Liberals Know They're in a Box Canyon

I got directed over to a New York Times editorial "A New Phase in Anti-Obama Attacks" yesterday. It blamed the Republicans for everything. And the commenters agreed.

What's not to like? If I were a liberal who'd climbed aboard the Obama Airtours excursion back in 2008, I'd be getting cranky too. I'd be looking at the canyon walls and wondering how the plane was going to be able to turn and get out of the narrowing canyon. I'd be blaming the Republicans for forcing the Airtours plane into that box canyon. Because it couldn't be my fault for believing all that hope and change rubbish.

Now here comes Salon into the conversation. Salon, in the person of Clintonite Bill Curry in "Hillary Clinton just doesn't get it...," is underwhelmed by Hillary Clinton's campaign. Here's the money quote:

Like Bill Clinton’s 1992 race, this election is about the economy. But this one’s about how to reform the economy, not just jumpstart it. Our political system isn’t set up to debate whether or not our economic system needs real reform. It will take a very different kind of politics, and leader, to spark that debate. 

This just shows the limitation of liberal politics and what a mess the Democrats have got themselves (and us) into.

The problem is that, for Democrats ever since whenever, "reform" has always meant giving more free stuff to their voters. That's what Obamacare is all about: Subsidies for Democratic voters squeezed out of the hide of that voter over there behind the tree.

Democrat-led "reform" isn't so much reforming as recasting, in concrete. Instead of a flexible, adaptable non-system of working people saving for their retirement, we have a rigid government-enforced Social Security system that takes 12 percent of wage income right out of the pockets of wage earners and gives it to politicians. What could go wrong? Instead of a flexible education non-system we have a rigid system of child incarceration and lifer educrats with $1 trillion a year spent by politicians.

The real meaning of reform is to break up the structures of privilege, discredit the dogs-in-a-manger defending their lifetime sinecures, and get everyone to earn a living by offering their labor and ideas to the world without the government getting in the middle and screwing things up. For that job the Democratic Party and everything it stands for is peculiarly unfit for purpose.

The way that Democrats have conducted their politics over the past century has been based on the assumption that "we" know what to do: Education for children to make them ready for the industrial workforce; Social protections for workers from the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism; Pensions for ageing workers; Health care so nobody dies because they can't afford a doctor.

Yes. But what do we do now, when Social Security and Medicare have promised trillions in dollars of benefits more than the taxes to pay for them? What to do about the marginal workers that have been bounced out of the post-crash economy? What to do about the broken families in the inner city?

Democrats are proposing mindless retread policies: like raising the minimum wage; Universal pre-school; Free community college. All familiar administrative state solutions.

But what if the solution is to switch to a non-governmental approach: returning to apprenticeships and on-the-job training? Freeing children from the schools and putting them to work in offices at computers? Reducing the weight of payroll taxes on working people? Putting Fidelity and Vanguard in charge of retirement instead of the Social Security Administration?

What New York Times commenter could ever imagine such a demolition of everything she holds dear?

Let's imagine that high up there in the councils of the meritocracy there are people thinking thoughts like that? How could any Democratic politician listen to them? Because the first and most obvious result of a restructuring of the liberal welfare state would be less jobs for elite liberals.

So it stands to reason that only a party without support from the elite bureaucracies could ever dare to "reform the economy."

The reason that "Our political system isn’t set up to debate whether or not our economic system needs real reform" is that Democrats shout down anyone that tries. So it's bootless to talk about a "different kind of politics, and leader, to spark that debate" when it is the Democrats that have been preventing the debate from starting, let along "sparking," from at least the time that Democrats decided to anathematize Reagan's supply-side economic policies as "Reaganomics" and "trickle-down economics."

The only solution to our problem is for Democrats to get trounced in 2016 by the first landslide election since Reagan, and face in addition the first solid Republican President & Congress since the 1920s. And again in 2020. Then they'll be ready by 2024 to put forward a new Clinton talking about another "Third Way" or "New Democrats" whatever they call it then.

But you'll remember that the Third Way was a deceit. As soon as he got into the White House Clinton raised taxes and proposed HillaryCare. And the voters elected the first Republican Congress since right after World War II.

How Do You Tell Voters That Everything They Know is Wrong?

Donald Lambro is out complaining that, while Gallup tells us that while their polls show that Americans are overwhelmingly concerned about the "economy and jobs," the Republican candidates are merely descanting on abstract principles.

Talking about "liberty," "freedom" and the Constitution are fine and deserve their rightful place in the conversation about where are country is headed. But it doesn't address the bread-and-butter issues that Americans are worrying most about.

Yay! And all that. But there's a problem. Most Americans, while they want more jobs and a better economy, don't want the means that science tells us will achieve that end.

Most Americans and Democrats think it is a good idea to raise the minimum wage. Science and Republicans say that minimum wages shut young, inexperienced, minority workers out of the job market. So what candidate is going to school the American people on that?

Most Americans and Democrats blame "greedy bankers" and Wall Street for the Crash of 2008. Science and Republicans say that it was the government policy that funneled mortgages to people that couldn't afford them. So who is going to buck the mainstream media and set the American people right on that?

Let's look at the lousy Obama jobs record. Mike Shedlock writes that if you want to drive people out of the work force here's what you'd do.

1. Raise the minimum wage.
2. Hand out lots of welfare benefits.
3. Look the other way on disability fraud.

So who will be the first to call for lowering the minimum wage, cutting welfare, and cracking down on disability fraud? Democrats and a lot of the American people say that we need to be compassionate to the marginalized. So who will bell the cat on this?

The fact is that political candidates cannot reeducate the American people. Rule One in politics is that you cannot tell the American people they are wrong on anything. If you wonder why politicians never answer a question straight, that is the reason. Voters will punish you for questioning their beliefs.

The problem for the candidates running for the Republican nomination for president in 2016 is that they really cannot go into detail much beyond "time for a change" and "let's get this country moving." Once you get into specifics then many voters will start to realize that their ox is getting gored. That was the problem that Mitt Romney faced with his "47 percent" moment. How do you reform the welfare state when 47 percent of the voters are already getting checks from the government?

Then there's the media problem. The "Democratic operatives with bylines" tend to "white knight" the Democrats' proposals. They don't ask how the Democrat can possibly promise to expand health insurance coverage to the uninsured while still lowering average premiums. But when Republicans are running, the media fight each other to see who can ask the toughest questions. We saw this earlier this week when Rand Paul got into trouble when he pushed back at reporterette Savannah Guthrie on NBC's venerable Today Show. Guthrie was all worried about his flip-flops on the issues. Already!

Yeah, like when has any mainstream media personality like asked President Obama about his flip-flops. Whatever.

There's another, even bigger problem. It comes out of my line that every government is an armed minority that remains in power by offering loot to its supporters. This is what the Democrats do, every day in every way. All the great government programs are some form of loot, from Social Security to Medicare, to "free" education to welfare. And don't forget subsidies for crony capitalists.

The average Republican voter doesn't want much in the way of loot. He or she just wants to be left alone to go to work, follow the rules, and obey the law. How can you get elected when you aren't offering much in the way of loot? Oh, by the way. Don't even think of touching the average Republican voter's Social Security benefits.

Rather than sneer at the Republican candidates for their rhetoric about liberty and the constitution, we should appreciate just how hard it is to do politics that wants to get government out of our lives.

We should instead look for an opportunity to cheer when our politicians, against all the odds, find a way to make liberty and the constitution appealing to ordinary folks, and actually take a step or two, for a moment, against the hurricane of liberal shibboleths.

Voting Yourself Off the Planet

My mother always used to worry about "overpopulation." Still, she had two children that each had two children. And I'm afraid that towards the end of her life I used to tease her a little about the birth dearth in Europe.

But why torment her? She picked up the zeitgeist of her youth, which was heavily into eugenics and the problem of the "unfit." Darwin, Spencer, Margaret Sanger and all. My mother was human; she believed what others believed.

But I have come to wonder about the population-control folks. What are they thinking? Don't they realize that, when they decide not to breed, they are voting themselves off the planet? Poster boy #1 is China, with their mad Mao-inspired One Child policy that only now is getting quietly shelved too late to prevent a massive collapse in China's population.

Now, according to James Lileks, there's a fashionable Manhattan trend celebrating childlessness. OK, there's a fashionable New York Times boomlet with a ton of articles and books celebrating childlessness. Here's a quote from Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids.

According to the NYT review, it “concludes with Tim Kreider’s rousing defense of the child-free as ‘an experiment unprecedented in human history . . . A kind of existential vanguard, forced by our own choices to face the naked question of existence with fewer illusions, or at least fewer consolations, than the rest of humanity, forced to prove ourselves anew every day that extinction does not negate meaning.’”

Here's an idea, Tim old boy. Extinction does negate meaning.

The guy I like on this is "Spengler," David Goldman. Here he is defending his book How Civilizations Die from the liberals at Ha'aretz.

Iran has an apocalyptic regime with a great deal to be apocalyptic about. As I have argued in these pages since 2005, no poor country in the entire troubled history of the world has seen its fertility rate plunge from 7 children per female just one generation ago to only 1.6 children per female today. There is no explanation for mass rejection of a nation’s demographic future except for deep cultural pessimism... Its unsuccessful engagement with modernity has left a childless country plagued by social pathologies, including some of the world’s highest rates of opium addiction, venereal disease, and prostitution.

 OK. Let's do a jump from here to gay marriage. As everyone knows, the traditional Axial Age religions all take a rather firm line on homosexuality. You could say that they are homophobic in the strict sense of being afraid of homosexuality. It's interesting to wonder why.

My take is that religion is the social lubricant that keeps the human project from seizing up. It is not just about scaring people straight with the threat of divine punishment. I think that the Axial Age religions are anti-gay because any religion that supports (or even celebrates gayness, as modern secular religious liberals do) is not long for this world. Because pretty soon there won't be any people in this world.

Every society must celebrate work, marriage, children, raising the next generation, and it needs to channel not just the economic incentives but the zeitgeist towards the pro-work, pro-natal culture. Otherwise people are going to decide that work is just too hard; they would rather follow their bliss. They will decide that marriage is too much of a risk and just tag along with the odd "relationship." They will agree with some of James Lileks' commenters:

Given the direction the world, especially America, is clearly takng, why would you have any children? Who is more selfish, vain or entirely oblivious: those who consign their offspring to less prosperous, less free futures, or those who eschew the blessings of replicating themselves?

 Of course that is why religions are also into hope, big time. They need to stop that sort of attitude right now.

Childlessness is a bit like fat. A century ago the rich were fat and the poor were thin. Now the opposite is true.

Two centuries ago, childlessness was the fate of the poor. If you were a poor woman without a dowry nobody would marry you and if you were a man without land, ditto. The rich had all the children, because they could afford it, and their abundant children crowded out the middling and the poor. But ever since the Industrial Revolution the poor have mostly been able to afford children, and those children have mostly survived. And so the rich, darling, have decided to be different.

Think about it: if you've inherited enough to support yourself as a writer or an artist, why wouldn't you stay single and develop your creativity rather than get down and dirty by creating children and putting your inheritance at risk?

Rodney Stark calls this "upper class asceticism," and he says it started with Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, who dumped his wife and kids for the spiritual life.

None of this is rocket science. If you like your civilization, you can keep your civilization. But first you must have children.

Why Nobody is Getting Fired over UVA Rape Hoax

Now that the official word from the Columbia Journalism School has been handed down on the UVA Rape Hoax, the Rolling Stone article on the rape of "Jackie" by seven frat boys at the University of Virginia, the world wonders: why is nobody getting fired?

Why is the writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, still writing for Rolling Stone? Why does UVA President Teresa Sullivan still have a job? Why is "Jackie" not in the coils of the law?

The New York Times takes a philosophical view of the whole matter. It quotes Rolling Stone  managing editor Will Dana:

Mr. Dana said that the report was punishment enough for those involved, and that they did not deserve to lose their jobs because the article “was not the result of patterns in the work of these people.”

So that's all right. Nothing to see here.

Jonah Goldberg ain't too happy either. This is not just about a rogue journalist and fabulist, he writes, like the good old days of Stephen Glass at The New Republic and Janet Cooke at the Washington Post. Everyone at Rolling Stone was in on it. But he knows why the liberals can't quite get it together and punish the wrongdoers. It's because they don't think anyone really did anything wrong.

Why? Because in their hearts they’re sure they were right, and that’s all that matters.

The narrative is right, and that's all that matters. There is a problem with sexual harassment on campus, and liberals need to teach America about it and cure the sick racist sexist homophobic culture that condones it.

But Ben Shapiro takes the notion of the all-important "narrative" to a new insight. He reckons that it's actually beneficial for the "narrative" when activists use a lie to advance it. The point is that a "narrative can only be forwarded if there is controversy over the facts." If "everyone agreed that Jackie had been gang raped" then no controversy. We send the guilty off to jail. End of Story.

But the leftist narrative requires an opposition, a group of evil haters who take rape less than seriously...

So the left specifically chooses to feature situations in which facts are under dispute. Then leftists claim that no one could reasonably dispute the facts; the only people who would dispute facts about the occurrence of an evil are those who sympathize with the evil.

On this view the tendentious claim, from a survey of two colleges that one in five women experience harassment during their time is college, is much better than the official Department of Justice numbers that the rate is more like 0.03 in five. Then you can claim that anyone opposing your narrative is a potential rapist, and not taking the issue seriously.

Hello climate change, where the skeptics of catastrophic global warming are associated with Holocaust "deniers."

You can see that this strategy goes all the way back to Marx and his argument about the bourgeoisie and the working class. Having waved his hands and declared that the working class was being grievously exploited by the capitalists, then any objector to his program could be dismissed as merely the bribed apologist of the bourgeoisie.

The truth is that after 170 years of this, we responsible individuals of the middle class still haven't come up with a way to neutralize it.

And that is the real scandal.

Switch to An American Manifesto

We won't be posting to this blog any more.



Go to an American Manifesto instead.

Am I Crazy -- Like a Fox?

My line, ever since the Obama administration decided to go ahead with their entire lefty agenda in 2009, is that the Democrats were making a strategic error for the ages.

I thought then that the right thing to do, for the Democratic Party's power down the years, would have been to push a moderate agenda, focused on fixing the economy and cementing the youth, women, and minorities into the Emerging Democratic Majority.

Instead, the Obamis figured that this was their once in a generation chance to ram through their lefty wish list, featuring a "stimulus" that paid off Democratic constituencies, Obamacare that hammered the middle class, green energy that ran up electricity bills, and Dodd-Frank that enmeshed the financial industry in stupid regulation and hampered its role of getting money from people who have it to people that want it.

But it got worse. Instead of reaching out to the middle and picking off moderate Republicans into the emerging Democratic consensus, Obama has been openly combative towards Republicans, thus heightening divisions. And he has clearly encouraged all the left-wing activist groups to go for the gold.

My understanding of conflict, politics, and strategy, such as it is, tells me that almost all the actions of the Obama administration have been strategically foolish: they hurt the long-term interest of the United States, the Democratic party, and the liberal movement.

Now we learn from Jonah Goldberg that the strategic vision of President Obama towards Iran is to help them:

He says he wants to bring Iran out of the cold, to "break through (their) isolation" and help them become a "very successful regional power."

But Iran is a revolutionary power. I doubt that treating it as a status-quo power and a partner in the concert of nations is really in anyone's interest.

And anyway, let's adjust the president's rhetoric and imagine him applying it to the Republicans.

He says he wants to bring Tea Party activists out of the cold, to "break through (their) isolation" and help them contribute to the emerging consensus. 

In fact the president is talking nonsense. In no sensible world would a status-quo power like the US want to encourage a revolutionary expansionist power like Iran. What we want, and what the rest of the world probably wants, is for no single power in the Middle East to dominate the rest of the region. That was the point of interfering in Iraq: to put a block in the path of Iranian expansion. The strategic interest of the US in the Middle East is to make sure that no single power gets its hands on all the oil.

On the other hand it would be immensely cunning for the president to cut out the moderate wing of the Republican Party, wine and dine the "beltway" Republicans and get them on board, say, with his immigration reform. Imagine the rage, the bloodletting in the Republican Party! Why, that way he might even succeed in dividing the Republican Party and set up Hillary Clinton for a win in 2016.

You see, I think that the business with Lois Lerner running interference on the Tea Party was a strategic mistake. I think that the race activism on Trayvon Martin and Ferguson are strategic mistakes. I think that the whole "rape crisis" effort is a strategic mistake. I think that the ruckus on the Indiana RFRA act is a strategic mistake. That's because if I were a moderate non-political woman I would wonder what on earth was going on. (And if I were a working-class white man I'd vow never to vote for a Democrat again.)

Today the intrepid Vox Day is invoking the wisdom of Sun Tzu, the First Strategist.

If you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know others but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.

If I were to describe President Obama and the liberals I would say that they know themselves, particularly their vision of themselves. But they don't know too much about others, except that they are racists, sexists, homophobes, and they don't seem to know much about what other people think about them.

The strength of President Clinton was that, as a governor of a state that was trending conservative, and as a brilliant politician, he knew how to present himself to the great middle of America. And he learned it the hard way by losing reelection as governor of Arkansas in 1980.

Maybe the Obamis are geniuses, and everything I know about politics and conflict is wrong.

We'll See. 

When Politics Comes to SFF

The science-fiction/fantasy genre is reckoned a small pond. It's not, after all, an important "literary" genre where the good people go. Important or not, the SFF publishers and editors have tended to be conventional liberals. They have had a tendency to whisper that so-and-so was a conservative, darling.

That meant that the libertarian Sarah Hoyt used to live in fear that she'd say something wrong somehow and it would wreck her career. Hey, join the club! Who doesn't worry that stepping out of the liberal line at work could cost them?

Because SFF was a cozy little liberal club, the editors and publishers tended to favor their favorites at award time. And then, being liberals, they decided that SFF ought to show a bit of leg in the diversity department. Perfectly harmless, if you're a liberal.

Now my #2 dictum -- right after #1 "government is force" -- is "politics is division." Humans are naturally social animals, but if you start getting political, then you are setting yourself up to divide your community in two.

In other words, if you and your liberal pals in SFF decide that such-and-such a writer is, eeuw, conservative, and that it is time to give women and people of color a chance, it may all sound perfectly harmless to you, but it might strike terror into the heart of a Sarah Hoyt and rage into the heart of a Vox Day.

In recent years a couple of conservative SF writers, Brad Torgerson and Larry Correia, decided to develop a slate of non-liberal nominees for the SFF Hugo awards. Last week their slate, "Sad Puppies," swept the Hugo nominations. Not surprisingly the liberal SFF rump isn't too pleased. At io9, Charlie Jane Anders wrote:

Last August, the Hugo Awards for science fiction and fantasy were swept by a younger group of women and people of color. At the time, we said "This was really a year that underscored that a younger generation of diverse writers are becoming central to the genre." So maybe it's not surprising that there was an organized backlash.

Note the innocent use of the passive voice. If you read the other side, they say that it has been people like Anders that have been pushing women and people of color on SFF, whether the SFF fans liked it or not, and that conservative voices were being shut out.

Anders' piece is titled: "The Hugo Awards Were Always Political. But Now They're Only Political." Well, yes, honey. But see my dictum #2 above: politics is division. Once you start down the slippery slope of politics, even for the obviously sensible reason, with which all evolved people agree, that women and people of color have been marginalized in government/office/boardroom/university/SFF or whatever, then sooner or later you are going to inspire a movement of rejection against your noble and ethical attempt to level the playing field.

Convinced of their own benignity, liberals have come to think of government and politics steered by liberals as a similarly benign influence on the modern world. All they are doing is trying to reduce violence and inequality and neo-colonialism and marginalization: what could be wrong with that?

But everyone thinks that their own ideas and proposals are benign and beneficial. It's the other guys that are cruel and unjust. The question that the really evolved person asks is: what does this benign proposal we are advancing look like to the "other" guys? Does it gore their oxen?

Usually, when any government program or political proposal is advanced, the answer to the question "does it gore the other guys' oxen?" is "Yes."

Why? Because government is force. Any government program is going to forcibly take money from someone through taxes and give it to someone else. The guy whose money is being forcibly taken isn't going to like it. And politics is division; it's about saying that our guys are deserving and their guys are undeserving. Having divided up the world, you are now morally and ethically justified in handing out loot to your deserving supporters and taking it away from the undeserving non-supporters.

Why are you then shocked, shocked when the un-deserving object?