Peggy Noonan and Narratives

Peggy Noonan recently got back to LiberalLand after attending a symposium in Colorado and she was struck by the ubiquity of The Narrative.

The Narrative has nothing to do with what is actually happening in the country. That would make too much sense. The Narrative is the story of a candidate or a candidacy, or the story of a presidency. Everyone in politics is supposed to have one. They're supposedly powerful. Voters believe them.

No, no, no, writes Peggy. You can't impose a narrative from above; it bubbles up from below.



Sorry, Peggy.   You are talking rubbish.  The Narrative is everything in politics.  Every leader must learn to tell the story of America so far, and the story of America as it is meant to be.  Ronald Reagan was the master of The Narrative, shamelessly appropriating the notion of the city on a hill and the last best hope of mankind on earth for all those who must have freedom.  Get the story right, and you've got the election almost sewn up.



But once you get elected then you better make sure that your narrative meshes with reality.



The Democrats have got completely tangled up in their narrative, and none more so than President Obama.  Their problem is that they are spinning stories for tactical moves, trying to move the public opinion needle, changing the story every time they speak to a different audience



The whole point of a narrative is to make sense of the world as it is, and as it ought to be.  The Democrats' problem is that their Grand Narrative, from Keynes to diversity to evil Bushism is failing.  It is failing because it does not explain how the world works.  It only shows that the Democrats don't know how the world works.



There is nothing catastrophic about this.  Narratives fail all the time.  Democrats love to talk about the failure of the Creationist narrative at the hands of Charles Darwin.  And talk and talk about it.  They talk so much that they don't notice that their own narrative is failing at the hands of a conservative future.



Peggy explains the Democratic obsession with narrative from their misreading of the Reagan era.  They thought Reagan's ideas were rubbish, and that he fooled the American people with a good story about Morning in America.  OK, they could play that game too.



But the Democrats decided Reagan was rubbish because they had to.  They had to believe that in order to keep on believing in their big-government narrative.  Reagan showed them that their economic and social ideas were all washed up.  They couldn't bring themselves to admit it.



But now the Democrats are about to pay for their delusion, big time, in the court of public opinion and election results.



Every human lives by narrative.  But the smart ones know when the old narrative is washed up and it's time to find a new one.

Liberals Always Go Too Far

Karl Rove thinks that President Obama will have his work cut out for him next year.  It's not going to be easy to pivot from base-pleasing class warfare to principled moderate and uniter.  Particularly as Obama is badly down with the voters that got him elected in 2008: young voters, Hispanics, and women.



In fact, says Jonah Goldberg, Obama has done the one thing he must not do.  He has awakened the sleeping bear of America's innate conservatism. "If you make no sudden moves and talk quietly, you can get a lot done. But if you wake the bear, as Democrats did in the late 1960s and early '70s, the ursine silent majority will punish you."  Of course, you could argue, Democrats still got Medicare and Medicaid passed back then, so it was worth it.



Anyway, that was then and this is now.  Peter Ferrara thinks that we are looking at a wipeout for the Democrats next year.  With the loss of Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, the blowout mid-term elections, and now the loss of an historically Democratic seat in New York City, things are trending worse for Democrats than in the Carter presidency.



Let us be clear.  The Obamaification of the Democratic Party is not just Obama.  The whole Democratic Party wants to be the party that Obama has made it.  It wants ObamaCare, wants swingeing regulation of everything from banks to light-bulbs, wants "green" energy, wants bigger government.



Back to the sleeping bear.  It woke up the moment that Obama was elected and it hasn't slept a wink since then.  But what does the awakened bear want?  John Agresto has an answer.

[T]he fairest nation on earth will be the one that prattles least about “social justice”; that the most neighborly will be the one that least tries to enforce artificial community; and the most compassionate will be the one that most cultivates the qualities of freedom in the souls of its citizens.

The tragedy of the educated class is that it couldn't be satisfied with persuasion, to educate the American people to its modernist religion of equality and peace and justice.  It decided that it had to have power as well, to force the bitter clingers to do the right thing.  But the combination of religion and politics has never gone well in the modern era.



In America, of course, the combination of church and state is actually illegal.  But the educated class attempt to combine its secular religion with the powers of government is obviously worse that a crime.  It's a blunder.

Rush! Make the Complex Understandable!

Yesterday a listener called Rush Limbaugh and riffed on the Elizabeth Warren flap.  The hypothetical business owner she cited, benefiting from the taxes and police and fire and roads, wasn't just benefiting from the government.  He was benefiting from the labor of the workers he hired.  Said Jeff the caller:

He didn't get rich because he dug more ditches than anyone else. He got rich and most people in the country get rich because they've got other people working for them, which means they're selling the labor of these other people for more than they're paying for it. They're paying a guy $8 to dig a ditch, and they're charging somebody else $20 for that ditch. Abraham Lincoln said that "before there's capital there's labor, and all capital comes from work that real human beings do."

This line, Rush was quick to tell his listeners, comes from the Daily Kos, in a January 29, 2009 article, "Abe Lincoln: Pro Labor. Send THIS to your R friends.", boosting the famous stimulus of that winter.  The "THIS" in question is an image and a quote from President Lincoln, here, made in his first message to Congress in 1861:

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

Rush responded, in due course, that this goes back to the idea that labor is paid less than it is worth.

This guy believes (I'll use myself here as an example) that I am getting rich -- and I'm not admitting that, by the way -- by paying the people who work for me less than what they are worth (not what they deserve, less than what they're worth) and getting rich off of it. Therefore, I am screwing the people who work for me.

Of course, the idea that it is scandalous that a contractor bills his client $20 for a employee that costs him $8 comes from Marx.  To justify the intervention of politics into the relation between worker and employer, Marx needs to find an injustice.  He finds it in the fact that the worker does not obtain the full value of his labor.  The employer gets more than he does by appropriating the surplus value of the worker's product over and above the value of the wages paid to the worker.



Help us out here Rush!  Let's come up with a rejoinder to these lefties and Marxists!  Let's make the complex understandable!



Here's my take.  It is true that "labor is prior to capital."  Of course it is.  That is why the capitalist must pay the  the worker his wages before he pays the bank. Before he pays his taxes. Before he gets paid by his client. Before he pays the bond-holders.  And before the chaps that come last of all, the shareholders, the risk-takers.  That is the principle of capitalism; it agrees with Abraham Lincoln.  The worker gets paid first.  The stockholders, accepting the risk proposition, come last; they live off the remainder left after all other stakeholders have been paid.  They make profits, or they suffer losses.



The welfare state is different.  In the welfare state the non-workers, from Social Security recipients to Medicare beneficiaries to welfare recipients to politicians to government workers, they all get paid first. And if there is enough money left over after all this government beneficiaries have been paid, then the workers can get paid.



In socialism, things are different.  There the workers do not come first.  They do not come last.  In socialism, the only thing that matters is the state.  So the workers do not really exist.  That is why they often just starve.

Herman Cain's 9-9-9 Plan

On the face of it, Heman Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan to reorganize federal finances on a three-legged stool, with 9 percent personal income tax, 9 percent corporate income tax, and 9 percent national sales tax sounds like a winner.  Remove all the complicated exemptions and deductions and let's get real!



But the obvious question is: who benefits?  On the face of it, the rich.  Surely they will benefit if high income tax rates and corporate income tax rates come down.



But the 9-9-9 plan also replaces the FICA tax on wages.  Right now (forgetting the temporary cut in FICA) the total FICA bite is 15.3 percent.  So a moderate income worker is going to get a cut on that (assuming that the worker gets the employer share of FICA).



The 9 percent sales tax will obviously hit the poor hardest.  Sales and excise taxes on consumer goods have always been understood to hurt the poor.  But maybe the poor will suffer more from elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which can be $2,000 per family per year.



The wild card is the corporate income tax.  If you eliminate FICA and reduce and simplify the corporate income tax it is going to have a substantial effect on corporations.  That will raise stock prices, but it will also enable employers to bid more for employees.  What really is the net effect for ordinary people when you lower corporate taxes?



The problem with a huge change like the 9-9-9 plan is that a ton of people are going to get a windfall gain and a ton of people are going to get a windfall loss.  The people experiencing a windfall loss are going to be really upset.



Herman Cain may find that out the hard way in the months ahead.

The New Praetorian Guard

Every schoolboy knows that, as the Roman Empire aged, its emperors declined from being Augustan gods to being shuffled in and out by the elite imperial guards, the Praetorian Guard.



Maybe Julius Caesar started the rot when he violated Roman law by bringing his army in Gaul across the Rubicon river and marched it into Rome.



As the welfare state careers towards disaster we are seeing the emergence of a new Praetorian Guard.  It is the organized mobs of government workers outraged that their over-market wages and over-market pensions are being cut.  You do not see dangerous mobs of ordinary citizens in the streets, unless you consider the peaceable and good-natured Tea Party a mob.  You see the civil servants in the streets.  No doubt the events in Madison, Wisconsin, of last winter will be repeated elsewhere as noble teachers and professors demonstrate their outrage now that their life-time employment and pension deal turns out to be less than gold-plated.



You could have seen it coming.  The politicians enrolled these supporters into powerful special interests to help them with their reelection.  And now their supporters are demanding that the checks keep coming.



In a perfect world, I'd say to hell with this ungrateful recipients of government loot.  For make no mistake, every dollar poured into the pocket of a government worker or a government benefit recipient has been obtained by force.



But reality is not as simple as that.



Our liberal friends have built their supporters up into a formidable political force.  That was the easy part.  The hard part is going to be persuading these lottery winners that you don't get to win the lottery every day of the year.  The tricky thing is going to be getting these folks to retreat without burning the place down as they leave.



Some politician is going to figure out how to do this, and I suspect that the key is understanding that most government employees--nurses, teachers, social workers--are women.  Let's face it, women in government, unionized as they are, aren't like the miners and the railroad workers and the auto workers that defined the union movement.  Women just don't do rioting in the streets.



Still, a grand betrayal of all the progressive promises is heading right down the tracks.  It is essential that the blame is put right where it belongs, on the liberals that promised that government could conjure up wonders.



What a crock.  Government is force.  If you want to do something practical, something productive and compassionate, perhaps, then you don't get government involved.  You rely on the cooperative nature of the social animal we call homo sapiens.




Meanwhile we've got the new Praetorian Guard trying to scare us into coughing up more money, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.

The Patronizing Dr. Warren

Liberals were famously irritated in the 2000s by the Texas swagger of George W. Bush.  You can understand why.  Elimination of the male macho personality type is precisely what liberalism is all about.  It is male aggression that brought us all those wars, not to mention domestic violence and gay bashing.



Judging by the response to Elizabeth Warren's riff about the wonders of government, it is clear that she represents an equivalent hot button for conservatives.



It is exactly the patronizing professorial attitude so common in liberals like Dr. Warren that drives conservatives to donate thousands of dollars to their favorite conservative candidates.



In fact you could say that both President Obama and Dr. Warren are poster boys for a particular type of liberal, the Pauline Kael type that couldn't understand why Nixon won the 1972 election, because she didn't know anyone who voted for him.  They live so completely in a liberal enclave that they never articulate in their speech the least notion that anyone thinks differently or needs persuading to the glory of liberal thought.



The beauty of Warren's comment that "nobody in this country that gets rich on his own" is its gloriously reactionary atavism.  She makes the common liberal mistake of conflating society and government.  To get rich, she patronizingly says, requires roads, educated workers, police, fire, and the armed forces. No kidding!



Then the pull quote:

But part of the underlying social contract is that you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid that comes along.

 Quite right.  As the Dalai Lama puts it, we need karuna, a directed altruism of action, issuing from a personal commitment to compassionate action.  Obviously that issues from a personal commitment in the individual.



The mistake liberals make that they assume that their compassion, directed into government programs, is the same thing, or the closest thing to real, personal compassion.



But we conservatives know that the liberal notion of government compassion is an atavistic holdover from the old days when society and government were not yet differentiated. In the ancestral village, government is not yet a bureaucracy.  Government is the gathering of the elders, carrying the opinion of the whole community.  When the community does something it is truly "we."



But in the modern era we have differentiated the spheres of human socialization.  We have government as the department of force.  It says you must.  We have the market economy as the department of stuff.  It says we could.  We have various religions, secular and transcendent, in the department of meaning.  It says we should.  We have decided that we need a separation of powers in society to avoid dangerous concentrations of power.



This is not hard.  In the modern era when you combine the economy and government you get crony capitalism, as in crony Solyndra, crony LightSquared, and crony Goldman Sachs.  When you combine religion and government you get totalitarianism, as in Hitler, Mao, Castro.  When you combine religion and capitalism you get liberals bossing business around.



The great problem of the current age is that liberals refuse to understand that their model of expert-led bureaucracy is flushing society down the toilet.  Modern society is much bigger than that; there just aren't enough experts to supervise, and there is no way they could know enough to supervise.  Modern society is a dense network of social cooperation in which millions of individuals contribute their knowledge and their skills to the whole.



For conservatives, we must resist the temptation to put businessmen on a pedestal.  For liberals, they must resist the temptation to put government on a pedestal.



The whole point of modern society is that it is not one big thing that makes it go.  It is everything working in concert that makes it go.  And until our liberal friends accept that, this country is in for a long nightmare of failure and conflict.

Obama Not Good On Economics

Now that the dam has broken on the Obama White House, we are getting our first real look at the man and his ideas--without the PR. Says The Money Illusion blogger:

It seems increasingly clear that Obama doesn’t have a good understanding of economics.  He approaches issues like a very bright non-economist using his common sense.

This is not good.  Because the whole point of economics and, for that matter, physics since Newton is that common sense doesn't do it on economics.  It would seem, from common sense, that productivity kills jobs.  You replace a man with a machine, and you lose a job.  Right?



Economics is the non-common-sense knowledge that says it ain't what you think.  The machine releases the worker for other work.  And there is plenty of other work to be done.  We've seen this process right from the start of the industrial revolution.  The workers that manned the textile factories were men that had lost their livelihood on the land.  Two centuries ago, about 80 percent of workers worked in agriculture.  Now it is less than 3 percent.  Then the factories started emptying out and manufacturing jobs started to decline.  A century ago, a huge proportion of workers worked in mining, steel, and railroads.  Now almost nobody works in those basic industries.  Yet overall Americans are much more prosperous than a century ago.



So it matters that President Obama doesn't get economics.



The bigger problem is that he doesn't get that he, or the next guy, is going to be the president that reneges on all the pretty promises about government entitlements.  Someone, and it better be soon, is going to have to reverse a century of liberal politics and cut entitlements, cut subsidies, cut labor regulation, cut environmental regulation and stop trying to gun the economy with the credit system.  The problem for Democrats is that their entire political existence is built upon entitlements, subsidies, labor "gains", environment, and cheap credit.  So if President Obama does fixes the economy he loses his base.



Right now the president seems to be focusing on the need to head off a primary challenge from the left. No doubt once he is sure of the nomination he will pivot to the center.



But the problem for the president that doesn't understand economics is that when he pivots to the center there may not be anyone there.  The president has been laying down a record for the last 30 odd months, and that record is spend, tax, regulate.  The American people want jobs, jobs, jobs.  And they mean jobs in the private sector, jobs that aren't procured by crony capitalism.



Any voter that thinks that Obama will deliver on jobs in the private sector any time soon deserves what he gets.