The Wages of Dissing America

Victor Davis Hanson has a long piece today on the importance of deterrence, and how the appeasement of others never works. It's not just a question of aggression, he argues. Symbolism is just as important as actual facts on the ground.

Symbolism is integral to deterrence. Obama perhaps meant well in his Cairo speech, his Al Arabiya interview, his apology tour, his circumvention of the Constitution to close a treaty deal with the Iranian theocracy, his media-hyped hosting of the deserter Bowe Bergdahl, his administration’s lies about Benghazi, his euphemism campaign of renaming acts of Islamic terror, his monotonous promises to close Guantanamo, his inability to control U.S. borders, and his pop admonitions to Christians to get off their high horse, to capitalists to remember they had not built their own businesses, to investors to quit profiting, and to the police to remember that they were stereotypers and profilers. 

President Obama does too understand the importance of deterrence. That's why he is always dissing conservatives and Republicans. And hey, it works! Otherwise Republicans under Paul Ryan would have pushed harder to get more of their agenda through in the late, great omnibus bill.

(Oh, and by the way, how come this whole business ended up with Speaker Ryan having to rush it through to avoid a government shutdown over Christmas. How did that happen, geniuses?)

But it all makes sense. President Obama believes in the left-wing agenda of battling racism, sexism, and homophobia. Therefore he is ruthless in his pursuit and his marginalization of racists, sexists, and homophobes. And he is nothing if not courageous in standing up for his faithful regime supporters, from college diversity administrators to Black Lives Matter activists.

But President Obama and the liberal ruling class are embarrassed by western colonialism, by capitalism, by enthusiastic Christians, by western cultural imperialism. And that is why they hesitate. In the war on radical Islam. On a sensible policy of immigration that looks after American citizens first. On a sensible reform of entitlements. On encouraging assimilation rather than worrying about the marginalization of minority cultures.

The bad news is that the international ruling-class embarrassment about the astonishing world-wide success of western culture has put us all into a bad place, with a variety of "peaceful protesters" running wild with the effective support of the liberal ruling class, rather as fascist street gangs had a license to take over the street in the Europe of the 1920s and 1930s.

The good news is that the cultural embarrassment of the ruling class is reaching its Munich moment, the point at which every person in the street can grasp that appeasement must stop, right now, and the West must start defending its culture, its ideas, and its homelands, and must start pushing back, hard.

And maybe, here at home, we will get a Republican presidential nominee that knows how to stop the appeasement of the liberals and the Democrats and rally a majority of Americans around the principles of freedom, justice, and the American Way, and put liberals and Democrats on the back foot, as they were for about ten years from 1985 to 1995.

Surely, the last seven years have taught us that the liberal culture of dissing America is going to end badly, for all of us.

Nobody Likes Ted Cruz. But Why?

Today we had another in the "nobody likes Ted Cruz" meme, this time from the Wall Street Journal news side. Janet Hook writes "Republicans Love Ted Cruz in Iowa, Loathe Him in D.C."

Yeah. We knew that, honey. Oops. I just saw Janet Hook on a video. She looks like a feminist Hillary voter., as you expect from the WSJ news side. And she adds something that wasn't in the article. The GOP establishment doesn't think that Ted Cruz can win the general. And, she says, the GOP in the Senate says that Cruz is all talk and no action.

But my question is still this. Why don't they like him? Janet Hook has all the standard quotes from GOP senators past and present. It's the old "work horse versus show horse" line.

But come on. It seems pretty obvious to me that Ted Cruz has been running for president from Day One. So one obvious strategy is to run against the GOP establishment as a real conservative. This is not that wild and crazy. Do you mean to say, GOP establishment, that you can't deal with such an obvious strategy and turn aside questions about it with a nod and a wink?

So here is a quote from a Frank Bruni piece on Ted Cruz. They didn't like him on the Bush 2000 campaign either.

After Bush took office, other full-time advisers got plum jobs in the White House. Cruz was sent packing to the Siberia of the Federal Trade Commission.

The political strategist Matthew Dowd, who worked for Bush back then, tweeted that “if truth serum was given to the staff of the 2000 Bush campaign,” an enormous percentage of them “would vote for Trump over Cruz.”

Another Bush 2000 alumnus said to me: “Why do people take such an instant dislike to Ted Cruz? It just saves time.”

 Frank Bruni finishes his NYT piece by explaining the antipathy against Cruz like this:

No, it’s the fruit of a combative style and consuming solipsism that would make him an insufferable, unendurable president. 

Gosh. I can't think of anyone on the Democratic side of whom that could be said.

I happen to know a guy that worked for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. He told me that the guy is impossible. Yeah. So he also happens to run the most revolutionary corporation in America, the one that has turned retail (and package delivery and I know not what) upside down. And he's a horse's ass.

I suppose that I would like to hear from Ted Cruz's friends. What do they think of the real Ted Cruz? We don't know. None of them have ever spoken out. Hey maybe Ted Cruz doesn't have any friends. Or maybe the friends know that nothing they say will help counter the liberal narrative.

For instance, if I were the Cruz campaign I'd be planning an effort to get the good side of Ted Cruz out some time in March. By that time voters will have a vague feeling of Ted Cruz as a menacing figure, as taught by the mainstream media. So if the campaign can present Ted Cruz as a soft-spoken, thoughtful candidate that cares about people like me then you would give a jolt to the moderate voter that had only got the liberal line up to that moment.

All I can say is that I am interested in finding out who the real Ted Cruz is.

What do I mean by this? Let's do it by a couple of items about the "real" George W. Bush. First, there was a story I read, after Bush had been elected, that Bush, when speaking at some event, usually veered into the kitchen to shake hands with the help. Second, there was a story just last week about how as president George W. Bush holed up at Camp David starting a couple of days before Christmas, and then left for the ranch on the day after Christmas. The reason? So that as many of the help as possible (including the media) could spend Christmas with their families.

Yeah. One thing I'd like to know about Ted Cruz is how he treats the help.

But I'd also want to know about how he is going to work with Congress, and how he is going to counter the liberal narrative with a conservative narrative, and how he is going to tame the extra-constitutional administrative state. And a few other things.

But most of all I would like to know why they hate him.

"Fools, Frauds and Firebrands" Building Their Secular Theology

When commentators say that people are losing their faith in religion, I like to say: what are you talking about? Since the supposed "death of God" about 200 years ago we have seen an explosion of militant secular religions that have inspired billions of humans with their visions of a better world. And the most militant and vibrant of those secular religions has been Marxism.

So I ordered Roger Scruton's latest, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left with anticipation. I have a lot of respect for Scruton, not least the fact that it was his horse that introduced him to his wife (it's a charming story).

Having read the book I confess myself a little disappointed. Scruton dismisses a lot of the lefty thinkers as purveyors of "nonsemes," or nonsense memes, and he discounts a lot of their writing as merely what we now call virtue signalling that communicates their reliability and orthodoxy to the others of their lefty faith.

I think the problem is that Scruton analyzes thinkers from Althusser to Žižek as if they were philosophers, when I think it is more sensible and accurate to describe them as secular theologians. For instance, one of Louis Althusser's books is Reading Capital, i.e., Marx's Das Kapital. The sensible way to understand such a book would be as an analysis of a holy text.

It is telling, as Scruton tells us, that these leftist thinkers do not reference any writers or sources outside the holy family of Marx and his epigones. I experienced this myself recently when reading the Marxist The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood. There is not a whisper in Wood's book about post-Marxian economics. Everything is analyzed from the holy texts, in terms of commodification of labor, exchange value vs. use value, surplus value, and class conflict. There is a word for this kind of thing. Fundamentalism. Don't bother me with the latest in science and research. That old time religion is good enough for me.

Now many of of the thinkers that Scruton analyzes I have never read. But some of them I have, including Foucault, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas. I am sorry to say that Scruton, to me, does not allow them the benefit of the doubt. For instance Scruton dismembers The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno as an attack on not just the bourgeoisie and capitalism but, hysterically, Enlightenment itself. OK, but I read Horkheimer and Adorno as saying that it is not just capitalism that threatens us with domination, but reason itself. Reason is not just a means to understand the world, but to dominate it. That is what they mean by "ïnstrumental reason." What they begin, Jürgen Habermas follows through, and by the time he has finished, in my view, the whole edifice of the revolutionary left is in ruins. Scruton criticizes the thinking of Habermas as labored and bureaucratic. But I think that it rips open the heart of leftist thinking. It says, in The Theory of Communicative Action, that instrumental reason is a domination can only be checked by inter-subjective communication between equals that trust each other. No doubt Habermas has to smother this idea in bushels of lefty orthodoxy to make it palatable to his lefty readers. And no doubt in his later Between Facts and Norms, Habermas utterly fails to show how his theory of moderating instrumental reason with intersubjective trust could be achieved in a big-government context, and submerges his failure in snowdrifts of bureaucratic waffle. But that is the point. Once you have opened the can of instrumental reason and begun to critique it, you have unwittingly exposed the impossibility of Marxism and socialism which are built on using people as instrumental pawns in a project of internal colonization. And no amount of beating around the bush can really hide it.

Now I choose to read Fools, Frauds and Firebrands through the reductive lens of my Three Peoples theory. I believe that lefties are People of the Creative Self and that their secular religion is an attempt to find meaning in this world for the creative life. That, to me, is the meaning of Sartre's existentialism and his idea of good faith and bad faith. Good faith is being a creative thinker; bad faith is repeating someone else's idea. Take Alain Badiou's idea of "the Event." He means, of course, the transformative political revolutionary event that every leftist longs for. But you can also see the Event as the creative breakthrough that every creative artist lives for. What Badiou calls "generic procedures"  I would call creative process.

Badiou identifies just four areas which admit of 'generic procedures', and in which the call to fidelity is heard: science (including mathematics), love (by which he means erotic love), art and politics. And it is only by through fidelity to such a 'generic procedure' that we achieve the good.

I understand this as a manifesto of creativity. Good faith is the creative act. To Badiou's creative self the only thing worth living for is the creative act, the invention of something new in science, love, art, and politics. The moment of creative inspiration is very heaven. Hell is unthinkingly regurgitating other peoples' ideas.

Very good. But to me Badiou's vision is crippled. Why just include science, love, art and politics as the sources of creativity? What about business? Has there been a more stunning creative achievement than the iPhone, brainchild of Steve Jobs? What about children? Is there anything more creative that joining with a woman to create and then to raise a child? And what founts of creativity are waiting undiscovered to the parent and the child as both set out on the journey of growth and discovery?

Yes, business. This capitalism that the left reviles is not a matter of "accumulation", but a miraculous story of creation and discovery. a process in the last two centuries that has raised human per-capita income by 3,000 percent. There has been nothing like the Great Enrichment, ever, as Deirdre McCloskey writes in her  "Bourgeois Era" books. George Gilder talks about the capitalist process as "surprise", one surprise after another. What is this "surprise" but the creative act?

Now, I think the Left's secular religion of the creative self has made one huge error. It has taken for granted that the great era of creativity, the celebration of the Events of creation, must necessarily be built on the ruins of the old age of the responsible self, what we will call, for the sake of argument, the bourgeois era. This is a monstrous mistake. The age of the creative self must be built on the shoulders of the age of the responsible self, by revising and extending the achievements of the age of the responsible self.

In my view, the creative lefties are repeating the mistake of the classical liberals of two hundred years ago. The classical liberals thought, as the middle class coming to power, that they would replace utterly the old age of the subordinate self in which ordinary people were subjected in feudal subordination to the great landowners and nobles. Now everyone would be a responsible self and a middle-class householder. But the truth is that plenty of people don't want to be rugged individualists. They want to live secure, safe lives as the clients under the shelter of some great patron. They are people that want a lifetime job working for the government or some great corporation. And when the classical liberals tried to impose their age of the responsible self the subordinate workers said: no way. Anyway, the first thing that happened in the new age of the responsible self was the nightmare of subordination and regimentation of the factory worker to the factory boss. A bit of a cock-up on the economic front.

Here's how the world should work. The creative class should have every opportunity to create and invent and surprise us with their original creations. But their culture must coexist with the culture of the responsible self. The responsible class should have every opportunity to live their lives as responsible individuals, working and wiving and thriving on their own account and not as the clients of some great CEO or politician. But this responsible culture must allow and concede space for people that are not ready, or just do not want to be anything more than subordinate clients to some great lord.

Of course, our lefty friends ought to know better than to build their cathedrals of meaning and their monuments of secular orthodoxy on a program of destruction, of the great Event that will demolish the unjust order of capitalism and domination. In that great apocalypse they will destroy themselves. But they are, as we all are, all too human.

Gift-giving at Christmas: It's a Girl Thing

Economists say, according to the Wall Street Journal, that gift-giving is inefficient, and gift-giving represents an inefficient reallocation of resources.

No doubt it is. But there are important social values other than efficiency. That is why societies do pot-latching, and that is why we have the annual orgy of Christmas gift-giving.

The first thing to understand about gift-giving is that it is a girl thing. As a man, I admit that I didn't really understand this until I read an article years by an angry divorced man complaining about his ex's compulsive and expensive "gifting" with her women friends.

If you get your head out of your computer and out of the politics and the sports pages you will discover that the women around you are always involved in thinking about getting gifts for their women friends. And then doing something about it. You eventually get to realize that women absolutely love giving and receiving presents.

Men not so much. Thinking and shopping for presents interferes with the manly business of fighting wars, designing software, battling for market share, bingeing on TV series, etc. That is why, during the Christmas season, women constitute the majority of shoppers, right up until the last couple of days before Christmas.

More research is needed, but my guess about womanly gift-giving is that it bonds together the community of women -- in which every woman is engaged in a life and death struggle. I suspect that the gifting mends the relationships and eases the serious stresses that women constantly experience with each other.

Also, and this particularly applies to Christmas, women absolutely love seeing children laugh and jump for joy. You may understand the whole Santa thing as an amazingly complex special forces operation designed to make children laugh and jump for joy for 10 minutes on Dec 25. Go figure.

Yes, it's true that gift-giving is inefficient, but that´s not the point. Efficiency applies in the marketplace, in the commodification of values and labor and all that. But the point of gift-giving is that it makes women happy. There is nothing worse for humankind than women that feel unappreciated and taken-advantage-of. It's the old saw: if she is happy, everyone is happy; if she is unhappy, nobody is happy.

OK, so gift-giving is about efficiency, after all. It's an amazingly efficient and effective way of making women happy.

Now there is a big takeaway here for you guys. The fact is that most men only get into the gift-giving mood when they are courting a woman, working on getting her to fall in love with you so you can get inside her pants. When that important objective is achieved then men tend to ease off on the gift-giving. This is a mistake; it makes her feel taken-for-granted, and it may be responsible for all the ills and the sorrows of the world.

But there is an easy, no worries way to keep the gift giving going, and avoid the taken-for-granted trap. Whenever you stop by the grocery store buy her some flowers and bring them home. I don't know why, but women love flowers, any flowers, and flowers make women feel loved and appreciated.

Now go out and get some flowers and make sure that everyone thinks you love Christmas. No Scrooges, please.

Burning Down the House: For What?

Why are so many people, at any time, so ready to burn the place down? Here in 2015 we have the socialist Bernie Sanders openly campaigning against the rich while Hillary Clinton is openly advocating new government interventions in the economy. Raising the minimum wage enjoys majority support, and Republican voters seem ready to burn down the party with the unreliable Donald Trump in order to send a message to their RINO party establishment.

Meanwhile in Spain, the established parties got a hammering in the latest election as voters express their anger over ten years of economic misery. Lots of them want to bash corporations and their employers, because. Here in NRO Jim Geraghty quotes Bryan Caplan on this theme:

So when we feel mistreated by a boss (or by co-workers the boss fails to control), we experience it as a serious affront. This in turn leads people to demonize employers as a class.

Once you demonize employers, it’s natural to (a) look to government for salvation from current ills, and (b) imagine that existing “pro-labor” laws explain why the demons in our lives don’t already treat us far worse.

Pretty soon you've got Marxism and all that that entails.

Actually I get it. It's the famous cornered rate syndrome. When you are cornered and facing death you have two options: submit or lash out. After all, if you do something then you never know, it might work.

Only there's a problem. Very few people in America in 2015 are truly "cornered." We are dissatisfied with out lot. We think that the economy has been bungled; we think that the boss is a fool; we think that the fellow behind the tree is a racist. But let's face it; if we are out of a job there is very little stopping us from getting another one, especially if we are willing to eat a little crow and take a job paying less than the last one.

The market economy deal is that you submit to the verdict of the market. If you don't like the verdict of the market then the thing to do is to change yourself: get more skills; work harder and better; move from California to Texas.

But that is hard. The easier thing to do is to blame the boss, blame overpaid CEOs, blame the system, change the market, and vote for the Bern or the Donald.

The problem for a politician bidding for votes is that you are not allowed to say to the voters: get on your bike and look for a job -- not if you want to get elected. So politicians say what the voters want to hear.

What I'd like to say is that the only way to live is to submit to the market. Even if you have a lousy boss and he fires you because he doesn't like you, just suck it in and go look for another job. Don't waste time thinking about how you could teach him a lesson.

Because the bottom line for all of us is that we are sitting on 200 years in which per-capita income has increased by 30 times, i.e., 3,000 percent. We are all sitting in an opulent mansion, and it is highly unlikely that anyone will benefit by burning it all down.

Can we thread the needle between the bomb-throwers and the pyromaniacs and elect a president that will restore as much of the market economy as he dares and inaugurate a new age of prosperity?

We'll see.

Gays Discover They Must Vote Democrat Forever

Here's little factoid. The gay friend of a friend is all upset because Ted Cruz is going to roll back gay marriage.

He is? I guess the gay guy is talking about this, where Cruz says that the Constitution doesn't mention marriage, which would mean that the 10th Amendment applies. (Boos from the audience.)

But it certainly illustrates basic settled political science. Particularly something that even liberals have conceded. You don't get to settle things with a Supreme Court coup de main.

That's what happened with abortion. Despite the fact that the Constitution says nothing about abortion, the ruling class through the United States Supreme Court decided to find in Roe v. Wade a privacy right to abortion. When conservative women woke up on the next day they found that this was an insult to women and to family. And to the sanctity of human life. So ever after we've had a divisive battle on abortion.

So ever after, it has been obvious to people that actually think about things that it's not a good idea to have the Supreme Court decide moral issues. It doesn't settle anything. It just riles up the opposition.

Here in Washington State we once had an Initiative 120 on banning abortion. It lost and abortion was never heard from again in this state. And that's the point. If you want to settle an issue you need a vote of the people. That's why Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that you want to decide big issues like Medicare with a 70-30 vote in the U.S. Senate.

So here we are in the same place on gay marriage. It passed in the Supreme Court but not in the court of public opinion. And now gays are terrified that a Republican president and Congress could turn around and reverse it.

Golly, fellahs. Who could have seen that coming?

See what this means? It means that gays must be mobilized in the National Gay Army forever. It means that gays must vote Democrat, and keep the Democrats pro-gay, forever. It means that gays must name and shame conservative Christians whenever they say a word against gays. It means a gay war on conservatives forever.

All this coalesces on my "little darlings" theory. If you become a little darling of the ruling class you are going to wake up one day to find yourself, like the veteran soldier, sitting by the side of the roadway in enemy country, sick and wounded, no longer any use to the ruling class that has abandoned you to your fate.

For the white working class that day dawned forty years ago when Norman Lear gave us the racist, sexist working class Archie Bunker. But it took the white working class decades to realize what had happened.

For gays, that day is not yet. But it will come. Because politicians don't care about people like you. They only care about your vote.

Obama: The Pharaoh That Knew Not Joseph

The thing about President Obama is that he knows and believes in the top-down administrative ethos of our ruling class without knowing why. He thinks that he and his kind are born to rule, and if the people don't agree, well, that's their problem.

His governing ethos comes from the post-Civil War era that began with the conceit of government by the "best men," followed in due course by the idea of government by credentialed experts. In this culture government is a series of programs that the best men and the experts think up for the betterment of the people. Because science.

But this is a profound misunderstanding of government. Government is not a delivery system of benefits conceived and gestated from on high. Government is the alternative to civil war. In other words, government and politics is a way of resolving conflicts between warring sections of a people without resorting to civil war.

To have a politics that does not collapse into civil war you have to govern "with the consent of the governed." Crudely put, this means that you must govern so that the opposition grudgingly consents to the actions of the government. The whole apparatus of the three branches of government and the bi-cameral Congress is designed to do this; it is bound to ensure that any proposed governmental action has wide and deep support if it is to clear all the hurdles and get implemented as law.

This sort of process is very frustrating to governing classes. They have ideas, wonderful ideas, that they are anxious to implement, right now, before it is too late. So, as time goes by, they learn how to game the system and push their proposals through without generating wide and deep support from the governed. In consequence they end up bulldozing the opposition aside as they push their agenda through. The govern, in other words, without the consent of the governed.

So now you know what is wrong with President Obama saying this at his end-of-year press conference.

"I think it's far preferable if I can get stuff done with Congress," he said. "...I think you've seen me, on a whole bunch of issues, like immigration, I'm not gonna -- I'm not gonna be forward-leaning on what I can do without Congress before I've tested what I can do with Congress."

Strictly speaking, it should be impossible for the president to "do without Congress." Doing without Congress is also doing without the consent of the American people, and that is not a good idea because it builds up a feeling in the governed that they are oppressed by a government that does not listen to them. But over the years, as Charles Murray details in By the People, the federal government has learned how to bypass Congress and legislate through executive actions and administrative regulations. This is how the Environmental Protection Agency is pushing the administration's shutdown of coal-fired electricity generation: by administrative action.

There is a push and a pull aspect to this gradual shift from legislating to administrating. The pull aspect is the appetite in the governing class for action. What is the point of ruling if you don't get to rule? The push aspect is that a 535-person bicameral legislature, even bulked up with 30,000 staffers, does not have the bandwidth to get down to the detail of a $4 trillion a year government. If it is going to spend 20 percent of GDP per year then the legislature has to delegate its legislative function to the bureaucrats and administrators.

Obamacare, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is Exhibit A if you want to understand the problems with administrative legislation.

First of all, Obamacare was passed on a partisan basis. Only Democrats voted for it; not one Republican voted for it. That is what you call a partisan cramdown. In the science developed by Buchanan and Tullock in The Calculus of Consent, you always have to buy the last few votes. But the votes bought to get Obamacare over the line were Democratic votes. The usual thing is to buy the votes of a few of the opposition so you can say that the proposal was passed with bipartisan support. That gives you the cover to say that the bill was passed with the consent of the governed. Actually, Buchanan and Tullock make clear, the only really just bill is one passed with unanimous consent; that way the proposers have to pay the opponents for the right to bulldoze over them.

Secondly, even though Obamacare was a 2,000 page bill, it didn't begin to get into the details of the complicated Obamacare exchanges, which operate in a hurricane of subsidies, both for the Obamacare signups and for the health insurance companies. Actually, of course, the whole thing is too complicated even for government administrators to control. That's why it's been such a disaster on all fronts. It has failed just as the settled science has predicted. Ten thousand bureaucrats cannot build a better mousetrap than millions of producers and consumers negotiating through the market.

The point is that the current model our ruling class uses to govern is a crock. First of all, they don't get the consent of the governed. Secondly, the administrative model they champion can't work because government and administrators cannot learn. The only way to learn is to let the market teach you.

President Obama is riding roughshod over all this. I understand why. He is the creature of his class, the international liberal governing class, and this governing class doesn't want to learn the settled science about consent of the governed and the futility of administrative systems. They think that they are the best men, and the people should just shut up and concede the higher wisdom and knowledge of their rulers.

In reality, government is force, politics is violence, governments cannot learn, and administrative system is domination. But there is nobody to tell that to the rulers.

So the Pharaoh that knew not Joseph and the wisdom of the Founders will have to learn the hard way.