Obama: Not Cloward-Piven but Jerry Lundegaard

Some people think that the Obamis are executing on a brilliant Cloward-Piven strategy to make the country ungovernable. That's why the president and his minions are "angrying up" African Americans against white cops killing young blacks.

All part of the plan, according to John Nolte.

Keep ‘em down. Keep ‘em angry. Pretend you are their savior not their oppressor, and keep ‘em voting for the very thing destroying them: big government and the Democrats who control it.

This sinister plot is no secret. It’s openly called the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

But I think that the Cloward-Piven Strategy, named after two lefty professors predicting revolution, is not a strategy. It is a tactic. Sure, it can angry up the proles so that radical leaders can enlist them into a political street army. Then the police hold back from vigorous policing and the violence gets worse. But then what?

I suspect the same goes for Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. It's all about mobilizing the urban working or underclass against The Man, making him follow his rules. But like Gandhi's non-violence, it only works against a "Man" that operates according to bourgeois law and a "Man" that has compassion for the struggling masses.

But the question is, with Cloward-Piven and Alinsky, what next? When you've got your urban army set up and organized, what do you do with it? Can you look around a corner and see where your lefty activism is going to take you?

There, in my opinion, is where things start to go wrong.

It's like the set-up in the movie Fargo. Car dealer Jerry Lundegaard sets up a cunning plan to have a couple of low-lifes kidnap his wife so his rich father-in-law can pay the ransom and Jerry can get his hands on his father-in-law's money. What could go wrong? As Instapundit Glenn Reynolds would say.

Everything, that's what.

Think of the Obama presidency. After the biggest financial crash since 1929, the Obamis say Hey, let's nationalize the health care system, let's drench the energy sector in stupid green subsidies and drive coal plants out of business. Oh and let's make sure we get out of the slump with a quick $1 trillion stimulus to keep state and local government employees on the job. What could go wrong?

Everything, that's what, from a failed Obamacare built on lies and a fracking revolution that makes nonsense out of green energy. And an excruciatingly slow recovery because of all the new costs that the Obamis have thrown over the economy.

Now the Obamis think it's a brilliant idea to end the "broken windows" and "stop and frisk" policing of the last 20 years. Because Black Lives Matter. Because liberals hate the unjust "stop and frisk" policing policy that unjustly targets young men of color. What could go wrong?

Everything, that's what, from murder to mayhem. Here's Leah Barkoukis in "Families of Shooting Victims to de Blasio: 'We Need Stop-and-Frisk'." You mean that urban residents actually want unjust and racist "stop and frisk?" Golly. Who could have seen that coming? In Baltimore:

Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend.

And now in Baltimore "the people who not too long ago decried the presence of police in their communities are now are wishing they’d come back."

There are two narratives about urban policing. There is the Robert Peel narrative, that in the modern big city policemen are needed to control young lower-class single men. Robert Peel was the guy that created the Metropolitan Police in Britain in 1829. Then there is the progressive narrative that the "gentle giants" are victims of the system. Because racism, or inequality.

The "broken windows/stop and frisk" policy belongs in the Peel tradition and was developed in response to the urban riots of the 1960s and the explosion in crime thereafter. The combination of riots and crime created the "law-and-order" politics that elected Richard Nixon to the presidency.

The idea of "stop and frisk" is that you go after minor street crimes on the theory that the guys creating street disturbances are the same as the guys doing the murders.  Says Wiki:

The theory was introduced in a 1982 article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. Since then it has been subject to great debate both within the social sciences and the public sphere. The theory has been used as a motivation for several reforms in criminal policy, including the controversial mass use of "stop, question, and frisk" by the New York City Police Department.

When Wiki writes "great debate" and "controversial" they mean that liberals hate it.

But there is a bigger issue that "stop and frisk" solves. The problem is that people in the inner city won't testify about gang murders; they are too afraid. Of course the inner-city folks blame the po-lice for their failure to arrest and convict the killers. But "everybody knows" who done the killings, including the police. So the police get their own back by arresting the known thugs for minor crimes whenever they catch them. The young thugs and their liberal activist mentors hate this.

And so when Bill de Blasio became Mayor of New York City he pushed back on "stop and frisk".  Of course he did; he's a progressive and progressives hate "stop and frisk." And in the wake of Trayvon Martin and Ferguson and Staten Island and Baltimore police all over the nation have eased back on "stop and frisk." Hey, why risk your freedom and your family and your career because you didn't dot the 'i's and cross the 't's in your last arrest? But coincident with the backoff in "stop and frisk" has been a startling rise in urban killing. Who could have see this coming? As always Heather Mac Donald is the go-to person on this in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

What we are getting is almost a scientifically controlled experiment to measure the effectiveness of "stop and frisk." We all know, because we all understand scientific method, that "correlation is not causation." That goes back to Hume. In the last 20 years the crime rate has come down dramatically. And also police forces across the nation have been implementing "stop and frisk." But hey, that's just correlation.

But now, courtesy of Barack Obama and Bill de Blasio and the lefty rioters in Ferguson and Baltimore, we have a suspension of "stop and frisk." And low and behold, urban killings are up sharply.

I'd say that this is just about as close as we get in this world to "causation."

What is the explanation for the dumb-as-posts policies of our liberal friends, who just cannot seem to learn? Why in the world have liberals insisted that "stop and frisk" was mere racism and oppression, and are now seeing their opposition to effective policing blow up in their faces?

Here is my evaluation, gleaned from a commenter at National Review. The answer to the question is that liberalism is not a governing philosophy. It is a secular religion. "The Z Man" is commenting on the inability of the progressive ruling class to curb the Clintons:

The central issue is that Progressives lack the ability to police their ranks, other than the hunting of heretics. They are good at chasing off a guy like Juan Williams for apostacy, but they can't figure out how to police common criminals like the Clintons.

See what he is saying? He is saying that the only thing the Progressives know how to do is to police orthodoxy, and hunt the heretics. But that is a tactic of a church or a religion. It does not try to look around the corner and think about what the hunting of heretics might do in the larger world. It does not think about a code of honor for the governing class, either from a moral or a strategic perspective.

And here is The Z Man's big point. "A political class with a moral grounding would have cut off [the Clintons] long before they made it to national politics." But in 1992 the Dems were desperate.

But now we have the "Fargo Presidency." Hey, let's angry up the African Americans and drive them to the polls in 2016. What could go wrong?

Well, everything, that's what. Let's just start with the vital Republican "war on women." If everything is quiet at home and abroad then it's a fine idea to terrify women into believing that evil white Republican men want to take their contraception away from them. But suppose the news is full of urban rioting and the sudden rise in crime?

Then America's biddable women, that once were soccer moms and then security moms and then hands-off-my-uterus moms, would now become law-and-order moms. It's visceral. A woman cannot begin to function as the bringer of life until she is safe. As Jack London opines in The Sea Wolf, when the ship starts sinking the women start shrieking. They expect the men to make them safe. Of course Jack London was a jerk and an alcoholic and a drug addict. But he did believe in socialism.

The number one question women have is "Mr. President, Is it Safe?" And it looks like "safe spaces" will be front and center in 2016.

Thanks to the Fargo Presidency.

Where's the Conservative Narrative We Need?

On a day when former Speaker Denny Hastert gets indicted for paying hush money, Jonah Goldberg writes about the astonishingly low bar for Clinton misdeeds.

[E]very time there’s a new revelation about the unseemly practices of the Clintons, every time a new trough of documents or fresh disclosures come to light, scads of news outlets and Clinton spinners insist that “there’s no smoking gun” proving beyond all doubt that Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation did anything wrong.

Whatever happened to the Caesar's wife standard? How come that Denny Hastert, a private lobbyist, is in the dock and, e.g., Lois Lerner, a government official that seems to have grossly abused her power, isn't? And how come Hillary Clinton isn't under indictment right now for violating government record-keeping mandates?

Or what about the delicious interview between Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina and Andrea Mitchell where Mitchell is clearly warning Fiorina that there's a lèse majesté problem with criticizing Hillary:

She's had a lifetime, though, in public service. Going back to before she was first lady in Arkansas. She can argue that she's got a record on women's issues, from the Beijing Women's Conference to all of her work with the Children's Defense Fund going up through the Senate, senator from New York, that’s a record. Secretary of state. How do you compare yourself to her? 

When, in a month of Sundays, has Mitchell ever defended a Republican white male like that?

Let's look at another notion, the "cares about people like me" metric used in presidential polls. It's said that Obama beat Romney roughly 80-20 on the cares-about-me question. Really? You might think that if you had been glued in front of your TV in summer 2012 and an endless roll of Joe Soptic commercials.  But come on: Mitt Romney's whole life has been about service to his church and showing up when asked. Barack Obama? Well, now that the elections are all over we are getting to see more and more of the small and narrow man inside the media bubble.

Conservatives often despair about winning the "cares about people like me" stakes. But I think we have been going about it all wrong. The way that Democrats frame it, it's all about feudalism. That's what the Joe Soptic ad was about. Romney was the lord of the manor; he should have sent his wife out to succor Soptic's wife with flannel and a basket of food.

That's all wrong for Republicans. What Republicans need to advertise is that they care about the responsible middle class, people who, in Sean Hannity's words, follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law. That's what Republicans did in the 1970s with the Silent Majority meme and Democrats hated it; they hated it because it worked. What Republicans need to hammer on again and again is that Republicans care about people who do the right thing, who get married, have children, save for college, help their community. And if the government or its bureaucrats or its activists come down on you, then Republicans will have your back.

It's my belief that the Obama boys have set this up beautifully for 2016. Where is the responsible middle-class person who is not worried about saying the wrong thing -- to a woman at work, perhaps -- and then losing his job, because sexism. Where is the Christian small business that doesn't wonder if some gay person will come through the door tomorrow and set them up for ruining their business, because homophobia? Where is the liberal college professor that does not worry about getting his career ruined by some "triggered" "studies" activist, because identity?

I was reading Charles Krauthammer's regular Friday column today where he mourns the awful time his fellow physicians are having, beset as they are by government, insurance companies, lawyers, and the dread electronic health records (EHR) mandate. But if you read the comments you can see very little sympathy for the docs. Hey, they seem to say, if the docs don't want to get with the program, they can quit.

Yes. No doubt. But the EHR initiative is a case of government coercion. It is government saying you will convert to our idea of what EHR should look like. Or else. Do we really care that little about government coercion in America in the 21st century?

It's strange to me how easily we accept government force. Perhaps it's because we mostly all work in some corporate bureaucracy, and so live in a world of corporate mandates. The mandate, for us, is our way of life; you suck it up and do what you are told, just like in the feudal era. Sucking up to the powerful is just what we all do.

But I yearn for a world where we don't suck up to the powerful, where the thing most honored in the public square is not the helpless victim or the cosseted "activist" but the responsible individual.

Will Demographic "Diversity" End in Tears?

All across the world different races and religions are mixing it up as never before.

Well, maybe not. Hey, maybe things were more mixed up in the Roman and the Ottoman Empires than right now. But never mind: we all think that the races and the cultures are mixing it up like never before.

Against that the lands of the former Ottoman Empire right now are sorting into silos like mad in massacres and genocides.

In his new book By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission Charles Murray is sanguine about this, at least as far as America is concerned. The United States, he tells us, was always a diverse nation, starting from the founding from Albion's Seed when the four British groups, Yankees, Quakers, Cavaliers, and Scots-Irish, didn't like each other at all. That was followed by German and Irish immigration, and then southern and eastern European immigration. And don't forget the Swedes!

Of course, everyone right now is terrified by ISIS and Islam in Europe. That's when they aren't terrified by Hispanic immigration to the US or black thugs in Baltimore or alternatively racist police in any inner city! My favorite professional firebrand Vox Day notes four different outcomes of "the demographic destruction of Anglo-Saxon America."

a) subjection and eventual elimination of minorities,
b) subjection and eventual elimination of the majority,
c) partition,
d) ethnic subsumption.

For various reasons, I expect (c) to be the most likely in the USA and (a) to be the most likely in Europe.

There's only one problem with this analysis: capitalism. I think that the great story of the last 200 years is the frantic effort of the left to keep people in their national and class and race silos in the face of capitalism mixing them up. That's why Marx had to predict that capitalism would "immiserate" the working class. That's why the Frankfurt School had to invent cultural Marxism to reimagine the working-class vicitms as race and gender victims. That's why the Democrats had to restart immigration in the 1960s. Unless they all acted right now the people would be converted by the Great Enrichement into contented middle-class cows with no interest in race, class, and gender wars.

Why did they do this and try to angry everyone up? Because if you leave people alone in capitalism the penniless immigrants will mostly turn into doctors and lawyers if you give them a generation or two of peace and prosperity. And that would be the end of left-wing reactionary politics, the totalitarian impulse to reduce everything to government. That's why President Obama and his minions are working overtime trying to "angry up" African Americans. That's why the feminists are trying to divide the sexes on college campi with their "rape culture" lies. Otherwise all those folks will eventually wander into the middle class and not respond to race appeals.

Here's Joel Kotkin showing what is happening out there in America under the radar of the racist-sexist mainstream media. The three major minority groups, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, all do fine when they get out of blue states.

We found, for all three major minority groups, that the best places were neither the most liberal in their attitudes nor had the most generous welfare programs. Instead they were located primarily in regions that have experienced broad-based economic growth, have low housing costs, and limited regulation.

And don't forget that, except for blacks, everyone else is interracially dating and intermarrying like mad.

Don't forget that the public school system is a ruthless homogenizer. Don't forget that for the 50 percent of people that go to college, they tend to "lose their religion" and become middle-class professionals. Don't forget that for the 100 million or so working in the private sector, cooperation and trust and teamwork is the driving cultural meme. You trust and you exchange with anyone who can be trusted. The idea is to be friends with everyone. Otherwise you lose.

Nobody can know the outcome of the great mixing of the races of the current era. Politicians may rile the groups up into global thermonuclear war. On the other hand there is the relentless cultural force of capitalism: the guy with the biggest market share and the biggest economy wins.

Summing Up "By the People": We Want More

In his latest book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, Charles Murray asserts three propositions. First, the Constitution is broken. Second, we can fight back against the administrative regulatory state. Third, in a "diverse" nation there cannot be one-size-fits-all solutions to problems. Fourth, it's time to ridicule big government, because the gigantic state that the Progressives so earnestly built over the last century is ridiculous.

You can see my blog on the three Parts of By the People here, here, and here.

When he says the Constitution is broken, Murray means that we can't go back to a small state and limited government by mere political means. Too much of the Constitution has been destroyed: the Welfare Clause, the Commerce Clause, and the Supreme Court's deference to the federal government's regulatory authority.

When he says that we can fight back, he is proposing a cunning way of neutralizing the power that bureaucrats now possess to cow individual Americans and businesses into submission. He proposes a "Madison Fund." It would be a privately-owned foundation that would push back at bureaucrats on behalf of individuals and businesses oppressed by the regulatory state.

When he says that a diverse nation can't reduce everything to one-size-fits-all administrative programs he is saying that a diverse nation has diverse communities with different and conflicting moral systems. Any government law or regulation is likely to favor one group's moral system over another, and that creates conflict. The way to avoid crushing other people and their moral systems is to keep government small and limited so that as much of the law as possible covers universals like prohibitions against murder, theft, and fraud, not to mention national defense.

When he says we should ridicule the man behind the curtain, he is suggesting that it is time for us Americans to stop deferring to the present ruling class, and tell it like it is: today's government is an incompetent mess that wastes our taxes and treats us like children.

But for me this is just a start. I don't just want to knock the helmet off the government's policemen, I want to diminish the very idea of objective government by experts that the educated class of the late 19th century has imposed on us, and my objection is fundamental. For me, government is force, and so the Progressive philosophy of government by experts is flawed at the very start. What do you mean by saying that pensions, health care, education, and welfare can only be achieved by force? Aren't these all highly desirable goods that most people will seek out and acquire on their own without government coercion?

You see, I think that the whole liberal project is hiding from a brutal truth, that the project judges there is no way forward except force. The administrative state is a system of force. It says that we educated chaps will consult our experts for the objective settled science and then we will implement it through the government. By force. The notion of "activism" is that activists can objectively detect injustices and then advocate for social change to deliver a regime of peace and justice. But if government is going to direct the transition from oppression to peace and justice, then we are talking about force. In fact I would argue that if you pay attention to the devotees of activism, they are out looking for things that can only be resolved by government force.

There is a kind of beautiful symmetry in the activists' system. They think that politics is the highest calling. But that means that there must be an issue on which to divide people, the "we" who want reform and the "they" that don't. So the whole process involves a contest to make "us" a majority so we can pass a law to force our idea on the minority. The interesting thing to me is that this is merely a sublimation of the old warrior ethic. The point about the warrior is that he is called to defend his community from the enemy. So force is involved, and it is necessary to exalt the warrior and his code of force in order to safeguard the community so that he will protect us from marauders. But, of course, the presence of warriors in a community is dangerous; you have some people within the boundary of "we" where force is forbidden whose whole reason for being is to be trained and ready to respond to threats with force. So here you have people that experience themselves and tell us that they are devoted to peace and justice: yet their whole being is about conflict, just like the warrior class of old.

Charles Murray's most penetrating insight in By the People is that you cannot have big government in a diverse nation characterized by a number of communities with different moral traditions and priorities. On his view the attempts by particular moral traditions to impose their will over the whole is bound to fail, or if it succeeds is bound to create opposition and discord. Our liberal friends are pushing forward on all fronts to impose their moral system upon America in all kinds of ways from their benefits state to their government by race, their program to push feminist and gay narratives on the American people, their war on global warming. Don't agree with the liberal moral system? Then you are a racist, sexist, homophobe, or denier. If Charles Murray is right about the needs of a diverse America, then the liberal program will end in tears.

But ultimately I find myself unsatisfied by Murray's book. Yes, there are some things we can do at the margin of the big-government state and we should do them. But I Want More!

First of all, I'm concerned that Murray is only pushing back on the Progressive Era governing model, of educated rulers using the best science and the experts to formulate government programs to improve peoples' lives. Don't forget that there is also the Revolution model, of courageous community organizers leading the people marchin' and protestin' against an unjust system and taking the ill-gotten gains of the rich and giving them to the poor. Our liberal masters use either of these models, as needed.

For instance, the Obama administration takes the fact that global surface  temperatures have gone up by about one degree Celsius and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased in the last century to all little under 0.5%, attaches it to the agreed scientific theory that carbon dioxide has a "greenhouse" effect, and then demands that we surrender huge powers to the government to change energy production and use. Because Science. That's the science and experts apology for increasing government power.

Then the Obama administration takes incidents of blacks getting killed by whites as grounds for federalizing local police forces. Because oppression. Or justifies a higher minimum wage. Because inequality.

See what is going on here? If you are a member of the liberal ruling class you naturally want more power. That's what all ruling classes want. In the modern era there are two justifications for more government power. One is: Because Science. The other is: Because Oppression.

Whenever there's a crisis other than a direct military threat, why do we always assume it requires more government power?

My question is: if this is such a great idea, why does it even need government force? I say that before we start trying to solve a problem with more government force we should have first explored all the ways we could solve it with less government force.

Temperatures are going up? Maybe we should think about encouraging people to learn how to adapt to temperature changes rather than spend billions and billions on government subsidies, grants, and handouts to politically connected corporations.

Oppression and inequality? Maybe we should first winkle out all the present government policies that promote oppression and inequality: licensure, subsidies, taxes, work disincentives, minimum wages.

All I am saying is that I want the American people to say, whenever some new plan comes along to increase government power, "oh yeah: Because Science." Or alternatively: "oh yeah: Because Inequality." That's what we need to change.

If we can reverse the narrative on Because Science and Because Inequality then we will really be changing things for the better.

And that is my dream.

By the People: Part III: A Propitious Moment

In his latest book Charles Murray has come up with a plan to push back against the oppressive regulatory state. We won't get there with normal political process, not even with a Republican president and Congress he writes in Part I of By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission. See By the People: Part I: Where We Stand. It will take "civil disobedience" to fight back and in Part II Murray unfolds his idea to create a "Madison Fund" to pay the bills of businesses and individuals that want to fight back against the regulatory state. See By the People: Part II: Opening a New Front.

In Part III: A Propitious Moment, Charles Murray takes a broader look at the United States in the decades ahead. He gets out of the trenches of the fight against the bureaucrats and looks at the larger horizon. And he likes what he sees.

[I]n the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century the stars are in fact aligning for a much broader rebuilding of liberty than we could have imagined even a decade ago.

First of all, Murray says that we are experiencing a return of a diversified America. You think that the US has always been a white-bread patriarchy? Don't tell the four European cultures that battled each other back at the founding. Using David Hackett Fischer's analysis in Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America he argues that while Yankees in New England, Cavaliers in the tidewaters, Quakers in Pennsylvania, and Scots-Irish in the back-country were all from one nation, they had radically different ideas about everyday life, and what it meant to "live life as one sees fit."

Murray "celebrates" the differences between Yankees, Quakers, Cavaliers and Scots-Irish in a table of 30 different cultural memes. Let's look at a couple. On "Marriage," the Yankees observed a civil contract, Cavaliers a sacred ceremony, and the Scots-Irish had "abduction rituals." How about their "time ethic?" Yankees believed in "improving the time," Quakers believed in "redeeming the time," Cavaliers believed in "killing the time" and the Scots-Irish believed in "passing the time." And in dress? Well, those Scots-Irish girls were notorious for tight clothes that accentuated the positive in their lady parts.

Then came the "post-founding" immigrants, the Germans and the Irish, and they brought Catholicism. The "Germans were the antithesis of the Irish." The Irish lived in exclusive Irish and Catholic neighborhoods and the Germans were "typically farmers that practiced advanced agriculture or highly skilled craftsmen." And that was just the beginning. After the Civil War the South identified as defiantly Southern and the North filled up with Italians, Slavs from eastern Europe, and after 1900, the Jews.

The point is that mid-twentieth century America was an anomaly, created by the restrictive immigration laws that obtained from the mid 1920s to the mid 1960s. For forty years the diverse brew of pre-WWI immigrants got to Americanize without a new crop of immigrants in the mix. And, of course, millions of Americans got homogenized in the uniforms of World War II. So it wasn't that hard to do one-size-fits-all politics in the mid 20th century.

The America of the twenty-first Ameica will be going back to normal, with Hispanic and Asian immigrants, and the new segregation by culture, the sorting of liberals into blue urban areas and conservatives into red suburbs and ex-urbs. And then there are the African Americans.

Murray makes several points about the re-diversified America.

1. Some regions are being latinized by Hispanic immigration, but "America as a whole is not being latinized."
2. African Americans are also concentrated in specific areas of the old Confederacy and large urban areas.
3. Asian Americans. Here's the interesting bit. They are only 5 percent of population, but already are concentrating in New York City and Los Angeles and San Francisco, and are "heavily overrepresentative in the elite zip codes of those cities." Silicon Valley? Asians are 33 percent of the population.
4. The "cognitive elite." Call it what you like, the middle-class college-educated people have a culture with distinctive tastes and they like to live together.

With all this diversity, the one-size-fits-all politics of the post New Deal area is making a lot of people unhappy. So can we dig our way out of it?

In Part I of By the People Murray told us this was the worst of times. Now he tells us that it's the best of times. First of all there's "liberation technology."

This is no longer 1900 and tainted meat, or the Solid South and laws keeping African Americans "in their place." Modern technology can make a scandal out of any political oppression, e.g., Ferguson and Baltimore, and the internet marketplace means that everyone gets rated, from plumbers to bed-and-breakfasts, and Uber can fight and beat the taxi cartel. The point is that bad behavior gets publicized.

That means that it's going to become more and more difficult for government to hide its incompetence from the average citizen. Call it the "collapse of the blue model." For instance, Californians can now go to TransparentCalifornia.com and find out that there's a Los Angeles firefighter named "Murray" that made $273,773 in 2011 in salary, overtime, and benefits.

Murray predicts that we are going to see an "alienation of the people who pay the tab for government." Our Democratic friends are comfortable about "the rich" paying their fair share, but in fact the 1% in 2011 "paid 35 percent of all income taxes." The people in the top quartile that "pays 86 percent of the federal government's income tax revenue are not billionaires... They have earned their success." The top 25 percent, says Murray, are not happy about politicians that demand the "rich pay their 'fair share'" and the anger "crosses party lines."

Up to now big corporations have made their peace with the administrative regulatory state, but maybe the world of "collusive capitalism" could be changed. Up to now, corporations have just been trying to go along to get along with the regulation and the criminalization of their world, but since the Crash of 2008 government has upped the ante and has been extending its activities into frank shakedowns, with billion dollar settlements imposed on oil companies and banks. The formula is simple. You find a corporation that may have done something wrong; threaten its managers with ruin and criminal charges, and then have them pay a huge fine in a "secret settlement." Then repeat.

So far, corporate America hasn't fought back. But at "some point, some of them will start defending themselves." And that could be a gamechanger.

Don't forget, Murray adds, that the rank-and-file bureaucrat isn't a happy camper. There can easily be up to 22 layers of management in a federal department. Federal employees like "their benefits and job security" but not much else about their jobs. When the Madison Fund starts to roll, its offensive will be going up against an army that is badly demoralized.

Charles Murray ends By the People on an optimistic note. It's time we pull aside the curtain at government, he writes, and say "This is ridiculous."

First of all, per-capita wealth has been going up ever since reliable records started in the late 19th century, from $5,000 to $50,000 in 120 years, through all the wars and depressions and government blunders. If wealth continues to increase,

[I]t is unimaginable that Americans will still think the best way to live is to be governed by armies of bureaucrats enforcing thousands of minutely prescriptive rules.

Somehow we will have to figure out a better way. Because it's ridiculous:

• "It's ridiculous that the cost of routine health care has not been falling for decades."
• "It's ridiculous that towns and cities can't afford to provide basic services."
• "It is ridiculous that anyone lacks the means to live a decent life."
• "It is ridiculous to impose one-size-fits-all national solutions for policies that involve morally complex cultural differences."

Notice the cunning in that list. The items all point accusing fingers at the basic assumptions and coercions of the current Progressive-inspired administrative regulatory state. As I might say:

• Never mind about Obamacare, what would "Walmartcare" look like? 
• How come lifer bureaucrats get better pay and pensions than ordinary middle-class families in the private sector and they still can't fix the potholes? 
• Can't we find a better way to relieve the poor than our current failed welfare system? 
• Hello gays and feminists! Are you really sure that the way to the future is to beat up on Christians and frat boys? 

The point is that in a culturally diverse society the only way to avoid lose-lose conflicts over loot and religious wars over morality is to overlay the whole with a culture of live and let live, and a limited government with limited powers.

But that is exactly what the gentry liberal ruling class refuses to consider.

I'm not as sanguine as Charles Murray about the glorious future. This is politics; politics is about division. This is government; government is about force and coercion. The gentry liberal ruling class is not going to give up without a fight. But like most dynasties, the quality of the liberal leadership tends to decline from generation to generation. Think Obama; think Hillary Clinton. Today's gentry liberal leaders are just not up to the job.

No doubt the United States will one day climb to Charles Murray's new sunny uplands from out of the present dusty Obama plain. But the way from the plain to the uplands is uphill. The path is steep, and the obstacles formidable.

But that's no reason not to just to try it, but to do it.

See here for a final summing up of By The People.

By the People: Part II: Opening a New Front

In Part I of By the People Charles Murray told us how our government is broken and can't be fixed by politics. The problem is that government has become practically lawless under the "living constitution" championed by the Progressives over a century ago. See By the People: Part One: Where We Stand.

But we are humans; we don't give up just because the political system is broken. So what should we do?

In Part II: Opening a New Front of By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission Charles Murray proposes a way of fighting back against lawless government.

Murray is proposing a program of civil disobedience, and that is a serious matter, for "The rule of law is the foundation of civilization." To resist the government Americans need a reason, and that reason is that "government is instituted to protect our unalienable rights." If it doesn't protect our rights, then "revolution is not treason, but the people's right."

Our America is founded not on some divine right or "ties of ethnicity and culture" but the right of people "to pursue their own interests without hindrance", and Murray enlists the German immigrant Francis Grund and Alexis de Tocqueville in his support. If that is so, then the federal government lost its legitimacy in the constitutional revolution of 1937-42 when the ruling class expanded the Welfare Clause and the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution to mean anything the rulers wanted.

Even though Americans have got used to life under unlimited government, they are getting progressively more suspicious of government. In 1958 Americans were asked whether they trusted government to "do what is right" and 73 percent agreed "just about always" or "most of the time." The trust level rose a bit in 1964 but then began a decline. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan became president, the trust level was down to 25 percent. The trust level went up under Reagan, then down, then up again at the end of the 1990s. But now it's down, hitting a low of 13 percent in 2014. It's easy to see why. "Washington looks like a sophisticated kleptocracy... [and] American government isn't supposed to work this way."

Murray develops three reason why government has lost the trust of the American people. It has "voided" three tacit compacts with the people. First, that the federal government would only provide freedom at home and defend from enemies abroad. Second, it "would not unilaterally impose a position on the moral disputes that divided Americans." Third, it "would make it easy for Americans to take pride in themselves," for good Americans were people "who made an honest living, took care of their families, and didn't bother anyone else". You can see the problem. Today our government wants to be in on every problem; it is imposing one-size-fits-all policies on moral questions on everything from abortion to marriage; and with the expansion of law, "Just about all of us are criminals now".

OK. So Murray proposes that we "ignore large portions of the laws and regulations with which we are burdened." But since we are Americans we must think about the limits to this. First, we are not going to license murder, destruction of property, etc. Second, we are not going to refuse to pay our taxes. Third, we are not going to muck up "public goods classically defined". What we are going to do is use "strict scrutiny" against the regulatory state. First, we are going to resist government telling us what to do with our land. Second, we are going to go resist the government meddling with the details of how people go about their work. Third, we are going to go after licensing laws. Fourth, we are going to insist that people be allowed to take "voluntary risks". Fifth, we are going to go after employment law. Sixth, we are going to go after "regulations that are arbitrary, capricious, or an abuse of discretion".

But we've got to be careful. Certain topics have a "halo" effect: everyone wants to protect the environment. And we want to choose to resist government in cases where the victim of government is trying to do the right thing. In other words, we want to push America towards a "no harm, no foul" regime.

Now it's time to describe the details of Murray's "Madison Fund, a privately funded foundation to map terrain and probe defenses while helping ordinary Americans who are trying to cope with the regulatory state." But how?

The dirty little secret is that the government doesn't have that much bandwidth to harass American citizens. In a table of regulatory agency staff numbers, Murray shows that your EPAs, your OSHAs, your FDAs, your CPSCs, etc. only have a couple thousand attorneys, 2,500 odd "investigative personnel, and 150 odd "administrative law judges." Those bureaucrats can only go after a few people at once. OSHA oversees "8 million worksites" with 2,200 inspectors that conduct about 27,000 inspections a year. EPA in 2013 conducted 18,000 inspections: this for the whole land area of the US. This "Goliath... is actually the Wizard of Oz." Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Enter the Madison Fund. Its task will be simple. When a businessman or an individual wants to fight a bureaucrat,

the bureaucrat [can] say to him. "You do that, and we'll put you out of business."

The Madison Fund would be designed to change the terms of trade in this transaction. It will "tap the bureaucrat on the shoulder, and say,

We are taking over this man's case. We will litigate it as long as it takes.We will publicize that litigation in ways that will embarrass you and your superiors. None of this will cost our client a penny, and we will reimburse him for any fine you are able to impose. And if you come back and bother him again, we will go through the whole process again.

And we don't need to ask anyone's permission to start. All we need is one of the many billionaires that have made fortunes in past decades. It just takes one billionaire and "a few hundred million dollars." As far as expertise goes, we already have a bunch of foundations like the Pacific Legal Foundation that know how to do this stuff. But the current crop of litigating foundations are tiny; we need a Madison Fund that will grow to an annual litigation budget of "a few hundred million dollars a year." And the Madison Fund won't just be doing litigation; it will be doing publicity.

And another thing. The Madison Fund is just a start. What if professional associations insured their members against "government as an insurable hazard"? Why not? Murray proposes the American Dental Association for this task, for dentists are subject to a 307-page OHSA manual for dentists, not to mention employment law, EPA regulations etc. I don't know about your dentist, but my dentist is treating patients, managing employees, providing free services as a group home in addition to the full-time job of complying with the government's mandates.

But is this legal? Free assistance is legal; think Legal Services and public defenders. Overloading government bureaucrats? Well, the Madison Fund is not going to be faking evidence. It is going to be trying to exploit the system, just like lawyers do every day. The one snag might be reimbursing clients for fines.

Suppose the ADA started a Dental Shield program, to provide insurance for dentists against regulatory oppression. Then Dental Shield will go to bat for dentists getting torqued around by the local bureaucrats.

But what happens when "The Empire Strikes Back"?  Suppose you are an OSHA bureaucrat offended by the dentists and their Dental Shield program to protect dentists from bureaucrats. In retaliation, you unleash "wholesale inspections on dental offices, levying the maximum fines." But, of course, the dentist's Dental Shield fights back, "appealing adverse decisions" all the way to the federal courts. Dental Shield makes the pursuit of the dental citations more trouble for OSHA than it's worth. Now OSHA is facing the need to ask "Congress for more inspectors." It might not go down well on TV.

You and your bureaucratic pals could try to win the publicity battle with Dental Shield:

[You] are a duly constituted agency.. [keeping] America's workplaces safe. That important mission is being cynically compromised by dentists who, in collusion with Dental Shield... are endangering Americans seeking dental care.

Except that "Americans generally like their dentists". I know I like mine, and I would get right on the phone to my congressman, "Baghdad" Jim McDermott, in a minute if my dentist got harassed by the Feds.

Or the OSHA bureaucrats could try to get the courts to declare Dental Shield illegal. But that would mean getting out of the safety of their own domesticated administrative courts into the real court system. Maybe that's not such a good idea. Maybe in the end the bureaucrats could beat a strategic retreat and "limit its citations of dental offices to cases in which a genuine safety issue exists.

Then OSHA is retreating to a "no harm, no foul" policy, which is exactly what we want.

But is that what will happen? Murray has consulted legal experts and they have told him of all the "technical issues of procedure and precedent" that have to be dealt with. But Murray is optimistic; the Supreme Court will help, he thinks, provided that "its decision will have enough support." And the key is to get the courts to revise their interpretation of "arbitrary and capricious" to a position that stops favoring the regulators, both in the creation of regulations and their enforcement; then we can start to move the needle. Murray cites an EPA wetland case, Sackett vs. Ennvironmental Protection Agency, which gives cause for optimism. The Sacketts fought all the way to the Supreme Court and won with "the help of two pro bono lawyers from the Pacific Legal Foundation".

The next step is to attack the whole idea of the "disinterested expert" governing philosophy, as in:

• Problems of public policy can be analyzed so that they yield objectively correct solutions.

Maybe that works when you are talking about sewer systems and smog reduction. But what about traffic signals, urban freeways, bike paths? "It's too politically sensitive to be left to the experts." In fact, "all public policy is ultimately political."

• The people who frame these solutions are disinterested experts who can put aside their own biases and institutional self-interest as they go about their work.

First of all, most policy sciences are immature, e.g., climate science. And bias is inevitable. It was and is "monumentally naive" to think that experts are disinterested.

But will the Supreme Court give up on its policy of "deference" to regulatory agencies and actions and so create a level playing field where the regulatory agency no longer gets to play judge, jury, and executioner in its own case? Murray reckons it will if and when the Madison Fund and defense funds like Dental Shield start to show results and gum up the works. Then comes the collision, the crisis: "the courts will realize that they have to give people a chance at a day in court" but without "ten-year cases with forty-thousand-page case files."

Is all this possible? Can we reverse the Progressive model of the lordly educated ruling class and its disinterested experts dealing out wise and objective decisions all based on settled science? Or is Charles Murray sending us up over the top into a senseless trench warfare that nobody can win?

I'd say the answer is: Yes, But.

First of all the billionaire that sets up the Madison Fund has to be a guy with incredible cojones. That's because once liberals figure out what is going on their are going to be very angry. Already they don't like the Koch Brothers and their mild libertarian activism, and have taught millions of liberals to hate them. Imagine how they are going to react to the backer of the Madison Fund.

Second, I think that the tactics of using the reverse terrorist effect, of humiliating one bureaucrat to scare ten thousand, is brilliant. A Republican Congress can help by disbanding all the SWAT teams that every agency seems to need these days. And they can then cut the budgets of agencies that get publicized for arbitrary and capricious actions against mom-and-pop businesses. After all, if they've got the time for that penny-ante stuff, then their budgets must be too big.

Third, I think that the publicity battle is crucial. And here I think that the Obama years have helped us with their parade of idiot-left activism from the beer summit to the racist Justice Department to the "rape culture" activists to the follies of "hate speech", "microaggressions", climate deniers, and the rest. We need leaders who can teach the American people to experience the lefty activists as totalitarian bullies. How hard can that be? They are totalitarian bullies.

And that's the beginning, the middle, and the end of Murray's proposal. We must push back against the bullies, and the way to do that is for each of us to know that there is someone who "has our back."

Next, we'll look at Part III: A Propitious Moment. 

By The People: Part I: Where We Stand

Charles Murray is the great political scientist of our generation. First he told us in Losing Ground that liberals knew by the early 1970s that the Great Society programs weren't working. But they kept them anyway. Then in The Bell Curve he told us that IQ is really important and it applies to race, and got his head handed to him. Most recently in Coming Apart he showed that the upper 20 percent in America was doing fine, but in the bottom 30 percent the women don't marry and the men don't work.

Now he's really mad, and in By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission he is calling for revolution. If you are with him, then you are not a libertarian or a conservative. He wants to call the supporters of a limited government: "Madisonians."

OK, he's not calling for blood in the streets, but he is proposing a cunning way to neuter the administrative state. But first, let's look at Part I of his book, where Murray analyzes the federal government and determines that it can't be reformed from within.

The problem is that the Constitution has been set aside and there's no way to get it back. Congress isn't going to do it, even with a Republican president, because the current system favors the status quo and the Supreme Court won't do it because, e.g., limiting the meaning of "general welfare" to its original meaning would cause chaos.

It's Hamilton vs. Madison, according to Murray. Hamilton and the Federalists favored a strong state and Madison and the Anti-federalists wanted a weak state. But back then nobody was thinking of anything like today's state. A strong state meant something like Hamilton's report of manufactures. A century later, under the influence of the Germans like Hegel and Nietzsche, the Progressives decided that the Constitution was outmoded.

To simplify, progressive intellectuals were passionate advocates of rule by disinterested experts led by a strong  unifying leader... They thought that individualism and the Constitution were both outmoded.

This progressivism got implemented by the judicial system, and "ultimately transformed the nation." The progressives saw the old Constitution as Newtonian and mechanical, "with its three separate branches and checks and balances." They wanted something evolutionary and Darwinist. So the game was on to change the meaning of law.

It started with the erosion of the Contracts Clause in the Constitution, and continued with the validation of the Social Security Act (which really put the federal government into the general welfare business). Then there was the gutting of the Ninth Amendment and the extension of the Commerce Clause to let the federal government regulate whatever it wanted under the power "to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes."

But we can't go back. If the Supreme Court invalidated current understanding of the "general welfare" it would mean the end of spending on "Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, all welfare programs, all spending on K-12 education" and so on. The fact is that by 1942, "we stopped obliging the American government to control itself."

But that's not all. We now have "a lawless legal system." Why? Because legal process is so costly. Because the ancient concept of mens rea is gone. In the old days,

You not only had to do something wrong, you had to be aware that you were doing something wrong. But the law also held that ignorance is no defense.

How did that work? It worked because "there weren't many laws" and most of the laws covered things that were instinctively wrong, like "murder, rape, and theft." But now we have a huge body of law and "the government has chosen to convert mistakes, or sometimes simply choices with which the government disagrees, into crimes."

So we have laws that are arbitrary, complex, subjective, discretionary. That is lawless. But that is just the beginning.

It used to be that lawsuits were rare; but now changes in legal rules make lawyering very profitable. First there was the introduction of Strict Liability which lowered the bar for claiming damages. Then there was the broadening of discovery, where a plaintiff could now go on fishing expeditions into the records of the defendant. Used to be that you had to sue someone in the defendants court district; now you can forum shop. And now the ethical limitation on lawyers for "stirring up litigation" is gone. Then there is the "private enforcement regime" where Congress lets private parties sue against business or individuals in violation of a law.

OK, so it's too easy to sue. But that is just the beginning. Now there's the regulatory state.

Today Congress passes a general law and sets up an agency to come up with the details. Typically the targets of the regulation will have to deal with the bureaucracy and the administrative courts of the regulatory agency. And the Supreme Court through the "Chevron Deference" has held that the regulatory agency is almost always right. It goes back the the Progressive Era faith in government by disinterested experts. The problem is that if the regulators get their eye on you they can destroy you in the expense of the system before you ever get to a real court of law (as opposed to an administrative court that belongs to the regulator).

OK, so the regulators and the administrative judges are too powerful. But that is just the beginning. There is also the corrupted political system.

Murray is not saying that today's politicians "are more venal or dishonest than political of the past." It is just that that

todays' political process has produced politicians who, while keeping within the law, do things that are operationally indistinguishable from the way Third World kleptocrats operate.

Back in the old days, before the 1960s, the government didn't have that many favors to distribute, campaigns weren't that expensive, special interests didn't give much money, and only a few leading politicians got to write the laws.

But with the expansion of the regulatory state, particularly industry-wide regulation by EPA, OSHA, and EEOC, every corporation had to get into the game in Washington DC. Now it takes a ton of money to run for office, there are hordes of lobbyists, and the number of staffers is way up.

In 2012 the Democrats set up a "Model Daily Schedule" for members when in DC. It tells members how to allocate their time.

It includes four hours [per day] of "call time" -- the term for phoning contributors -- and one hour of "strategic outreach" which includes such things as breakfasts and meet-and-greets with supporters.

On top of that, the parties regularly hold fundraising dinners. They go to lobbyists and tell each of them to cough up a million bucks. Because only "friendly" interests get friendly results from office holders.

A kleptocracy? Well, politicians usually seem to manage to get rich in government service. And you have to pay for access to the authorities. And when a congressman calls for a contribution you cough up. And officeholders reward their friends. And "bribes produce results independently of political principle."

Can it be reformed? After George W. Bush pushed through the budget-busting Medicare drug plan, don't expect much reform from Republicans. And Murray goes to Mancur Olson and The Logic of Collective Action for the explanation.

First, advanced democracies inherently permit small interest groups to obtain government benefits for themselves that are extremely difficult for the rest of the polity to get rid of. Second, these successful special interests inevitably pile up over the years until the political system becomes rigid and unresponsive, unable to adapt[.]

In other words,

People who receive government benefits tend to vote for people who support those benefits.

We may call for reform as much as we like, but the fact of all of today's programs and benefits "will push the Republican Party to the center in all presidential elections."  We are not going to get truly "Madisonian majorities in both houses and a Madisonian president."

Something else will have to give. But that's the topic for Part II: Opening a New Front.