If Every Young Liberal Longs to be an Activist, What About Conservatives?

A liberal friend recently confided to me that she'd always wanted to get into "activism." And I must say that the notion struck me forcibly. It wasn't that I didn't already know that. I just hadn't heard it from someone I knew personally, and I hadn't thought about what that meant for her and for me.

I've been thinking about this for about a year now, and I've come to think that it encapsulates the whole question of the culture war. If young liberals all want to escape the necessity of earning a living and doing activism, where does that leave conservatives? Do we just sit back and take it?

It's the basic question. Liberals want to get away from their hum-drum little lives, as Lina Lamont might have said, and fight injustice. Conservatives? What do we dream about sitting in front of the computer in our cubicle? Living responsible lives as spouses and parents? Fighting against government corruption? Reforming the welfare state?

It's really important, because according to the latest opinion polls they are making more liberals these days. Peter Wehner has the numbers and he wonders if conservatives are losing the future.

If we are losing the future it's no mystery why. Our kids are being raised by liberal labor-union teachers and all they get is 100% liberal line and liberal activism that issues from the cultural Marxism agenda of identity politics. Lots of nice liberal girls decide that they want to do activism, just like nice Catholic girls a century ago got a "vocation," and they end up indoctrinating our kids and proselytizing their secular liberal religion.

If you wonder about the kids, I got a chilling lesson from R.K. Modena, the daughter of a Filipino reporter and activist. She reports from the years when her father was the Filipino ambassador in East Germany. The young people were totally indocrinated by the "system;" they knew nothing except what they had been taught by the government. Here's what happened when a young woman got smuggled out into the West.

One of the people working at the consulate fell in love with an East German woman. The only way they could marry was if she escaped East Berlin, and so he smuggled her out. The details of that I don’t know, but I remember my dad saying she was struck dumb for three days from sheer culture shock after she saw West Berlin for the first time – and realized that everything she’d been raised to believe, and had known as truth was in fact a carefully manufactured and maintained lie that was possible only through total control of information.

If only that liberal secular religion didn't always call for more government, more spending, more subsidies, and more jobs for liberals. And lies. And total indoctrination of "our kids."

So what are we going to do about it?

I'd say we need a two point program. Point One is to develop a culture of conservative activism. We want millions of young Americans earnestly working towards solving our national problems by reforming and reducing government. I had a email from a woman church member in Vermont last week, wanting data on Vermont spending on welfare. She wrote:

My project is for a church coalition considering a serious attempt at offering alternative services/approaches to poverty in the state of Vermont. 

See what I mean? Here you have conservative activism, honest, earnest Americans trying to make government smaller and people bigger.

Point Two is to delegitimize liberal activism. And I would say it starts with the idea that liberal activism makes government bigger and people smaller. It's time to ask whether the answer to all our problems is another law, another entitlement, another subsidy, another bureaucracy, another unholy alliance between activists and government bureaucrats. I mean, it's 150 years since Marx demanded justice for the workers and for government force as the solution. Here we are, almost two orders of magnitude richer. Couldn't we dial back the coercion, now that the poor are doing better?

How does this work? How about the presidential campaign of Carly Fiorina? She is doing a full court press to change the dialog on women and feminism:

“A feminist is a woman who lives the life she chooses,” Mrs. Fiorina told a free-market interest group dinner in Washington in speech that was billed as her first major policy address since declaring her candidacy May 5. “A woman may choose to have five children and home-school them. She may choose to become a CEO or run for president.

Right. And I'd say that a real feminist is a woman who disdains "safe spaces." She's a responsible woman and she owns her choices.

“The left fights to protect late-term abortions and sues the Little Sisters of the Poor, but they oppose over-the-counter birth control,” she told the crowd.

You see what she's doing? She's turning the left's rhetoric back on it, making liberal feminists the issue rather than dead white males and male privilege.

Or, as I like to say: "There is only one kind of privilege in America: Liberal privilege."

When the Ruling Class Defines Humor It Isn't Humor

We are having a little ruction this week about Jerry Seinfeld. He's been saying that he can't do colleges any more because the students are so politically correct.

Even his 14-year-old daughter has caught the bug, telling her mother "that's sexist!"

So a "politically correct" student writes a response so correct that, surely, it has to be a parody.

The official line of the liberal bullies is that it is wrong to make fun of women and minorities because they don't have the power. This is in the same chapter as the line the blacks can't be racist because they don't have the power.

Here is liberal Dean Obaidallah:

Where Seinfeld and I disagree is that I don't see "political correctness" as being inherently bad -- unless it goes way overboard. To me, "political correctness" is about being respectful to minorities -- be it based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.

Quite so. Except that political correctness doesn't work that way. It's more about liberals saying "you will be respectful to minorities who vote Democrat or you will lose your job." Which is a bit different.

When we unpack this and recall that the Democratic Party is an over-under coalition of the powerful and the marginalized, you can see thatit all makes sense. The PC brigade are really saying "You cannot make fun of our political clients." Which is what the ruling class has been doing since time out of mind.

Laughter and humor, of course, are mysteries. Why do humans laugh and make jokes? Let us just suggest that they play a part in the drama of human sociality.

Back in the day when liberals thought of themselves as cultural underdogs, oppressed by the Puritans and the WASPs, we were told that humor and satire were important tools for the oppressed to speak truth to power. But that was then. That was when liberals could get political advantage out of humor and satire. But now that liberals are politically and especially culturally dominant, now you're not allowed to make fun of liberals and their political clients.

Now liberals say it's OK to do humor and satire if you are "punching up" but not if you are "punching down" to e.g., Muslims.

But this is typical of liberals lying to themselves. Because when they say you can't punch down to Muslims they are really saying that you can't punch down to Muslims who are political clients of the liberals. Want to punch down to fundamentalist Christians? Perfectly OK. Want to punch down to white crackers like Honey Boo Boo? Go right ahead. Want to sneer at NASCAR fans? No problem.

But, as usual, liberals are their own worst enemies. Back in the day, kings used to have court jesters. "There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do nothing but rail." The rulers can't afford to cut off all feedback from their subjects; they need to know what is bubbling away down there.

But liberals keep narrowing the Overton Window about what you are allowed to say in America. And they are becoming more and more specific about demanding that we care about liberal agenda items.

The result is that liberals don't have a clue about what Americans think and feel. Too bad. When you are a ruling class and you shut yourself off from feedback and deny the right of the people to petition the government about their grievances, and forbid the people to laugh at the rulers and their little darlings you are not just unjust rulers, you are fools.

When you forbid your subjects to laugh at you and your political clients there is a good chance that you won't be a ruling class for much longer.

How Does the Next President Beat the Liberal Activism Culture?

The current "rape culture" flap was started by a "Dear Colleague" letter from an official at the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education. The letter -- which was not a law, not a regulation -- told universities that they'd better put in a Star Chamber system of adjudicating accusations of sexual harassment. Or else they'd be violating Title IX, the federal law that is designed to "end discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive federal funding." Jessica Gavora, who's written a book on Title IX gives us the state of play. As she writes:

As long as Title IX’s victims were wrestlers or swimmers from low-revenue men’s sports that were jettisoned to achieve participation-parity with women’s sports, nobody much cared. But now that the law is being turned into a tool to suppress free speech on college campuses, even liberals are starting to cry foul.

At least they are crying foul when card-carrying liberals are involved.

Did you know that the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education has about 950 lawyers working for it? I read this recently, but can't find it on Google.

And of course "Title IX" is just one tiny part of the federal government's activities in service to liberaldom's identity politics agenda.

The context on this, for me, is supplied by the following points.

• About a year or so ago a liberal friend told me at lunch that she had always wanted to do "activism." You can see what is going on here; liberal secularists turn to activism in lieu of religion. Doing activism, for them, is making a difference in the world. But what they do not realize is that government is force. It is one thing to work for a better world; it is another thing to empower government bureaucrats to enforce your will on the world. If their activism involved advocating for a new law or a new regulation or a new "Dear Colleague" letter they are saying: We Need More Force.
• There is a whole universe of liberal groups out there doing activism. There really isn't anything close to a conservative or libertarian counterforce to the liberal activism culture. But the liberal activism culture is everywhere, advocating for more government, more spending, more regulations, more bullying, more force.
• Since 2009 the Obama administration has put its pedal to the metal pushing the left-liberal agenda by any means possible. To take a single example, the Obamis essentially neutered the bipartisan welfare reform of 1996. Without a "conversation," without a change in law. They just did it. And the mainstream media did nothing.

What happens in 2017, assuming a Republican president and a Republican Congress? What would happen if the Republicans reduced the number of lawyers in the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights down to five? What would happen if they gutted the Environment Protection Agency's global warming initiatives that are essentially shutting down coal-fired electric power stations? Suppose the president issued as executive order banning all federal government employee unions? And so on. Would the next President of the United States have the cojones for that? Would his appointees have the cojones?

It seems to me that the first priority for the next Republican president should be to make it very difficult for liberals ever again to do what they did during the Obama era, pushing the liberal agenda without attempting to obtain consensus first, without bothering to pass a law in Congress. They could do it because the mainstream media, being partisan operatives with bylines, did nothing when the Obama administration blatantly violated the letter and  spirit of the law and bulldozed the de-facto consensus into the ditch on a whole host of public policy issues.

I've been reading that the strategy of the GOP Congress back in the Clinton presidency was to flood the zone in the details of the appropriation bills with a host of spending cuts and policy changes and set up certain issues as veto bait. The idea was that a president could veto a bill or two on some headline issue, but he can't really veto a bill because of 950 spending cuts and policy changes that he doesn't like.

Should that be the strategy of the next Republican President of the United States? To flood the zone will jillions of executive orders, cuts to liberal pet programs, forcing the liberal activism culture to focus on one or two issues?

You could say that, given that the liberals changed the rules and just pushed the pedal to the metal, that the old game is over, that Republicans can do what liberals just did, and to hell with their objections. But that is unrealistic, because the media will revert to its traditional role of "speaking truth to power" once a Republican administration takes power. They will make a scandal of any Republican initiative that offends the liberal agenda. And they will have liberal activist groups backing them up. And most important of all, we conservatives don't believe in extra-legal government. We want limited government with powers that are agreed upon by the citizens.

Obviously the GOP presidential nominee in 2016 must prepare the ground. He must lay out an agenda of reform and roll-back on the grounds of the Obama administration's violation of the old rules, and the oppressive use of regulatory power to dominate and marginalize ordinary American citizens. He must be able to say: look, the American people gave me a mandate to reform the egregious injustices and abuses of power committed by the Obama administration. All I am doing is correcting the egregious abuses of a lawless administration, just as I promised.

Suppose the GOP ticket wins in a 55%-45% landslide. Suppose the GOP increases its majority in the US Senate despite current projections; suppose the GOP increases its majority in the House despite the fact that they already gone about as far as they can go? Can a Republican administration really move the needle on reform, or will it get bogged down by a frenzy of liberal activist opposition?

Nobody knows what is possible. What troubles me is that I haven't heard a whisper from the conservative media about a post-Obama pushback. Check that. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has announced his reform agenda, including Medicare (!) reform. Now maybe it's too early for whispers and hints. But at some point in the road to November 2016 we need to see the battle space being prepared; we need to see spokesmen and mentioners saying that this or that candidate has big plans to reform the federal government and roll back the regulatory state and retrofit the administrative echo chamber for the liberal activist agenda with sound baffles.

The point is that you can't beat liberal politics without a conservative politics. And I don't see the conservative politics coming together to create a new Morning in America.

Reading Hillary Between the Lines

The great question in life is how much to believe your own bullshit. I am talking of everything from religion to politics to economics.

What I mean is, how much should you blindly conduct your life on faith, and how much with a skeptical eye on things, knowing that everything you believe might turn out to be wrong?

My answer is straight forward, for I am a Kantian, believing that we can never know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances.

How much should you believe your religion's creation myth, from God creating the world in seven days to the magical Big Bang of today's speculative scientists?

How much should you believe the eternal growth myth of modern economics, and how much the "immiseration" myth of Marxist economics?

And how much, if you are a Democrat, should you believe in the The Emerging Democratic Majority of women, minorities, the educated and the young prophesied in the 2000s by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira?

Probably the answer is the same as it has been for every loyal foot soldier down the ages. You believe until you find yourself dying of hunger and disease on the side of the road as your army disintegrates in defeat. But then it's too late.

I think that's where we stand in the Democratic ascendancy of the last ten years. It comes through rather clearly in Rich Lowry's piece on "The End of the Clinton Coalition." He writes:

Bill Clinton got elected by peeling off working-class whites and suburbanites from the Republican party, while holding traditional Democratic voters.

 But Barack Obama won with the Emerging Democratic Majority of "minorities, liberals, and upper-class suburbanites."

Elsewhere in the former Clinton coalition, though, his support collapsed, with older and blue-collar whites continuing to flee the Democrats.

That worked pretty well for Obama because of the peculiar enthusiasm of blacks and the educated and youth for his promise of Hope and Change. And when Obama ran for reelection he did a good job turning the white working class off Mitt Romney with his Joe Soptic ad.

But now the white working class is probably gone for good.

Even if Hillary wanted to try to recapture those kinds of voters, it’s not clear that she could, and the effort would risk alienating the Obama supporters she needs if she’s going to win a national election.

So Hillary Clinton is faced with flogging the Obama coalition into one more Big Push.

But let's look at the numbers at uspresidentelection.us. In 2008 Barack Obama won with 69.5 million votes to McCain's 59.9 million. In 2012 Obama won with 63.5 million to Romney's 59.7 million.

Leaving out the natural expansion of the electorate, you think that Hillary is going to beat Obama's turnout in 2012 after eight years of disappointment for the Democratic faithful? And you think that the new generation of GOP operatives haven't been thinking 24-7 about how to bounce the GOP vote up over 70 million?

The big hit against Hillary Clinton is that people can't name a single achievement from her 25 year time on the national stage.

But I think there is another, bigger problem with Hillary Clinton. She is an utterly conventional thinker; she has never vouchsafed a single thought that wasn't liberal conventional wisdom. So how can she possibly inspire Americans with hope and change?

The conventional wisdom about presidential elections is that it is always Four More Years vs. Time for a Change. After eight years of government by one party the instinct for a change is almost irresistible.

And after eight years of Obama there must be a still small voice in the mind of many Democratic voters asking: "What difference did it make?"

Arguing Over the Zombie Corpse of Keynes

As I understand it, the core of Keynesianism is that, in an economic slump, it is a good idea for governments to borrow and spend, particularly on infrastructure. Because stimulus.

The idea is that when the government spends money on a useful thing like a bridge or a highway, there will be a "multiplier" effect, and the monies spent on infrastructure will "multiply" through the rest of the economy. Hence stimulus.

We non Keynesians have always been a bit suspicious about the "multiplier" effect and recent research has indicated that the multiplier might be less than one, meaning that the Keynesian stimulus has an anti-stimulus effect. In real recessions it seems that government spends a lot of the stimulus on e.g., grants to state and local governments to avoid laying off teachers.

Anyway, almost everything the government does is payoff to a special interest. What is the chance that any government spending "stimulates" the economy? I'd say pretty slim, Solyndra.

So it's natural for a non-Keynesian like historian Niall Ferguson to needle Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky, who predicted disaster for the "austerity" policy of the Cameron government in Britain in 2010. Instead Britain has outpaced the rest of the EU in economic growth.

So did the Brit economy do better than forecast because of its austerity policy or in spite of it? Good question.

In my view the Keynesians are missing the point.

The point is that in an economic contraction a lot of people can't pay interest on their debt, and, what is worse, cannot repay their debt because their collateral can no longer liquidate the debt. Banks, of course, are the worst of all. this creates a financial crisis.

That's why we have central banks as the "lenders of last resort." The idea is to fold the debt of defaulters into bigger, healthier institutions, including the nation state itself. A lone borrower may be broke and unable to make payments, but the whole nation is not; the bigger, healthier institution can still make its debt payments and keep the credit system afloat.

In the Crash of 1907 the United States did not have a central bank and this was considered to be a Bad Thing. But in the crisis point, J.P. Morgan was told that a certain brokerage house was set to fail on the following Monday. So he got permission from President Roosevelt to do a debt-equity swap and saved the brokerage. End of crisis. Then Morgan grabbed the richest men in America into his library and they did triage on the economy. They lent money only to troubled corporations that they thought would survive if they lent them money.

But the establishment decided that this was not enough and so they legislated the Federal Reserve System. Unfortunately when the Federal Reserve was tested in 1929 it failed in its core mission by allowing a bunch of banks to fail. This reduced the money supply and created a cascade of failure. The result was the Great Depression and it didn't matter what stimulus and what-have-you the government got into. The basic credit system collapsed because the Federal Reserve did not do its job and act as lender of last resort.

The same thing almost happened in the Crash of 2008. The Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, proprietor, let investment bank Lehman Brothers collapse, saying that he didn't have the authority to rescue it. That was in September 2008 and the financial markets went into free fall. In the end, with TARP and other programs amounting to about $20 trillion in outlays and guarantees (see my TARP bailout page), the federal government executed on a gigantic lender-of-last-resort program (meaning, roughly, that the feds took all the dodgy debt onto their own balance sheet) and the economy recovered.

Now my view is that Keynesian stimulus is counterproductive. In my view the problem at a financial crash is that, as the Austrian economists say, too many capital investments have turned out to be malinvestments. Those malinvestments of the previous boom must be liquidated and the resources released into more productive channels. A recession is the period of adjustment for the liquidation of the malinvestments of the previous boom.  But governments are in the business of bailing out politically favored corporations like General Motors, not in liquidating failed businesses so that the resources they consume can be reallocated to better businesses.

There is indeed an argument for temporary relief to workers thrown out of work during the period of adjustment. My argument is that this has a little to do with compassion and a lot to do with keeping disappointed people off the streets until the economy recovers and businesses are hiring again. What people call "austerity" is really the government's attempt to reduce the flood of government benefits so that people will start looking for work instead of reposing on their benefits.

I'm inclined to categorize Keynesianism in the category of what Charles G. Battig calls "bespoke science." It's science that is made to order for politicians by tame scientists. Politicians naturally respond to any economic crisis by spending and borrowing. Keynesianism gives them a fig-leaf to hide their economic embarrassment.

On Witch Hunts and Reigns of Terror

The trouble with the Left is that, time and time again, their politics creates a witch hunt. As in the current hunt for rapists on campus.

Sometimes, time and time again, their politics creates a reign of terror. As in the war against privilege that is beginning to put liberal professors in the tumbrils. Hang on a minute, you social justice warriors! The whole point of cultural Marxism is to hang the white male bourgeoisie out to dry. You're not supposed to start in on good faithful New York Times readers and NPR listeners.

Oh all right. It's not really a reign of terror because nobody has been executed. Not yet.

I was reading about witch-hunts recently, and a couple of features stood out.

First of all, witch hunts tend to occur in borderlands where the writ of central government is weak. E.g., Salem in 1692. Witch hunts tend to reflect the enthusiasm of local yokels anxious to do their bit for truth, justice, and the American Way. The first witch discovered is usually some marginal woman living out of town, e.g., Salem in 1692. The witch hunt usually ends when it starts to devour the rich and powerful. That's when the rich and powerful -- think Graham Chapman's "The Colonel" -- step in to stop the silliness. The other thing you might not know is that the fabled Spanish Inquisition was an attempt to stop the freelance pursuit of heretics, and bring it under sensible central control, complete with due process.

The point is that now, as then, the folks running around spouting off about white male privilege and microaggressions and "safe spaces" are ignorant fools that know not what they do. They are just repeating stuff that their teachers taught them in school. But that's what happens when stupid teachers teach stupid students stupid ideas.

Second, reigns of terror are a natural part of revolutions. On this one I do have chapter and verse. It's Crane Brinton's The Anatomy of Revolution. Brinton writes that revolutions tend to have four phases.

• Fall of the Old Regime The old regime is discredited, and probably running out of money. But there is hope, for that is what the revolutionaries are selling.
• Rule of the Moderates and Dual Power Typically the old regime is succeeded by a regime of moderates, but the moderates soon find themselves in conflict with extremists who act illegally and independently of the moderate regime.
• Reign of Terror The extremists win for a bunch of reasons, including that they are more ruthless and better organized. Then they embark on a campaign of terror and virtue, ruthlessly purging the world of injustice and sin and vice.
• Thermidor Humans cannot live forever in a fervor of holy rage; eventually the tension breaks and they fall back into a more normal life. But the solution typically involves a dictator, nationalism, and foreign conquest.

You can see that the way to stop this is for the government to stick to its job and to keep its finances in order.

But it's fair to suggest that the failed war and the financial crisis of 2008 set up a kind of mini-revolution with Barack Obama offering Hope and Change. And the lefty extremists seemed to get a green light to push their agenda to the max. So we've had a kind of mini reign of terror with the president showing the way with his extra-legal executive orders. Then there was that nice lady in the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights sending out her "Dear Colleague" letter in 2011 that told universities that if they didn't pursue extra-legal policies to stamp out campus rape, why then their funding might be affected. When every last administrator is a feminist liberal you can see that it would be remarkable if the universities pushed back.

At some point all this enthusiasm in the pursuit of witches and the reign of terror and virtue collapses from exhaustion and the improper capture of regime supporters. And so it ends.

Whether the collapse (or "reaction") ends in a Republican president and Congress with a mandate to do serious reform of the administrative welfare and regulatory state is another question.

Why are Liberals in a Blather Over Gender?

If you are a conservative then gender is pretty simple. Or as they say nowadays, binary. There is male and there is female, and that's all there is to say, except vive la difference.

But liberals are in a complete blather about gender, insisting on the one side that gender is not binary, but multifaceted, and on the other side that cisgendered white males are the very devil.

What is going on here?

I think that my three stage theory of humans explains everything.

On my view there are three kinds of people. There are the People of the Subordinate Self, the peasants, serfs, and victims of the world. They experience themselves as helpless and naturally seek to attach themselves to a powerful lord. They are clients to a great patron. We know who they are: women, minorities, rank-and-file Democratic voters.

Then there are the People of the Responsible Self, the responsible individuals that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law. These people think they they are responsible for making their way in the world on their own and they understand that to do this they must serve other people, spouses, children, communities, and consumers. It's up to each individual to figure out how to contribute to society and thus earn a living.

Finally, there are the People of the Creative Self, people who believe that meaning in life comes from work of a creative endeavor. You cannot just go to work and follow the rules; you must create your own work, and discover your own rules, for otherwise you are just a routinist and a mass man.

In my view, it is easy to be a subordinate self; anyone can give up and become a victim. It is challenging, but rewarding, to become a responsible self. Most people are up to the challenge of responsibility. But it is very hard to be a successful creative person. The reason is simple: many are called, but few are chosen.

In our modern America, as I've written before, the nation is divided into two cultural/political camps. On one side are the People of the Responsible Self and they identify as conservatives, libertarians, Christians, Republicans. On the other side is a coalition of the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Subordinate Self and they identify as liberals, progressives, atheists, victims, Democrats.

In the old days liberals and progressives were proudly elitist and served their subordinate clients as great lords, but the strain, the stress as we like to say, was unbearable. That's because the life of a person truly dedicated to the creative life is remarkably challenging.

So liberals came up with a cunning plan. Instead of living lives of true creativity they would live lives of ersatz creativity. They would get get tenure in universities and churn out ersatz scholarship; they would get creative on gender, faking life as creative people. But above all they would reimagine themselves as victims, and they would partake also of life as subordinate people. They would create and inhabit dozens of sexual or gender identities and also pose as helpless victims of the white patriarchy.

Now you understand what all the Title IX rape crisis is about. Now you understand what all the gay marriage thing is about. Now you understand the whole Bruce/Caitlin Jenner media mega-splosion.

But it's all a lie, and the worst kind of lie: the lie people tell themselves.

The most creative thing that most people can ever hope for is to create and raise a clutch of children. A few people get to create new mechanical contraptions; a few people get to create new abstract concepts. But the most that the overwhelming majority of people can hope for is the responsible task of searching out a mate, creating and raising children with that mate, and leaving the world a better place than they found it.

But we humans are forever tempted by squirrels! We are forever getting distracted from the hard work of making a living and caring for those we love. We are forever imagining what might have been, what could have been, what should have been, given a couple of breaks.

And of course when we have power, cultural and political power, we get corrupted by that power, and we declare that our sordid little appetites and oppressions are actually noble and grand.

Usually we only fool ourselves, like our liberal friends in America, right here, right now.