Honoring an Eagle Scout

We old 'uns are always worrying about the young generation.  But the truth is that the vast majority of young people are nothing to worry about.  It's we, the old ones, with our power, our corruption, and our hypocrisy, that are responsible for ruining the future.

On Sunday I was privileged to attend an Eagle Court of Honor at Troop 171 in Seattle, where four young Americans, including a former neighbor, Kyle Piddington, were awarded the rank of Eagle Scout.  It's easy to forget that behind all the hoodies and the baggy pants of today life is going on as usual and regular middle-class kids are going on scout camp-outs and getting socialized from boys into men.

The Eagle Scout ceremony is shocking in its unashamed conservatism, with flags, bush shirts, badges, God, country, character and moral straightness.  And it is also shocking in its familism.  Each honoree is eulogized (from the Greek: "good words") by an adult, and is enrolled in the rank of Eagle Scout with mother and father behind him.  Mother puts the Eagle Scout ribbon on, and the Eagle Scout pins mother, father, and a mentor.  Each Eagle Scout gets a US flag that has flown over the US Capitol.  Cue George M. Cohan and "It's a Grand Old Flag."

Those of us that have read Judith Rich Harris's Nurture Assumption, which argues that the most important influence on children is first of all their genes, and then their peers, and only then their parents, often wonder how to socialize young people: to counter the Lord of the Flies barbarity of their peers with something healthier than our appalling schools.

Scouting stands as an obvious and unassuming answer.  It puts boys under the guidance of adults, immerses them in a rough-and-ready moral order complete with ritual and responses, and combines teaching with play.  The boys start out as beginners, and end up as leaders.  We are talking about real leaders, of course, with real responsibility for their charges, poles apart from the "community organizer" style of leadership that is often celebrated by our political culture.

But the biggest takeaway for me was the realization that Scouting puts boys of all ages in a single group, and counteracts the instinct of children to socialize only with their age cohort.  Thus a 12-year-old can go out camping with 18-year-old gods, by right of membership.  And the 18-year-old has a responsibility of care for the young ones.

In my own boyhood I recall with particular relish "fagging" for a school prefect.  It usually meant toasting bread and brewing coffee in the afternoons for the Olympian gods.  And it also allowed the young to take certain liberties with the senior boys: a cheeky remark was not amiss.  When you consider that my particular god grew up to become Sir Howard Stringer, head of CBS News and then Sony Corporation, you can understand the privilege I enjoyed in the humble role of servant.

It's a delight to get a chance to talk to young people once they can converse like adults.  Kyle, the Eagle Scout that I came to honor,  responds like a politician to the usual questions from adults, with confident and intelligent sound bites.  Last year he set up a Facebook page for kids at his high school to help each other with homework.  And his father reports that he spent many hours teaching kids through their homework problems.  Why not?  Studies show that you remember 90 percent of what you teach.  Kyle is going to Cal Poly in the Fall and intends to major in Computer Science.

The trouble with our modern society, with its Big Media, Big Politics, and Big Business, is that it marginalizes all the important things, like family and civil society.  It's good to be reminded that under the radar, outside the camera frame, kids like Kyle Piddington are doing fine.

Who's The Extremist?

You don't often get a liberal and a conservative having a civil discussion about politics, but Hugh Hewitt had E.J. Dionne Jr. on his show to discuss E.J.'s  new book, Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle For The American Idea In An Age of Discontent.

Dionne argues that conservatives have gone extremist in the last ten years, abandoning the "compassionate conservatism" of the early 2000s for a radical individualism.  I've taken strong exception to E.J.'s argument here.

Of course Hewitt and Dionne disagreed about conservatism and liberalism, but their disagreement is illuminating.  Dionne says that the Tea Party is partly a throwback to the John Birch Society, that there is a "Bircher kind of strain within the Tea Party."  Hewitt hates that: "They're just different."

But Dionne is right.  Any conservative populist movement is bound to have similarities with the John Birch Society, and liberals are bound to try to link any new conservative trend with the conspiracy theorists of yesteryear.  Just look at the Wikipedia entry on the Birchers.  The problem with the John Birch Society was that they started looking for Reds under the beds, and that allowed liberals to turn them into a laughingstock of conspiracy nuts.

On the other hand when Hewitt raises the question of reading the left-wing crazies out of the liberal movement, Dionne won't do it.

[S]omeone on your side, and it might be you, has to do to your left wing, the Occupy people, the SEIU and the rest of the radicals what Buckley did to the Birchers. You must throw them out, or your party will die[.]

 That's when Dionne says that he doesn't think that the left has changed, and therefore there is no call to curb the crazies.

Actually, I think that Dionne is right, but for the wrong reasons.  It is true that conservatives have changed their political stance in the last ten years.  We have not really changed our beliefs; we just don't believe that we can get to where we want to go by compromising with liberals.  To Dionne the death of "compassionate conservatism" means that today's conservatives are all radical individualists.

I think they [the Tea Party] emphasize our individualistic side, which is very much part of us, the individual liberty side, to the exclusion of that side of us which both believes profoundly in community, and sees it as essential to preserving liberty.

This, of course is the fundamental divide between conservatives and liberals.  Liberals believe that community means government.  Conservatives believe that community ends where government begins, because government is force and the whole point of humans as social animals is the attempt to reduce force in intersubjective relations.  More government equals less community: that's what conservatives believe.

As David Cameron said in 2005, "There is such a thing as society.  It's just not the same thing as the state."  Talk to your liberal friend about that.  You'll find they just don't get it.

Americans Still Love Big Government

Don't get too excited about Wisconsin, people.  The problem Wisconsin exposed is a split in the Democratic Party, writes Michael Gerson.

The voters of the Badger State do not object to the idea of an activist, generous state government. The problem for Democrats in Wisconsin and elsewhere is that state and local budget debates unite conservatives while dividing voters who believe in active government.

One the one side are the public-sector unions that just want More; on the other side are the progressives that want the things that government delivers: "parks, libraries, public safety, education, support for the homeless and such."

This, it seems to me, rather misses the point.  The Democrats are united on Big Government.  They want unions and workers' "rights" and they also want big government and its public services. They are united because they all experience themselves as consumers of government--as government workers and as consumers of government services.

The trouble is the average American moderate and independent.  These honest folks are all in favor of big government; they just don't want to pay for it.  So when it looks like government workers are the big rich guys, getting free pensions and health care, it is easy to stir up resentment against them.  Conservatives have been railing for ten years about the princely wages and benefits that government workers get, anywhere from 25 to 50 percent more than equivalent workers in the private sector.  It was only a matter of time before some politicians found a way of capitalizing on this injustice.

When the good times were rolling the moderates and independents were quite happy to vote for new programs.  But now that budget cuts are threatened they think that the government workers should take up the slack by ponying up more for their benefits.

The question is how to get to a more worthy politics, one in which people aren't mere freeloaders eager to cash in on "free stuff" one day and railing enviously against the current winners in the Free Stuff Sweepstakes the next.

America is supposed to be better than that.

Rush Limbaugh's Scott Walker Takeaway

Radio host Rush Limbaugh has a reputation as a blow-hard.  It's undeserved, of course, as are most of the cruel characterizations put out by our liberal friends.  On the contrary, Rush Limbaugh is one of the most acute political analysts in the USA.

Said Rush this morning: The Scott Walker achievement means that there is a fairly simple and easy way of dealing with state budget problems.  All you have to do is stop union collective bargaining on government employee benefits and then unilaterally force government employees to contribute a bit more to their pensions and health care.

Hey, what could be more practical?  What could be more compassionate?  And the public employees will still be earning about 50 percent more than they could get in the private sector and they will still be working with civil-service protections and be pretty well sitting in lifetime jobs.

Of course there is still the problem that these folks will still be operating a school system that stinks, especially for the poor.  They will still be operating social services that stink.  They will still be getting paid whether or not they produce anything of value.   So they will still have, I would say, a pretty cushy deal.

The other thing, of course, is that politicians all over the nation will be looking at the Scott Walker experience and be telling themselves that you can take on the government employee unions and win.  But you had better have real cojones down there between your legs.

By the way, could we just mention Scott Walker and his courage and coolness under fire?  For nearly 18 months this man has been subjected to the most outrageous abuse.  Liberals, Democrats, and union members--and of course their willing accomplices in the media--have occupied the state capitol, tried to stop the operation of the state legislature by absenting themselves, abusing the recall election process, using every intimidation tactic in the book short of actual violence.  And it started at the top with President Obama putting in an ill-judged remark about union-busting.  And now, instead of letting himself go with triumphant rage, he merely calls for unity and says that Wisconsin should heal its wounds and get back together after the divisions of the last year.

There is class, and then there is class.

Wisconsin Proves It

There are only three themes in politics.  There is "We the people are getting screwed!"  There is "They the rebels must be destroyed!"  And there is "Death to the invaders!"  The remedy in each case is simple: War!

You can see this dynamic perfectly illustrated in the Wisconsin Recall War that reaches a decision today, Tuesday June, 5, 2012.  The government employee unions in Wisconsin for years had obtained remarkably generous wages and benefits for their members.  They got this by tireless lobbying and campaigning, using the money extracted by payroll deductions for union dues.

But when Gov. Scott Walker (R) ran on a platform of reducing union power and then immediately began to put his program into action, the unions and their supporters were outraged.  They were determined to fight.

Of course they were.  That is what politics is all about.  It is civil war by other means, a battle for the spoils of office, the opportunity to use the power of the state to reward your political supporters and punish your political enemies.

Whenever your opponents steal a march on you then you mobilize your supporters and tell them that they have been royally screwed, that they are the people and your opponents are powerful barons intent upon destroying every good thing.  So the unions in Wisconsin mobilized their supporters with mammoth demonstrations, and Democratic state legislators attempted to intimidate the governor and Republican legislators by decamping to the neighboring state.  Then they collected petitions and demanded recall elections.

Of course, this response to a cruel world is nothing new.  It was cunningly depicted over a century ago by Anthony Trollope in Phineas Finn.  He describes the political views of Mr. Bunce, the landlord of the hero Phineas Finn.

Mr. Bunce, “a thoroughly hard-working man, doing pretty well in the world... had joined a Trade Union”.

He longed to be doing some battle against his superiors, and to be putting himself in opposition to his employers;--not that he objected personally to Messrs. Foolscap, Margin and Vellum, who always made much of him as a useful man;--but because some such antagonism would be the manly thing, and the fighting of some battle would be the right thing to do.

This is the whole point of left-wing politics: to put yourself in opposition to something: corporations, low wages, the Pentagon, the Catholic Church.  Of course, conservatives play this game too.  We rail against unions, big government, community organizers, and liberal professors.  They are communists and socialists trying to wreck the United States and American exceptionalism.

The question is: what can political action, the mobilization of "civil war by other means" really achieve in this world?  The left has always railed about the futility of war.  They were against the Cold War and are now against the War on Terror, because war never solved anything.  So far so good.  But the left is anxious to prosecute domestic moral equivalents of war, such as FDR's war on economic royalists, the War on Poverty, or conjuring up  threats like the "war on women" and the "war on gay marriage."  Of course they do.  Politics is civil war by other means.  Every political struggle is a war.

The problem with politics, of course, is that the bigger government gets the more it is likely to create victims of government force, people with a grievance about money taken from them in taxes or given to the other guy rather than to themselves.  And that just creates new causes for civil war.

Today's recall election in Wisconsin is just a battle in our ongoing "civil war by other means."  The winners will rejoice and the losers will determine to fight another day.

But humans are not just political animals, determined to contest every insult and right every wrong, even unto the death.  Humans are social animals, that cooperate for mutual benefit.  Whatever happened to that idea?

Whose Emerging Majority?

Early in the new century, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira argued that the Democrats were entering on a new era of dominance, becoming The Emerging Democratic Majority.  The new majority would center around the educated, the minorities, and the youth.

On the contrary, argues Sean Trende in The Lost Majority, under the two party system the future is always up for grabs.  That's because there is always some demographic group wavering in the middle between the two parties.

James Piereson proposes a more grandiose vision in The New Criterion.  He calls it the Fourth Revolution.  He looks at a 50 year Democratic dominance starting with the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, a 50 year dominance for Republicans starting in 1860, and a 50 year dominance for Democrats starting in 1932.  Each of these periods of dominance came to grief when the political case for the dominant or "regime" party collapsed.

Right now there is an impasse between the two parties because the support for the "public sector" party, the Democrats, is about equal to the support for the "private sector" party, the Republicans.

This impasse between the two parties signals the end game for the system of politics that originated in the 1930s and 1940s. As the “regime party,” the Democrats are in the more vulnerable position because they have built their coalition around public spending, public debt, and publicly guaranteed credit, all sources of funds that appear to be reaching their limits.

I have been arguing something similar, and from a more negative viewpoint, that nothing will change on the entitlements front until the federal government runs out of money.  Republicans may have been warning for the last generation that entitlements will bankrupt the state, but the fact is that, for today's beneficiaries, it makes no sense to reform.  Most of the beneficiaries, like me, are senior citizens.  We will probably be dead, or nearly dead, when the crash comes.

The discouraging thing about the welfare state is that, from Greece to Argentina, an over-extended welfare state does not reform its entitlements honestly.  It can't because the beneficiaries will take to the streets.  The only thing it can do is devalue its currency and default on its debt.  That has the effect of reducing entitlements (and screwing creditors) but doing it by the back door in a coup de main.  You wake up one morning and find that your bank account is worth 50 percent of what it was worth yesterday, and the government has unilaterally cut the interest rate and the principal owed on its sovereign bonds.  They already did that in Greece.

Many people have criticized the president for his Obamacare as a reckless expansion of entitlements.  But to the president, it is a solution to the health care crisis, because it buries all health care decisions in a heap of bureaucratic procedures and "death panels."  It hides the decisions to ration health care.  And it may be that most Americans really don't care how bad their health care is as long as it is "free."

If there is really to be a revolution and a fundamental reform of the welfare state it will happen because a majority of the American people want an honest system that is based on freedom and un-coerced social relationships.  The trouble is that everyone wants freedom in the abstract; they just don't want to have to pay for it.

But one thing, surely, we have learned in the 20th century.  Big government is always unjust, because it always reduces society to a power play between powerful interests, and reduces politics to a question of rewarding your supporters and punishing your opponents.  We have seen that played out in spades with the Obama administration as it has openly rewarded friends, from green energy companies to labor unions, without regard to the national interest, and done corrupt bargains with special corporate interests in order to get its legislation passed.

The point of human society is that it softens the natural war of all against all into mutually beneficial cooperation.  Society is nothing if is does not reduce the need for and the compass of force.  That means that government must be limited, because government is force, and politics is civil war by other means.  This is surely not that hard to understand.

Signs of Life on Jobs

Yes, I know.  Everyone is throwing themselves on the floor about the uptick in the unemployment rate from 8.1 to 8.2 percent.  And the number of jobs in the establishment survey is only up 69,000.

But the reason the unemployment rate did an uptick is that people are reentering the labor force in strength.  The labor force number went up by 642,000 last month, which is very good news.  It means that people are getting out there and looking for jobs.  Employment went up by 422,000, which is also very good news.  But since it didn't go up as much as the labor force, the unemployment rate went up.

What is going on?

This is another case where liberals have been sending the wrong message for decades, and now they are getting snake-bit by their own misdirection.  The thing is that in the early stages of a recovery, as people start to judge that jobs are available, they will come into the labor force and start looking.  Since they probably won't find jobs right away, they will raise the unemployment rate.  This is good.  But in the Nancy Pelosi playbook, when Republicans are in charge, you rail about a "jobless recovery."  So what do you do when the same thing happens in a Democratic administration?  You tell me.

In the subpar Obama recovery, one of the reasons that people have not got back to work is that the 99 week extended unemployment benefit makes people put off looking for a job.  We've heard recently that a lot of people are running out of their extended benefits, and are thus "forced" back into the labor force.  Maybe that is why people are returning to the labor force.

Liberals have done a lot of misdirection on economics over the years, from Keynesian stimulus, to lifetime employment, to union thuggery, to first-dollar health benefits to "price gouging" to "vampire" capitalism.  They have encouraged millions of Americans to have unrealistic ideas about the economy.

Well, mark down 2012 as the year of the return to reality.  All the liberal economic myths are coming home to roost and the liberals find themselves in a replay of Hitchcock's The Birds.  And they don't know what to do.

The simple truth is, of course, that every government intervention harms the economy and privileges some special interest over the common interest.  And that starts with cheap money and every single government subsidy and corporate goodie, and it ends at the mortgage interest deduction, Social Security and Medicare.  Sure.  Don't touch My Medicare!  But some poor slob or slobette is working 40 hours a week so that well-to-do seniors like me can get subsidized health care.  Talk about fairness.

As Bill Clinton said in another era:  Everything that should be down is up, and everything that should be up is down!  But Bill Clinton and his team were a much better political team than President Obama and his lot.  And it shows.