How Did We Get Here from There?

Here's a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger story about the republic of France.  Did you know that foreign investment in France has gone down by 77 percent in 2013?  Writes Tom Rogan:

That figure isn’t just bad, it’s unambiguously catastrophic. But the costs of President François Hollande’s failure aren’t simply economic. They’re also societal. Galvanized by popular disenchantment with the establishment, the French far Right hopes to win major victories in forthcoming local elections.

In short, the Fifth Republic isn’t looking so great.

Oh no, not Fascism!

But the question is: how can France be so stupid?  How can it build such a gigantic state and do nothing about it?  What is preventing it from declaring victory over Big Government and getting on with life?  Well, the answer is simple: chaps like Hollande from the grandes écoles.

The problem can't really be the people.  As Joseph Schumpeter wrote in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy back in the 1940s, Democracy is not the rule of the people, for the people clearly cannot rule.  Democracy is the rule of the politicians.

So why don't the politicians Do Something about the mega-state?

Perhaps democracy isn't the rule of the politicians.  Maybe it's the rule of someone else.

What about Andre Codevilla's Ruling Class?

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity...  America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

Good enough.  But that suggests the "New Class" of Milovan Djilas, once an associate of Yugoslavia's Tito and Vice-president of Yugoslavia.  Djilas's New Class was "the privileged ruling class of bureaucrats and Communist Party functionaries" the "nomenclatura" that possessed not just power over the economy but over a nation's politics as well.

People like me are dissatisfied with this analysis because it does not address the idea that, in the aftermath of the death of God, the New Class or Ruling Class also operates as a kind of established secular church.  In our present society moral leadership and moral creativity comes not from divines but from people in the academy.

The trouble with the academy is that we are not talking about the detached moral leadership of medieval philosophers and scribes.  As Julian Benda claimed in The Treason of the Intellectuals in 1927, today's thinkers are not universalists; they have betrayed their calling.  Roger Kimball:

The “treason” or betrayal [Benda] sought to publish concerned the way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was “mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers.” The ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were not jettisoned altogether.

In other words, today's intellectuals are not just ivory-tower thinkers.  They come down from the mountain and use their ideas for political purposes in the street.  They now count political commitment as a virtue, not a conflict of interest.

The late Andrew Breitbart memorably said the "politics really is downstream from culture."  It's no use trying to change politics if you don't change the culture first.  But what if culture is downstream from religion, whether a transcendental religion such as Christianity or a secular religion such as socialism or progressivism?

So the best way to think about any human community is to think first about the people that are setting the agenda for moral discussion.  And in our society, those people are the professors.  They form, in essence, a established secular church.  They formulate correct opinion; they decide what is beyond the pale.  The media takes its cue from the academy: that is what all those experts are doing on your TV.  And the politicians take their cue from the media.  In other words, the "Cathedral."

The Cathedral has two parts: the accredited universities and the established press. The universities formulate public policy. The press guides public opinion. In other words, the universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent. It's as simple as a punch in the mouth.

The Cathedral operates as the brain of a broader power structure, the Polygon or Apparat - the permanent civil service. The Apparat is the civil service proper (all nonmilitary officials whose positions are immune to partisan politics, also known as "democracy"), plus all those formally outside government whose goal is to influence or implement public policy - ie, NGOs. (There's a reason NGOs have to remind themselves that they're "non-governmental.")

And further,

Today's Cathedral is not a personality cult. It is not a political party. It is something far more elegant and evolved. It is not even an organization in the conventional, hierarchical sense of the word - it has no Leader, no Central Committee, no nothing. It is a true peer-to-peer network, which makes it extraordinarily resilient. To even understand why it is so unanimous, why Harvard always agrees with Yale which is always on the same page as Berkeley which never picks any sort of a fight with the New York Times, except of course to argue that it is not progressive enough, takes quite a bit of thinking.

The point about the Cathedral is that it not only has political power, through the fact that it pwns the minds of the politicians.  Not only does it have cultural power in that it defines what it is to be enlightened and fashionable.  Its primary power is that it has moral power.  It decides what is acceptable to think and say, i.e., politically correct or what used to be called orthodoxy, and it decides what is "hate speech," i.e., politically incorrect or what used to be called heresy.

Mencius Moldbug has lots of ideas.  Some of them are good, and some not so good.  But his idea of the "Cathedral" magnificently encodes the nature of the modern ruling class and our current moral, cultural and political predicament.

Anyone that wants to get somewhere from here has to start with the fact of the "Cathedral."  Because the Cathedral is what has got us to our present moment.

And don't forget, if you want to change things:  As far as the Cathedral is concerned, the world is working pretty well right now.

Liberals! Stop Blowing Things Up!

What with Obamacare a full-fledged disaster and all, commentators are just about united in describing President Obama as "blowing up the health care system" for the sake of the 30 or 40 million or so "uninsured."

Only now it turns out that the uninsured aren't signing up for health insurance, not so you'd notice.  So, the commentators are now saying: we blew up the health care system -- for what, exactly?

When you think about it, liberals are always blowing things up.  And for what?

One hundred years ago they blew up the credit system and substituted the Federal Reserve System.  How's that been working out, as the dollar has gone from $20 per ounce of gold to the present $1,300 or so?

What about the wonders of Social Security?  Well, according to some researchers nations, a pay-as-you-go government pension scheme results in people that seem to stop having children.  And that's apart from the fact that Social Security blows a hole in the savings rate.

Then there's welfare.  That's blown up the low-income family, to the tune of $20 trillion over the last 50 years.

Then liberals decided they had to provide "affordable housing" to everyone, regardless of ability to pay.  That ended up blowing up the credit system in 2008.

What else?  Well there is always the student loan system that is in the process of blowing up higher education.  There is always the war on drugs that has blown up the inner city.

Right now I'm reading Doctor Zhivago, about how the Bolsheviks blew up Russia.  Really, Russia has never been the same since.  Go back before that and read about how the Jacobins blew up France.  Ditto France.  It has never been the same.

The fact is that the only thing government knows how to do is to kill people and to blow things up.  But very rarely is that necessary in the course of human events.

Let's take two present issues: marijuana and abortion.

The problem is that both of these are moral questions, not criminal questions.  People may disagree about the morality of abortion, but it is not a criminal matter that should be decided by police.  Same with drug use.  It would be far better to conduct these matters as moral issues, and make abortion and drug use shameful rather than illegal.

President Clinton famously tried to square the circle on abortion by making it "safe, legal, and rare."  I'd say that conservatives should trump him by making abortion "safe, legal, and shameful."

Ee should use the same strategy on drug use.  We shouldn't make it illegal.  We should make it déclassé, darling.  And that means women getting together and whispering about the friend who's doing too much alcohol, pot, pain-killers, anxiety drugs -- like, whatever.

That's how we solve social problems: socially.

And then maybe we could stop blowing things up all the time.

The Rape of the German Women

According to the feminists, we are not to construe statements like "Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women" from Andrea Dworkin as "all sex is rape."

But, to echo a famous feminist politician.  "What difference at this point does it make?"

The difference to me is that I just can't trust what feminists say about anything because it is so transparently obvious that it is all about the politics.

But I still think about Briseis, the trophy concubine of Achilles and the cause of the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon on the plains of Ilium before Troy.  What did Briseis think about her father and mother and brother being killed and then becoming the concubine of the very man that killed them?

I got an approach to an answer in the harrowing book A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City by Anonymous.  It describes what a woman has to go through to survive when living at the mercy of Red Army troops that have just battled their way into the capital of Germany in April 1945.

Here is what she does.  After being forcibly raped a few times this 34-year-old journalist comes to a decision:

Damn this to hell! I say it out loud. Then I make up my mind. No question about it.

I have to find a single wolf to keep away the pack.  An officer, as high-ranking as possible, a commandant, a general, whatever I can manage.  After all, what are my brains for, my little knowledge of the enemy's language.

It's the morning of April 28, 1945 and goes out and finds herself an officer.  He brings food and drink every night and everyone in the apartment has a jolly time, partying the night away until it's time to go to bed and for her to get violated.  And when his unit moves on, another officer takes his place.

It was the adult fecund women that took the brunt of the rape.  The women mostly managed to hide the teenaged virgins in attics and false ceiling, and the older women were mostly spared.

These young, sexually experienced women had the skills to manage their conquerors, to avoid gang rape, and to exchange, as far as possible, sex for survival.

It was the young innocents that suffered most psychological damage.  Not knowing how to manage men sexually, they were the ones that ended up being most brutally violated.

Here's the chronology of a conquered city.  You never know.

• By April 20 water and electricity are out.  
• On April 26 Germans are looting an abandoned barracks for food and drink.  
• On April 27 the Russians arrive and the worst rape occurs.  
• On May 2 the city surrenders.  
• On May 9 the Russian sugar daddies leave.  
• On May 11 they get new ration cards and start to venture out to find friends in other neighborhoods.  
• On May 14 there's "a Russian truck full of flour" on her street.  Food is back.
• On May 15 she registers for work.  
• On May 16 she acts as translator for a Russian lieutenant charged to check out all the banks in her neighborhood.  
• On May 19 the water comes back on.  
• On May 22 she gets to work shoveling debris.  
• On May 24 she works stripping factories of everything movable for transport to Russia.  
• On May 25 she starts work washing soldiers' clothing. 
• On May 26 the electricity and the radio come back on. "They say that millions of people -- mostly Jews -- were cremated in the East and that their ashes were used for fertilizer."  
• On June 3 she starts working (for free) for a Hungarian who wants to start a publishing venture.  
• On June 8 the streetcar starts operations (briefly).  
• On June 16 her German pre-war lover turns up.

Her lover Gerd looks at her diary.  What's this abbreviation "Schgd?"

I had to laugh: "Schändung," of course -- rape. He looked at me as if I were out of my mind but said nothing more.

You get a new understanding of violence and human sexuality from the extreme experience of a woman trying to survive in a conquered city during the key month when order has broken down.

And you get to understand what women want.  They want to make the best of the situation.

The System Isn't the Solution

Why is Obamacare such a mess?  Why is the economy barely growing?  Why are the rich making money hand over fist in the stock market while ordinary Americans are struggling to find jobs?

It's the system.  Or rather the faith in system.  Our liberal friends believe that politicians can and should construct a system of health care.  They believe that government can fine-tune the economic system.  They believe that government can intervene in the labor markets to improve the outcomes for workers.

We talk about the free-enterprise system and the market system but really it isn't.  Nobody set up an economic system; it just evolved.  And the modern market system evolved out of the limited markets that obtained during the feudal era.  As people got more freedom from the hierarchical demands of their feudal ties they interacted with each other and developed markets and trading and credit and prosperity.  The folk that did international business, like the Champagne fairs of the Middle Ages developed the bill of exchange that allowed them do transact business without having to pay in coin.  Nobody ordered it; it just evolved.

Of course we are trammeling here into the dangerous waters of Social Darwinism.  It is one thing to say that genes evolve by an unconscious process of natural selection, where the offspring that are blindly better adapted to the environment survive and the others don't.  It is another thing to say that the same process applies to social interactions.

But you can see what happens when the unconscious interactions of market players are banned and a state system of interaction is substituted.  You get the flavor of it in Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.  As the market interactions of ordinary Russians were made illegal and the "system" failed to provide food and basic necessaries in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution people were forced to exchange goods in a criminal manner in the dark of night.  You exchanged household goods for food.  On the train you leaped off at stations to buy food from peasant women that stood around the back of a shed ready for the train passengers with cooked food wrapped in quilted towels.

Here's Michael Totten driving across Cuba in a bus.

Most of Cuba is more or less flat. I could see off in the distance outside the window because the landscape is not forested. It consists mostly of grass, stray palm trees, sad little agricultural plots, and unused fields gone to the weeds. 

Unused fields gone to the weeds?  There's an infestation of weeds from Angola, and "no one seems to have a clue how to get rid of it."  Now why would this be so?

It's because nothing happens in Cuba outside the "system."  If you are an enterprising soul you can't rub a couple nickels together and buy a little weedkiller or experiment with a bit of poly-culture.  No indeed.   Because nothing moves in Cuba unless it's approved by the "system."

It is telling that the best indictment of "system" has been developed by a leftist, Jürgen Habermas.  The system that you get with any large organization, whether capitalist or governmental or military is inherently dominatory, according to Habermas.  That's because the whole point of a system is to force everyone to work for a single goal, and a system always thinks and acts strategically.  His solution is to balance the strategic domination of system with communicative "Handeln."  Handeln means "action" in German but it also means haggling and negotiation.  When applied to Jews and business people it seems to be a pejorative.

I don't know if Habermas knew what he was proposing, but it seems obvious to me that the combination of system and Handeln is in fact modern capitalism with a minimum of interference by lefties.  There is no doubt that the knowledge and the organization of institutions that make and sell goods and services are enormously powerful and dominatory.  But the market is voluntary; actual transactions are subject to negotiation.  You don't have to buy at Walmart, but many people do, and will continue to do so as long as Walmart offers their Everyday Low Prices.

The huge error at the center of Obamacare is to imagine that you can substitute the complex interaction of system and Handeln with a single bureaucratic systems manual.  There is a category error here.  You can create a government system to e.g., invade the continent of Europe.  There's a single, simple goal that, given the biggest economy in the world, you can achieve if you allocate 40 percent of GDP to the task for a few years.

But health care is not so simple.  It cannot end with the defeated enemies of good health care signing an instrument of unconditional surrender.  It is a constantly changing, constantly adapting thing -- an unconscious organism responding every moment to the great tides of secular change and the little ripples of individual need.

When you want something to respond every moment to every change in human need you don't want to give the job to government.

There is in the human breast the constant yearning for an end to all the struggling, to live in peace and tranquility free from the brutal forces of the world: the Kantian dream of Perpetual Peace.

And so, time after time, humans try to create that dream, by fiat, by saying let it be so.  But the only way that people can seem to imagine such a paradise is by forcing their dream on other people.  And so they transform the dream into a nightmare.

Liberals have been dreaming of a universal system for health care for about a century.  If only we had a centralized system, they have insisted, then all the inadequacies and injustices of the current system would be eliminated.

But our liberal friends are in the middle of being proved disastrously wrong on their health care dream.  And instead of a dream they are creating a nightmare.

They have only themselves to blame.  Economics says that a government system is not the answer.  Political theory says that centralized power is not the answer.  Even lefty sociologist-philosophers say that system is not the answer.  And that is to say nothing about the actual facts of history, from the failure of socialist communes in the 19th century to the failure of communist dictatorships in the 20th century and the dead hand of government bureaucracy everywhere you look around.

The system isn't the solution, liberals.  Why is that so hard for you to understand?

The Clueless Clots of Silicon Valley

We conservatives thought that the tech revolution would usher in an era of small government.  But it turns out that the Gateses and the Jobses and the Google guys are Democrats.



I don't know whether it is snobbery -- because every educated person in America is taught from an early age to shun the gap-toothed fundamentalists and Puritans that run the Republican Party.  Or maybe it is crony capitalism -- because those corporate greedists learn pretty quickly that the guys they need to keep happy are the Democrats.  Or else.



But now it looks like the Silicon Valley guys are heading for trouble.  The local lefties in the Bay Area are starting to target the tech giants for their special attention.  And the techies are feeling confused. Walter Russell Mead writes.

[It] feels like a weird and painful betrayal—both to the techies who like to think of themselves as benign and progressives, and to the hipster left who thought that this corporate wave would be different.

 But, of course, these chaps are living in a fool's paradise.  Seen from a distance, the new tech giants are no different than the new giant industries of the 19th century.

 Many start-up industries are individualistic and libertarian in culture even when they depend heavily on state action.Many start-up industries are individualistic and libertarian in culture even when they depend heavily on state action. Think of 19th century railroads and their subsidies, for example. With tech, despite the usual wacky individualism and libertarian rhetoric, it has been DARPA and defense spending all along as a major engine of growth. It’s an association that goes back to World War Two, when the massive data processing needs of total war laid the foundation for the computer age.

The reality is that whether or not business is interested in government, government is interested in business.  Politicians are quick to grasp the power potential in the new technologies and immediately move to use it for their own power projects.



As frisky tech startups becomes Big Tech the left targets them as the enemy.  And, as Mead reminds us:

The pressure groups and government agencies of the blue state are desperate for revenue. Silicon Valley has money. The question becomes: how to extract wealth from those horrible techsters and redistribute it where, in the judgment of blue politicos and interest groups, it will do the most good?

 Hey Big Tech!  Isn't it time you re-evaluated who your friends are?  We conservatives may not be as hip and fashionable as you like, and we may be terminally embarrassing with our god-bothering, but think about it.



We conservatives think that government should be limited, and that means that its power to meddle with Big Tech should be limited.



What do you think about that, Google guys?  Don't you think that you should start hedging your bets and putting a bit of money on the same horses as those evil monsters, the Koch Brothers?  Not to mention the unmentionable ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, bête noire of the left?



Because you chaps are going to need a bit of covering fire from the right starting from right now, and if you don't get that, you really are the clueless clots, the mindless nerds, that everyone takes you for. 

Inequality, Crony Capitalism, the Left and Obamacare

The modern secular religion that we call the Left has a vision of human liberation and emancipation: a liberation and emancipation of all humans from the oppressions and subordinations of the past.

But the odd thing about its vision is that it is wholly political; it can only imagine getting to the future by force.

This is a puzzling thing, because the whole point of human society is that it represents a zone of peace; disputes between humans within society are not to be settled by force, but by other means.

This requires the left -- and every political actor -- to divide the society into Us and Them.  Properly, We are the group, the tribe, the nation, the society and They are the Enemy in the next village, next nation.

In the notion of the left the enemy is a viper in the bosom of our own society, a nest of exploiters, or robber barons, or class enemies, or racists, sexists and bigots.  Thus the left must mount a war of the people against the powerful, the workers against the bosses, the gays against the "haters."

In other words, the left is always waging a civil war against the domestic enemy.  The irony is that this usually requires the left to co-opt some of the people that it normally characterizes as the "enemy."

Take Obamacare.  For decades the left has taught everyone to believe that the problem with health care is insurance companies and drug companies and corporate greed.  Yet President Obama and the congressional Democrats designed Obamacare around the need to co-opt the drug companies and the health insurers into its plan so that they would not oppose it, and it exempted big corporations, the ones that self-insure, from many onerous regulations and requirements.  There is even a "risk corridor" to bail out insurance companies from losses if Obamacare's projections turn out to be wrong.

When corporations get in bed with government we conservatives and libertarians like to call it "crony capitalism."

Of course, nothing prevents the left from turning on their corporate "partners" when things go wrong.

But this is all wrong, and cannot end well.  That is because the whole point of capitalism is that it is adapting, every moment, to the demands of the consumers.  The whole point of a big-government program like Obamacare is that it protects people from adaptation, and solves, for all time, some monstrous oppression or injustice, and it sets up a bureaucracy to manage it.

That is the point: bureaucracy doesn't adapt.  It wants to keep running things the old way, and resists change.  It can resist change for a while because it has the power of government behind it.

Today the cry of the left is against "inequality."  Of course it is.  Because the left always needs some rationalization for the use of government force.  If some people are rich and some people are poor then it requires a government intervention to redistribute it.

But what if the government policy supported and implemented by the left has actually contributed to inequality?  Somehow our lefty friends cannot imagine that.

There is a better way to look at this.  It is that freedom (and liberation and emancipation) needs individualism.  You cannot have freedom unless individuals are free (and also obligated) to search out and discover how they can contribute to society.  Servitude, the other side of the coin, always involves collectivization.  If government -- whether the family patriarch, the village big man, the local baron, the political commissar or the nation state -- guarantees anyone a lunch ticket then it must force people to work to provide that lunch.

When the Brits started emerging from feudalism a thousand years ago, they did a curious thing to break up their serf households; they sent their children away from home as apprentices and servants.  This meant, of course, they the detached their children from the mother's teat.  Each child had to find their own way in the world.

In a way, it's a cruel idea.  Each child must find a way to support itself on its own or perish.  But the alternative, of course, is to stay at home and submit oneself forever to the authority of the father.  Then you survive or perish upon the decisions of the patriarch.

OK, which is more cruel?  You rely on your own efforts to secure a livelihood or you rely on the efforts of the family patriarch, the precinct captain, the party boss, the charismatic politician?

I know what I think.

Never Call a Voter a Fool

The truth is that we voters are fools.  We vote for politicians that tell us things we want to hear and then we act all outraged when they betray us.



That is why H.L. Mencken said that "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."



What the common people want is free stuff, and what they get is the cost of free stuff.



Right now our Democratic friends are offering the common people extended unemployment benefits. Sounds like a good idea except that the longer people -- especially middle-aged men -- stay on unemployment the more likely they will never work again.



What about a higher minimum wage? Sounds like a good idea except that the science says that the minimum wage discriminates against young, low-skilled workers, and particularly young, low-skilled minority workers.  Maybe that's why the young unemployment rate is higher than adult unemployment and minority youth unemployment is the highest of all.



But how do you talk to voters who are fools?  The women voters that bought the Obamacare promises?  The youth that bought the free contraception, student loan promises?



All you can do is blame Obama.  All you can do is say they lied.



But then you have an opening.  You can say that this is what big government looks like.  Big government doesn't care about someone like you.  Never has, never will.



Big government only cares about power and influence.  If you want a society that cares about people like you then there is only one thing to do.  Vote against big government and start working for the family, church, and neighborhood organizations that know you personally and care for you individually.



Here's the thing.  It is only people that are related to you and know you personally that will be there when you need help.  As you will be there for the people that are related to you and know you personally.



Government doesn't care about you; it just cares about your vote.  The best thing for the economy would be to get the government out of its monetary and fiscal meddling.  Oh yeah, we need government as the lender of last resort, because capitalism is punctuated by crashes and panics.  It's pretty scary, but a lot less scary than what came before: periodic famine and starvation.



But when government gives out free stuff it is setting people up for a fall.  All that Fannie/Freddie credit?  Millions of people took the bait and ended up losing their homes and everything?  All that help for the poor?  It ended up killing work and marriage in the lower orders.  Medicare for seniors like me?  It's ended up as a racket where physicians go to conferences to learn how to "upcode."  Social Security?  It reduces savings, the foundation of the future.



You can see Republican Senate candidate Ben Sasse trying to break through to the voters as he campaigns for the US Senate in Nebraska.

[H]e faces a barrage of questions about health care, from workers watching their costs skyrocket and small-business owners worried about growth. There are broader concerns, too: “One of the most common questions I get is some version of whether we've come to the end of America,” says Sasse. “People are worried that we’re in decline, and that one of the reasons we’re in decline is because our leaders refuse to discuss it.” When the subject comes up, Sasse tries to acknowledge these concerns and sound a few hopeful notes. Then he says ordinary citizens must do their part: “We have to teach the American idea to our kids. The inertia of motion does not preserve a republic.”

Maybe that's all a politician can do: "sound a few hopeful notes."



Just don't call it Hope and Change.