. So the West has wanted to dominate the region to make sure that the oil keeps coming.

That's why we were meddling in Iran in the early 1950s. That's why we've supported the Saudi family dynasty since whenever. That's why we cared about the thug Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile the Middle East has been seething under the western knout. One day it will explode. And then what?

President Obama recommends "strategic patience." We conservatives assume that this is merely a cover for the left-wing argument that the West is to blame for everything, because of its racist colonialism and imperialism. For Obama, we assume, the West has it coming, and has no moral right to interfere in the Middle East.

But suppose President Obama is right for the wrong reasons. Suppose that the best strategy is the good old Cold War strategy of "containment." Let the Middle East become a cauldron of hate and blood, but establish a clear perimeter, starting at Israel, at the Bosphorus, at the border between Pakistan and India. We will contain the fire at the borders: thus far and no further.

This is a good time to switch strategies, from the Bush forward strategy to the Obama strategic patience, because of the fracking revolution. Instead of the left's prophecy of "peak oil" it looks like there is an ocean of hydrocarbon out there from natural gas to oil.  That means that we don't care as much about Mideast oil as we used to do.

Right now, it looks like there is plenty of fracked hydrocarbon at $50-60 per barrel, and it puts the "stability" regimes and the radical regimes of the Middle East in a quandary. They can use the oil weapon, but in doing so and raising the price they will just make it easier for Big Oil and little oil to do more fracking. But if they cut production they get less money and they need the money. All the big oil-producing nations, from the Saudis to the Iranians to the Venezuelans "need" the oil price up at $100 per barrel or more.

Various critics of Islam argue that it is ill adapted to the modern age. It retains a pre-trading mentality, a philosophy of global conquest in jihad that doesn't work any more than the nostalgic global totalitarianism of communism and socialism can work. Since it was impossible to convince the true-believers of the left that socialism could not work until communism crashed and burned in 1990-91, there is no reason to believe that the Islamists will abandon their jihad for world domination before its catastrophic collapse.

It's at this point that I like to invoke the Chinese Christian from David Aikman's Jesus in Beijing. Here is what he said.

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. 

OK. So what is it about Christianity? I suggest, following Rene Girard, that Christianity, more than any other transcendental or secular religion, has articulated a philosophy of human comity. It directs every human to serve before they collect. It tells people to love their enemies. It tells that that in service is perfect freedom. This goes against the basic human instinct to strike first before the other guy gets his chance. It goes against the ancient instinct of the border war, the escalating feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. And of  course it goes against the modern totalitarianism of basic conflict of interest between the races, between the sexes, between the classes, between religions.

The modern totalitarianisms are cunning. They understand how to get people riled up. First, in the 19th century they got the working class all riled up against the bourgeoisie. Then, with "cultural Marxism" they got all kinds of other groups riled up: the blacks in Ferguson, the women in college, the gays in their urban ghettos.

From a tactical political point of view, these totalitarianisms are brilliant. But there is a problem. These political tactics wall up groups into resentful ghettos. They prevent people from surrendering to the market and making the profoundly social and altruistic decision to find something in this world that contributes to other peoples' welfare, and then doing it.

That is what the Islamists are doing to Muslims worldwide. They are telling Muslims that the way to the future is to conquer the world, not to serve it.  Maybe they are right, but if they are the whole history of the past 500 years has been a terrible mistake.

The only way to demonstrate who is making the mistake is to step back from the Middle East and let the chips fall where they may, except in Israel. Sorry, jihadis, no messing with Israel. And in the rest of the world, we enforce our Judeo-Christian doctrine of service. Muslims that want to thrive in the West are welcome. But they must show by their actions that they accept the fundamental principle of the modern economy. They must seek to serve before they demand to collect.

On my theory of the world, the history of the last two centuries has been the story of various foolish attempts to rebel against the new world order of markets, exchange, and service to others. On this view, radical Islam is merely the latest and hopefully the last such rebellion.

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.