ISIS is Just a Normal Religious Frenzy

After reading the already classic Atlantic piece on “What ISIS Really Wants” by Graeme Wood, you can understand why the liberal response to Islamic terrorism has been so inadequate. The problem is that liberals completely misunderstand the nature of the last two centuries. Take this mind-blowing statement of ignorance and misunderstanding.

Centuries have passed since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes.

Oh dear, liberals. Where to begin? First of all, it may be convenient for liberals to write off the Protestant Reformation and the little matter of the French Huguenots and the Thirty Years War as "wars of religion," but the notion rather elides what was going on.

Centuries ago there was a fundamental transformation in the culture and economics and power in Northwest Europe. Not surprisingly there was a mighty clash between the various actors at all levels of social interaction, political, religious, economic, military. Marxists might even call it a "class struggle."

Now what on earth do you call the convulsions of the 20th century and its two world wars? I'd call it a monster religious war of the ages between at least three secular religions: communism, fascism, and democracy. Each of these secular religions has a different idea of the meaning of the modern age and the way to organize human society and to live in community.

Of course the worst convulsions occurred in countries like Russia, China, and Germany where the people experienced military defeats and a collapse of the old order. What on earth would you expect in the wake of collapse and ruin? I tell you what I'd expect. I'd expect a profound turn to religion. Only, of course, in the modern age, I would expect secular religions to burst forth.

Now, according to sociologist of religion Rodney Stark in books like The Future of Religion, when people get the religious bug they go in one of two directions. They either attempt go back to the tried and true, as in going back to basics, or as in recovering the true meaning of the gospels. Stark calls this kind of approach a "sect," meaning a religious group that breaks away from a mainstream church looking for the original meaning of the religion.

The other approach is religious innovation, forming a group that looks forward to the truth rather than backward. Stark calls this kind of group a "cult." In practice, many groups combine a backward and a forward look. Nazism combined nationalism and socialism, which we will stipulate as forward-looking, with a return back to blood and soil. Communism imagined a glorious future of perfect community that seemed oldly nostalgic to a mythical past of "primitive communism."

Now let us turn to the Middle East. Just like China and Russia in the 19th century, the Middle East is in crisis. Nothing works, and the people are desperate. Not surprisingly many Muslims have turned to Islam and tried to discover where things went wrong. ISIS, on the report of Graeme Wood, is an attempt to recover the original truth of Islam from its founding texts. According to Islamic expert Bernard Haykel, ISIS "is trying to re-crate the earliest days of Islam and is faithfully reproducing its norms of war" and the caliphate and slavery and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.

On the view of Rodney Stark this is completely understandable and normal. Let's look at another authority, William G. McLoughlin, who has studied religion and politics in the US in Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform. He argues that the US has responded to perceptions of social crisis with repeated Great Awakenings in religious enthusiasm followed by political reform. The First Great Awakening in the mid 18th century was followed by American Revolution. The Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century was followed by the Civil War to end slavery.

Of course, we Americans look at our history and nod in appreciation at the successful upheavals where we went from a bad place to a better. But the opposite can happen. We conservatives would argue that the rise of communism as a solution to political crises in Russia and China and elsewhere have yielded nothing but disaster. At any rate, Russia and China aren't going the communist route right now.

So the question is whether ISIS and the Iranian Revolution are going to usher in a political and economic and cultural revival in the Middle East or whether they will bury their peoples in a maelstrom like the maelstroms of Soviet Russia and Maoist China. For us in the West the answer is obvious. ISIS and Iran are leading the people of the Middle East off the cliff.

But the ISIS enthusiasts don't agree, and chaps like Rodney Stark would say that they are doing what the West did five hundred years ago when in the Protestant Reformation it attempted to distill the original true essence of Christianity with the benefits of the printing revolution that let any middle-class person conduct their own independent study of the Christian scriptures.

A chap like Ken Wilber has a slightly different take. His "integral psychology" is based on a number of stage models in developmental psychology: stuff like Piaget, Maslow, and Kohlberg. On Wilber's view, when a people experience a disaster, like the Germans in World War I, they respond by stepping down a level in development; they go back to the developmental stage that worked in the past. Thus the most advanced country in the world, the nation that came up with German philosophy, relativity, and quantum mechanics, predictably returned to the idea of race and land, and invaded the empty wastes of Russia to acquire more "living room."

So what will happen with ISIS and Iran? We cannot know, of course. But I think that my view, distilled from thinkers like Stark, McLoughlin, and Wilber, are a much better way of understanding the Islamic threat than tired liberal talk about "wars of religion."

What End-of-Dynasty Looks Like

If you are a conservatives like me you look at the news every day for portents. You hope to see signs in the sky that the Liberal Dynasty is coming to an end, and that the way is clearing for the Glorious Conservative Future.

I know. Life isn't really that simple, not even close. But still, it's obvious that the liberal regime is tired and uncertain. Liberals know something is wrong, even if the New York Times and NPR insist on assuring everyone that everything is copacetic.

If the Liberal Dynasty is really ageing, then it ought to look a bit like China in the second half of the 19th century. I've been reading Jung Chang's Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, and I have to report, liberals or no liberals, it's pretty harrowing, as you read about the Manchu ruling class stumbling from one disaster to another. It's sobering to realize that when Cixi died, in 1908, the horrors hadn't really begun.

Jung Chang (author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China and Mao: The Unknown Story) is writing a revisionist history. In her story Cixi is a frustrated reformer instead of the Dragon Lady of previous histories that held China back and frustrated all the reformers.

In any case, the situation in China, from the start of the Opium Wars in 1839, was extremely challenging. The imperial system, that had existed for a thousand years, was suddenly confronted by western commercial powers that wanted to open up China to trade. That's what commercial nation states do. Their merchants want to trade, and they pressure and fund their governments to protect their trade from pirates and plunder.

China's response to this challenge was, to radically simplify, twofold. On the one side were the conservatives who wanted to continue the Confucian system as written, and on the other side reformers that in varying degrees liked the western system and/or realized that China better get with the program or else. Complicating the whole thing was Japan, that woke up from its ancient slumber and decided it wanted to dominate east Asia, including China.

Understand that emperors (and the rest of the Manchu ruling class) were educated solely in the Confucian classics. So when the west came in wanting to set up trading ports and institute western commercial law, and build railways and so on, what on earth would Confucius say? No much. But obviously the western ways would completely transform China. Everyone understood that.

In the event, of course, China under various incompetent emperors and advisers and the remarkable Cixi stumbled from one cock-up to another, during which the education system was completely revised, Beijing University was founded, a modern navy was built and destroyed by the Japanese, and the western armies visited Beijing in 1860 and 1900.

Indeed, China came into the modern world just in time for nationalism and socialism and all the horrors of the 20th century that we, in the Anglo-Saxon west, have mostly dodged.

Back to the Liberal Dynasty. Are we looking at some sort of Mandarin end times with the manifold failures of the Obama regime? We have the president invoking various readings from the liberal scriptures as in Crusaders and colonialism and endless racism while he mindlessly sets liberal activists loose to tangle the nation up in stupid Obamacare and stupid race wars and mindless green politics. Is that a repeat of the Chinese stumblings in 1840-1900?

The answer is that we don't know. Obviously liberalism and big government social democracy is in trouble. Any fool can see that. But politics and reform isn't a simple matter of issues and policy proposals and reform. Politics is about power, and liberals still have lots of power, and they still have lots of faith in their project. And they have the 47%, the folks getting some sort of free stuff from the government.

It's obvious though that liberals are nowhere where they'd thought they were after the glories of 2008 and America's First Black President. It was obvious back then that liberals thought they were going to own the future: a quick stimulus to set the economy to rights, a health reform to finally set health care on the right path, and green energy to save the planet from global warming. Grateful minorities, women and educated youth would then vote them in for a generation.

In fact, the opposite has happened. The economy has sputtered, Obamacare is a metastasizing disaster, green energy is a bird-slaughtering boondoggle, and Congress is solidly Republican. How could it have happened?

That's exactly what the conservatives asked in China in the second half of the 19th century. They were trying to do everything by the book but things were collapsing all around them.

Who knows how things will end up in America in the first half of the 21st century?

When Minorities Fight Over Dem Spoils

Here's a charming prospect. African Americans are pissed off at Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) for endorsing Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) for the Senate seat of young Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) who is retiring in 2016. Steve Phillips says that Reid is racist for endorsing a white Democrat for the job.

And in California, the Dem establishment is running Kamala Harris (D), the state Attorney General. She's apparently part African American and part Asian, although from her photo on Wikipedia you'd be forgiven for thinking that she's just a well-born liberal with all the advantages that gets you. But the Hispanics want to run former LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. They reckon it's their turn.

It makes you wonder how long our ruling-class white liberals are going to continue to rule the Democratic Party. It all dovetails, as they say. For half a century white liberals have been telling us that racism is pervasive and so we need quotas, or affirmative action, or diversity, disparate impact, or something in order to correct racism or institutional racism or glass ceilings, or microaggression, or something, and that means that moderate or conservative Americans, black or white, need not apply.

But now the liberals' top students are applying the logic of liberal race politics to upper-class liberals themselves. And really, what took so long? Liberal race politics is just a high-falutin' form of good old machine politics, of the kind that the Democratic Party has successfully run ever since the first Irish fire captain rose to political power in the mid 19th century.  First the Irish did it, then the Jews did it, then the Italians did it. And now the blacks and the Latinos are doing it. You have to be carefully taught, as they sang in South Pacific. Only in those days high-born songsters like Oscar Hammerstein II were hymning against bigotry and hate, as they thought.

Although I've always thought that the idea that you have to be "carefully taught" to hate is the most amazing nonsense ever. Taught to hate? Come on liberals. You have to be carefully taught not to hate!

When the Latinos and the African Americans have elbowed the white liberals out of the Party of Race, what then? Will liberals start watching Fox News? Will they start to read The Wall Street Journal? Will they start to listen to Rush Limbaugh?  Will they start to swear by Austrian economics?  Will they suddenly discover the virtues of limited government? Will they suddenly turn against the idea of a "living" constitution?

And will they even start to vote Republican? Well, maybe. But I for one think that actually coming out of the closet and admitting to voting Republican is beyond the compass of today's liberal ruling class. It's a class thing, you know. No liberal can imagine herself voting with the party of the bitter clingers. And racists, sexists, and homophobes -- and cis-gendered micro-aggressors.

I mean, darling. Have you seen what those people wear?

The Liberal "Compromise" Chimera

What do people mean when they decry the "partisanship" in Washington and call for compromise?

They mean, of course, that Republicans should compromise with Democrats. They mean that, when Democrats propose an Obamacare, that Republicans should climb on board. They mean that, when Democrats propose gay marriage, Republicans should not object. They mean that old white men should not stand athwart history, shouting Stop!

What they mean is that they are troubled that the foundations are shaking and they wish the troublemakers would shut up. What they mean is that they know that things are screwed up but they don't really want to face up to the changes that will be needed.

These are people that believe in individual responsibility but then complain about greedy bankers and insurance company profits. Hey! If you don't like greedy bankers then put your money in a money market mutual fund. If you don't like insurance companies then go for Seattle's Group Health or Kaiser Permanente. This isn't hard.

And there's a bigger issue. If you believe in compromise then you cannot believe in big government. Government is force, politics is division. The point of passing a big-government program is that the people, through their representatives, tax business or the rich or that fellow behind the tree to give themselves benefits. It's a squeeze play. The idea is to make some other guy pay for your free stuff. The only compromise, according to the settled science in Buchanan and Tullock in The Calculus of Consent, is the deal-making to get the votes of the guys on the fence. Since fence-sitters and their constituents aren't going to benefit from the new free stuff, you have to give them something to compensate them for their loss.

Even the government's legal system is an enemy of compromise. True compromise would be to settle your differences, man to man, before going to the government for justice. The point about a suit at law is that each side presents their best case, looking at the issue from their side only, and then the judge makes a binding decision on both the parties. This is not compromise. It is two opposed parties that can't see each other's point of view going to a third party and saying: "look, we can't figure this out on our own: you figure it out and tell us what to do."

Look I get it. I understand the frustrations of good loyal liberals. They must feel, instinctively even if they don't admit it to themselves, that things are going wrong with the liberal project. Nobody thought back in 1970 that the obvious decision to legalize abortion would face a generational pushback. Nobody thought that women would oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. Nobody thought that the sensible and progressive programs of the Great Society would smash the black family (and the low-income white family) to smithereens. Nobody thought that the sensible and anti-racist "affordable housing" programs would blow up the financial system in 2008.

In fact, most liberals can't even begin to admit any of these problems to themselves, let alone talk about it with their liberal friends, let alone admitting it in The New York Times, let alone talking confidentially about it on NPR, let alone compromising anything in the public square. That's why the sufferings of African Americans have to be caused by racism or inequality. That's why the crash of 2008 was caused by greedy bankers. That's why the mess in health care is caused by the drive for insurance company profits. That's why liberals try to raise up generation after generation of social justice warriors schooled in grievance and activism.

If you really believe in compromise then you can't believe in big government, because government is force, and system, including the system of government social programs, is domination. Compromise means citizens getting together and solving their differences without anyone having the option of resorting to the club of political power and government force.

Science says that if you put Americans into a room and ask them to solve a problem they will do it, and they will do it by trying to give everyone a bit of the solution. So science says that the ingredients for compromise are there. The only thing needed is to figure out how to create the conditions that will encourage compromise.

Look, I get it. If you are a liberal you see dark forces everywhere combining to attack the great white citadels of liberal governance, threatening to demolish every social gain that liberals generously bestowed upon a grateful peasantry since the first days of wage and hour laws and bans on child labor.

But compromise starts with working to understand the point of view of the "other." And that is something that liberals haven't even begun to think actually applies to them rather than the great unwashed "other."

And so liberals natter on about compromise, unthinkingly believing that compromise is something that other people should be doing, not realizing that compromise starts with you, not the other guy.

And above all, compromise can only start with both sides leave their weapons at the door. I am not talking about assault rifles; I am talking about power: political power, economic power, cultural power, personal power.

Anything else is a chimera.

Roberts Won't Save Obamacare This Time

Back in 2012 liberals were delighted and conservatives were horrified when Chief Justice Roberts turned out to be the swing vote to put the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act over the top.

But I understood what the chief justice was doing. He understood that the Supreme Court could not obliterate the Obama administration's signature legislative act of 2010. Not in 2012. It would have opened a hornet's nest if it did.

So I wrote that "Roberts hands a poisoned chalice to the president."

Chief Justice Roberts did his level best "nudge" the voters.  First of all, he ruled that ObamaCare is constitutional because it is really a tax...  Secondly, Roberts ruled that the federal government cannot penalize states that don't accept expanded Medicaid.

But now President Obama is a lame duck. Now the Congress is Republican. Now Obamacare is a confirmed failure. Now the American people have been shown "good and hard" that Obamacare doesn't protect them and doesn't make health care affordable.

Now Chief Justice Roberts can bury the knife in Obamacare. Now Roberts can write something akin to his wry comment in Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District:

T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300-301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. 

This time, he could say something like: "The way to protect patients is to allow patients to buy health insurance plans that protect them. They way to affordable care is to allow Americans to buy affordable health insurance plans."

Back in 2012 every partisan liberal and every Democratic operative with a byline was enrolled in the Obama army and would do anything to help the president's reelection.

But today the liberals and the MSM are divided in their own minds. Should they defend Obama? Or support Hillary Clinton? Should they defend Obamacare to the last man or should they help the ordinary middle class as Obama's "middle class economics" pretends to do.

The fact is that today Democrats are on the defensive; the fact is that today the Democrats have a huge corruption issue growing every day; the fact is that today the American people are restive and are starting to think it is Time for a Change.

The fact is that all the portents are favorable for Chief Justice Roberts to rule that the IRS does not have the power to change the plain meaning of the text of a federal law. Because justice.

The fact is that Americans of all kinds are starting to wonder about John Adams' 1780 catchphrase: "a government of laws not of men," and they don't like what they see.

Liberals Discover States' Rights Over Obamacare

One of the things I've been wondering about, vis-a-vis Obamacare and the King v. Burwell, case is how on earth you can dodge the fact that the Obama administration changed the plain meaning of the text of the PPACA in giving out subsidies to people in states that did not set up a state health insurance exchange.

As all the world knows, and Jonathan Gruber explained, Obamacare was set up with a gun to the heads of the states. Set up a health insurance exchange or forget the subsidies, says the text of the PPACA. But little Johnny and little Barry miscalculated on their little playground bullying. Most of the states didn't set up an exchange. So it follows that they don't get the subsidies. And that is what King v. Burwell is asking the Supreme Court to enforce.

So my question has been: how will the Supreme Court liberals justify their knee-jerk vote to uphold the IRS's illegal payment of subsidies to people in states without state exchanges?

Perfectly simple, writes The Wall Street Journal. You gussy up a states rights argument, a thing that liberals usually abhor.

But Justices Anthony Kennedy, Elena Kagan and others wondered if this arrangement crosses over from Congress merely attempting to influence state decisions into using spending and regulation to compel these sovereigns to join ObamaCare.

Gag me with a spoon, girls. You mean to say that all of a sudden you are worried about the federal government bullying the states into something? Why aren't you worried, e.g., about the Office of Civil Rights bullying state universities into convoluted and probably unconstitutional policies to fight the supposed "rape culture" on campus? And a hundred other liberal pet programs.

“From the standpoint of the dynamics of federalism . . . there’s a serious constitutional problem if we adopt your argument,” Justice Kennedy told plaintiffs counsel Michael Carvin.

Whoa, baby. Who'd a thought it? Constitutional issue with coercing the states? I'm shocked, shocked that there is political arm-twisting going on here.

Anyway, at least the liberal justices will have a peg to hang their kick-jerk liberal hats on. I mean, we wouldn't want to subject them to the humiliation of voting for Obamacare's illegal subsidies "just 'cos." That would be wrong.

A couple of days ago I wrote about "The Three Stages of Government and Law." My point was that any political dynasty rewrites the law to suit its convenience once it seizes power, because it can. This act of force has a beneficial result, from the point of view of the new ruling class, because it creates an aura of legality around its legislation as it enters into the zenith of its power. But at the end of a dynasty the rules that the ruling class set up no longer suffice to get it out of a jam like the Obamacare trainwreck.  So the ruling class starts flailing around and violating its own sacred principles every time it smashes up the family car after yet another drunken power binge.

The whole of liberal governance is based upon the idea that the Feds know best and that the sheeple should just shut up and accept that government by liberal experts and activists is just and fair.

So now, all of a sudden, liberals are invoking states rights? Now, at last, they are worried about the Feds coercing the states? Yeah, and I gotta bridge to sell you.

My point is that we are seeing, with the Obama administration violating its own law and digging up states rights arguments to justify its illegal and unjust Obamacare war on health care, the crumbing and ruin of the great liberal dynasty.

And it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Greece's Problem Isn't Socialism, It's Politics

It's easy to say that the problem with Greece is socialism. Or that the problem with President Obama is Alinskyism.

But look, socialism is just another apology for big government, and every ruling class has an ideology like that. In socialism the idea is that the working class is the biggest class and so they ought to rule -- through their evolved and educated leaders, of course. This is no different than kings talking about Divine Right or landed aristocrats talking about the rule of the best people.

The fact is that governments get into power by offering their supporters loot and plunder. It doesn't matter whether you are talking about Charlemagne looting and plundering eastward from Trier into the German lands, or whether you are offering the workers a bite of corporate profits. It still amounts to a promise of loot and plunder in return for support.

The problem is that loot and plunder eventually results in a wasteland. If people are licensed to go around stealing stuff, then less stuff will be produced, and there will be less stuff to go around. So every society must rail against thieves and robbers or go out of business.

Now the truth is that all governments, from a band of insurgent guerrillas to a mighty nation state, occupy territory, defend it with a armed force, and tax the inhabitants for the right to go about their daily business of producing and consuming. The question is: How much? How much expropriation of peoples' livelihood is enough? The answer is simple. A government will stop taking more to give to its supporters when: a) it runs out of money, or b) it provokes a head of rebellion.

That is the way to understand the Greek situation. Governments in Greece have bought the support of ordinary voters for decades with the promise of free stuff. But now the money is running out. Under pressure from other European governments the Greek government has implemented a policy of "austerity," meaning it has eased off on some of the free stuff. But austerity is very unpopular with the government's supporters and so a new party, Syriza, has arisen and obtained the support of the voters by asserting that all the cutbacks are unnecessary and a cruel trick of the Germans.

No doubt. But here is what a McKinsey report had to say in 2012.

Large scale business operations had been discouraged by hostile regulations. The generally small scale of businesses that remained, combined with over regulation, complex and restrictive licensing, and a highly volatile tax framework, has deprived the Country of an industrial base sufficient to support its spending.

The public sector had become too expensive and offered low quality output.

A framework of collective, inflexible, and binding labor agreements had led to a disconnection between education and the job market, which led to reduced innovation and under representation of women and young adults in the workforce.

A cumbersome legal and judicial system led to an over abundance of vague and sometimes conflicting laws, which discouraged economic activity.

Widespread tax evasion, which had become endemic in Greek culture, had led to substantial wealth creation outside the formal economy, and had led to a seemingly permanent fiscal shortfall.

Apart from the "widespread tax evasion" you could say the same thing about the US economy, unless you count the widespread use of illegal alien labor and general off-the-books work, condoned by our liberal masters, as "widespread tax evasion."

In my Story So Far about the last half century, I like to say that, in 1980, the liberal consensus had failed, and that made it possible for a right-wing extremist like Ronald Reagan to get elected as president. Reagan implemented a bunch of supply-side reforms, including hard money, that created a 20 year boom. The ruling philosophy of Reaganism was that there is a limited set of things that government can do; it's best for it to stay out of the economy as much as possible and let the people get on with it. The liberal ruling class was flummoxed by this, because it knew that such a thing could not work. Still, after three successive Republican wins they had to do something, and they got it in Bill Clinton, who ran for president as a moderate and then nearly self-destructed with HillaryCare. As time went on, Democrats reverted to the norm, forgetting the lesson of Reagan and the faux moderate tone of Clintonism, and we ended up with Barack Obama who is clearly a left-wing president that believes that everything begins and ends with government dangling free stuff in front of the people while liberals march through the institutions to implement their social agenda and gentry liberal environmental policies.

The problem with Obama-style politics is that it ends up at Greece, because the whole economy gets to be seized up in high friction politics and bureaucracy, crony capitalism and Chicago-style thuggery, and wasteful pet projects for gentry liberals from bike paths to biofuels.

The point is that government is force, and there is only a limited set of things you can do with force, because government force tends to destroy things, to loot the economy for the benefit of its supporters. With big government you get a lot of people sitting around on government pensions and not contributing to the economy. You get a lot of government bureaucrats sitting around and not doing anything to contribute to the economy while they compile regulations to benefit the supporters of the government. You get crony capitalists capitalizing on the governments fashionable enthusiasms, from wind and solar power. And of course you get left-wing activist groups interfering in everything.

Eventually the whole thing goes down the tubes.

My guess is that ordinary middle-class Americans are probably pretty confused and upset by the Obama years. But as yet, they don't really know what to do about it.

In my view the ordinary American middle-class is composed of people that believe, more or less, in responsible individualism. They will respond to a politics that celebrates responsible individualism as a way out of our current malaise.

Because politics isn't the solution to our problem. Politics is just civil war by other means. The solution is for people to go out into the world every morning as a responsible individual asking how they can give to the world.

Politics is all about how much to take, and eventually you run out of things to take.