The Obama Implosion Alert.

We knew that liberal government was going to fail about 40 years ago. That's when, as Charles Murray wrote in Losing Ground, the results came in on the social science that instrumented the War on Poverty. Liberals read the results and did nothing.

The War on Poverty conducted in the 1960s included a raft of programs recommended by liberal social scientists, from welfare to job training and community activism. Result, according to the social science instrumentation? No difference. Of course many things got worse, such as out-of-wedlock births and a move away from work.

Yeah. It's 40 years later and liberals are still saying "more of the same."

Fast forward to today. In Charles Murray's 2012 book, Coming Apart we see that for the top 20 percent of whites, about 5 percent of the adult men aged 30-49 in the top 20 percent aren't making a living, and 30 percent of adult men aged 30-49 in the bottom 30 percent aren't making a living. You can calk about "income inequality" till the cows come home, but the problem here is cultural inequality. Rich people work hard, and poor people don't. That's the opposite of 100 years ago when poor people worked hard, and so did their children.

Now my feeling is that we are approaching a tipping point. I think that the full-on liberal activist program of President Obama is going to force the American people to demand a change.

Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy argued that the voters can't really tell the politicians what they want. The only thing they can do is use their votes to elect the politicians that will rule over them. Voters can only call for Four More Years or say that it is Time for a Change.

Most of the time politicians present the voters with muddy compromise. They shift a little to the left while trying to assure the right that nothing has changed. And vice versa. But President Obama has rejected that model of government. He is committed to getting as much of the progressive agenda enacted, by any means possible, while he is in office. Presumably he feels that by throwing everything against the wall, some of it will stick.

The other possibility, of course, for Obama's legacy is the experience of the German Army in 1942. The southern army group headed for the Caucasus while the Sixth Army was assigned to take Stalingrad. The southern army group covered a lot of ground, but because Stalingrad on its left wing did not fall, all that territory was gained for nothing, and when the Red Army attacked and encircled the Sixth Army the entire southern army group had to retreat. It was, of course, the turning point in the whole war on the Eastern Front.

I think — OK I hope — that President Obama and the Democrats are in the overstretch situation that the Germans experienced in 1942. They've pushed their wave way up the beach and the tide is about to turn. Think of Obamacare as the Democrats' version of Stalingrad. If they can't get Obamacare to work, they are screwed.

In military affairs, the danger of an over-extension is that you are really vulnerable to something going wrong.  If the tide of fortune changes, it's likely to bury you in the undertow.

If you are a liberal, you think of everything that the president has done as sensible moderate stuff, long overdue and held up for years, decades, by racist, sexist, homophobic Republicans and conservatives, people that have opposed and stymied the progressive agenda at every turn. As conservatives and Republicans gave President Bush the benefit of the doubt for most of the Iraq War, so do liberals give President Obama the benefit of the doubt for all of his initiatives.

And just as liberals pretty quickly decided that President Bush and all his works were wrong and ought to be opposed, so do conservatives (and quite a lot of moderates, I'd say) think that President Obama and all his policies are wrong.

We think that the Keynesian stimulus was wrong, particularly as its main effort was to funnel money to state and local governments; we think that Keynesian economics has been proved wrong both by theory and by experience. We think that Obamacare was wrong; we think that government is completely the wrong institution to deliver any kind of service because government is uniquely incapable of fixing problems, because just doesn't have the bandwidth to fix things. We think that the liberal green energy program is utterly foolish, not just because the idea that CO2 is going to fry the world is unproven and because green energy has turned out to be a cesspool of crony capitalism that pays billions to crony capitalists and stick the middle class and the poor with the bill, but because wind and solar represent a step backwards, for a simple reason. Wind and solar are less concentrated than fossil fuels and nuclear. We think that the president's policy to regulate the internet as a monopoly telephone utility is utter folly. We think the president's policy to hammer out a nuclear deal with Iran is utter folly. We don't have a clue what he thinks he's doing.

Then there's the big stuff, the cultural collapse at the bottom of society, described by Charles Murray and now by Robert D. Putnam in Our Kids, that demonstrates that, after all the liberal welfare state programs, from health care to welfare to education to activism, the poorer people in our society are getting absolutely screwed. Liberals say it's all because of "economic inequality." Really? After fifty years of the Great Society? After a century of middle-class entitlements and labor laws? Things still aren't copacetic? No, liberals. The problem is cultural inequality.

Could it be, liberals that the problem is not "economic inequality" but your programs? Could it be that just shoveling out benefits to people tears society apart, and denies low-income people the chance to contribute to society?

Could it be that it is the liberal programs themselves that are causing the problem? Could it be that "fighting inequality" with government programs is precisely the wrong thing to do?

Like I say. At some point mainstream elected Democrats are going to look at the polls and say to themselves: "If we don't separate ourselves from President Obama yesterday we are all going to lose our elective offices." And then you'll see a stampede among the lemmings that you never saw in your lifetime.

Liberal Robert Putnam Still Doesn't Get It

So now the other penny has dropped. Back in 2012 Charles Murray reported in Coming Apart that everything was copacetic in the upper 20 percent of America. But things were not so good in the middle, and in the low-income sector the men didn't work and the women didn't marry. This was not so good for kids.

Now liberal Robert D. Putnam, author of the bestseller Bowling Alone is out with Our Kids. Putnam says that rich kids are doing fine but poor kids are not. Writes W. Bradford Wilcox in The Wall Street Journal:

[Putnam] argues that children's acccess to the core institutions that foster their development — strong families, strong schools, strong communities — is increasingly separate and unequal.

Murray's book was just about white America, because he did not want to get into trouble for raaacism as he did with The Bell Curve. But Putnam is a liberal, so he's allowed to talk about black folks. He gets to write about black "Desmond, son of affluent married parents, and Elijah, whose working-class parents, in his own words, 'couldn't live together for nothing.'"

Bully for Putnam. But what does he suggest? You guessed it: more of the same.

Mr. Putnam concludes "Our Kids" by calling for a raft of civic initiatives and public policies, many of which seek to add to services for poor and working-class children and their parents.

Oh great: more free stuff. Like that's going to make a difference.

It's comical. Over a decade ago, Robert D. Putnam wrote a book where he observed that Americans aren't as civic minded as they used to be, and don't join civic organizations like they used to. But he fails to make the obvious point that maybe, maybe, Americans don't join because government has taken away the public square with government's stupid programs that encourage and reward people for being helpless freeloaders.

Now Putnam writes about how, oh wow, rich kids with married parents are doing better than poor kids with single parents. And what does he propose? More government programs to encourage freeloading. And the current liberal ignis fatuus, more preschool.

Now I've developed the notion in my American Manifesto that government is always and everywhere an armed minority occupying some territory, taxing the inhabitants thereof, and keeping itself in power by rewarding its supporters with free stuff. Thus the liberal welfare state stays in power by offering free stuff to its supporters: minorities, women, government employees and gentry liberals.

There's only one little problem with this: freeloading on free stuff is anti-social. You just have to ask Kant's question whether this would work if everyone did it. No, it wouldn't! If everyone is competing for free stuff, and politicians are competing to offer free stuff, then you don't have a society any more. You just have piracy and plunder.

The dirty little truth about liberals is that, for all their preening and self-congratulation, their liberal welfare state is nothing more than a robber state. Liberals tax productive citizens, anyone that has to work to put food on the table, and they give the tax monies to their supporters, the freeloaders. Everything else is just window dressing and distractions from cute little fluffy puppy dogs.

What your liberal neighbor and Robert D. Putnam can't see is that this current springtime for freeloaders can't go on like this. It is hammering the poor, and it is making life pretty miserable for the ordinary middle class.

Eventually the American people will get this and throw the liberals out. The tragedy is that they will probably "get it" far too late.

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.