Dems Go the "Lying Liars" Route

So far in my Kant course at the University of Washington the philosophy prof has emitted two political zingers.  I regret to say that neither were high-toned reflections of his philosophical knowledge.

One zinger was a put-down on former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, representing him as a knuckledragging mouthpiece for a theocratic state.  The other was repeating the current Democratic talking point that Mitt Romney won the debate last week because he lied.

It is astonishing how educated people like you and me just parrot the partisan talking points of our political masters.  I mean, couldn't this chap come up with a zinger out of Horkheimer or Rorty?

Look.  All politicians lie.  They lie because we the voters insist on it.  We cannot stand the truth.  But if Mitt Romney lied in the debate then what about President Obama?  He insisted that Romney had proposed a $5 trillion tax cut.  Which is true if you leave out the other half of his tax plan.  On the one hand he proposes to reduce incomes taxes by reducing the tax rates.  On the other he proposes to balance that by eliminating tax loopholes.

Romney's proposal is standard Republican boilerplate that goes back at least to President Reagan's 1986 tax cut, which reduced tax rates across the board and also swept away a whole forest of deductions.  The philosophical, political and practical reason for this is that all deductions and subsidies create distortions in the economy, and that reduces economic growth.  Moreover, as Republicans (and occasionally Democrats) have reduced tax rates the overall share contributed by the rich has gone up.  See here.

But you can see the appeal of the "lying liars" attack.  It gets the partisan government university professors all riled up and you need your supporters to be all riled up in order to be certain that they will get to the polls and vote.

Here is a thought that just occurred to me.  The big hit on the Democrats this election will be in the African American vote.  President Obama just shamed the whole African American community with his Affirmative Action performance in debate.  They say that the purpose of negative ads is to demoralize the opponent's supporters.  And if you are an African American you have to be ashamed of the president's performance.

All of which goes back to the assumption in most of the polls that the turnout in 2012 will at least approximate to 2008.  I suspect that this is utter fantasy.  My guess is that African Americans are going to revert to normal voting turnout, Hispanics are going to turn off the president, and Republicans are going to be crawling over broken glass to get to the polls.  And then there are women.  What will women think about the negative body language from President Obama last week?  They will think about cheating husbands trying to hide something from them with reduced eye contact and scowls.

They say you should live in the moment, forgetting about the hopes of the future and the glories of the past.  That probably applies in spades this October.  There will probably not be a better month to be a Republican and a conservative again in my lifetime, and maybe in yours.

And if it all ends in tears?  Hey, live in the moment!

Liberals Racing Over the Cliff

Here's what really has me gasping.  If you look at the finest lefties, from Marx to Habermas, they are trying to imagine a way for humans to get out of the trap of exploitation.  For Marx, the problem was the exploitative monster of capitalism and the answer was the wonder of socialism through revolutionary communism that would return to an age of true community.

For Habermas the problem is now the entire rational system world, business and government, that run by rules.  They are engaged on systematizing and colonizing the "lifeworld," the face-to-face communicative interaction between human and human.  The point of the systems world is that everything ends in an up-down decision, rationally arrived at.  But the lifeworld is a world were people oppose truth claims and come to a communicative consensus.

So look at the administrative wonderland of Dodd-Frank, the financial regulation that subsumes the financial system in a dense web of administrative oversight.  Writes Peter J. Wallison:

Dodd-Frank is by far the most comprehensive and restrictive financial regulatory legislation since the Depression era; its effect on regulatory costs for financial firms at all levels has been and will continue to be substantial, with severe adverse consequences for credit availability.

But that isn’t all. The Financial Stability Oversight Council — an agency established under Dodd-Frank and consisting of all the federal financial regulators — has now begun work on identifying the nonbank financial institutions that will be declared systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs).

The point is that the government will have enormous administrative power over the SIFIs, so they will naturally become crony capitalists currying favor with their overlords.  But there is more.

Title II of Dodd-Frank gives the secretary of the Treasury the authority to seize any financial firm he believes is likely to fail in the future and hand it over to the FDIC for liquidation. If the firm objects, the secretary can apply to a court for a ruling, but the court has one day to decide whether the secretary has acted unreasonably.

So the government now will have instant life-or-death power over any financial institution.

Now the whole point of the financial system, the credit system, is getting money from where it is to where it is wanted.  Now the government will be in the middle, thinking about the electoral consequences of the financial system and forcing the financial system to back up its political agenda.

Think Fannie, Freddie, and the Community Reinvestment Act.  The politicians really showed how good they are in running the mortgage financing system.  So now their political approach will be extended to the financial system as a whole.

What liberals want is to have administrative control over the whole of society.  They want to crush the lifeworld and bring everyone into a client relation to the government.

But the whole point of the left-wing critique for the last 200 years is to deal with the terrifying power of modern capitalism and modern government.

Yet the only solution that the moderate left can imagine to any problem is to jack up the power of government.

This can only end in tears.  Liberals will continue to gather power into the government in their frightened response to the disasters that their politics has caused.  But then the government will run out of money.

We can already see what happens next by taking a look at Europe.

The Question of the 47 Percent

Our liberal friends, in their apoplexy over the presidential debate Wednesday night, excoriated their champion Barack Obama for not raising the question of the 47 percent.  The 47 percent are the people that Mitt Romney told a supporter would be voting for Obama whatever the Romney campaign did.

Romney was expressing the platitude that, in any presidential election, there are only a few percent of the voters that are "persuadable."  Of course, our liberal friends interpreted Romney's remarks, as they have a right to do, in the worst possible light, as proving that he didn't care about the 47% that would never vote for him.

Romney has responded variously to this "gaffe", first of all explaining his position and lately saying he was "completely wrong."

It all proves the power of the mainstream media, that they can make a scandal out of nothing.  After all, the profession of a politician is learning how to divide the country up so that he gets 51 percent of the vote.  What could be controversial about that?

It is after the election that the winner calls for everyone to forget their divisions as Republicans and Democrats and all come together as Americans.

The winner doesn't call for unity out of virtue, but out of the practical necessity of trying to minimize opposition to his program in the interregnum between elections.  It is for this reason that politicians typically try to fashion bipartisan compromises when they craft legislation.  "Bipartisan compromise" is here a polite word for buying off the opposition with concessions so that they will support the overall legislation.

Barack Obama is an interesting case with regards to the 47 percent.  When he won the 2008 election, he got 53 percent of the vote to John McCain's 46 percent.  Just a hair away from 47 percent.  Let us ask about the that 46 percent.  What has Obama done to persuade them that we are all Americans and that he would govern in the interests of the entire 100 percent of America?

Not much.

The guy that sent the bust of Churchill, the colonialist, back to the Brits apparently did not think about Churchill's advice to victors: Magnanimity.  He's the guy that told a meeting of House Republicans: "remember, I won."  He's the guy that was having to buy the votes of Democrats to pass his unpopular Obamacare.  He's the guy that called out ExxonMobil by name in the presidential debate as an example of a corporation feasting on subsidies.  He's the guy doing recess appointments when Congress is still in session.  He's the guy planning to rule by executive order in his second term.

By the way, lefty thinkers like Juergen Habermas have a word to describe the domination of the economic and political system by business and the administrative state.  They call it "internal colonization.  They mean that, just as the European imperialists blew away the native political and cultural system in their 19th century colonies, so the administrative state (think ObamaCare) blows away and colonizes the face-to-face "lifeworld" in the modern First World.  It's an irony that Barack Obama, the anti-colonialist in foreign policy, is hell-bent on colonizing Americans with his administrative welfare state.

Look, politics ain't beanbag.  But Obama, who ran for president as a man who would heal our partisan and racial divisions, has governed as a partisan and a race warrior.  He has reversed the normal practice of playing the partisan to get elected and then working across party lines to fashion bipartisan compromises.

It became clear quite soon after Obama's election that many people in the 46 percent that voted against Obama felt they had targets on their chests. That's why Seattle's 29-year-old Keli Carendar came out of nowhere to organize a Tea Party in the deep blue city of Seattle.  That's why the Republicans gained 63 seats in the House of Representatives in 2010.  That's why people I know that aren't really politically active are energized this year to vote out President Obama.

How widespread is this feeling?  Well, let's just say that the first debate on Wednesday night scored 67 million TV viewers, 15 million more than the first debate in 2008.  That might mean something.  It might mean that voters are more energized about the 2012 election than they were about the 2008 election.

Now why would that be?

The MSM Did It

After last night, there's a temptation to haul out the football and military metaphors.  As in: Is this a strategic breakout?  What did the Obamis lose last night?  A division?  An army corps?  The Sixth Army at Stalingrad?

Never mind.  The big takeaway is the MSM.  Do you understand what you have done, you nattering fools, chattering away to each other in your liberal bubble?  You have betrayed your own side.

If liberalism is to be worth anything, it should be the best it can be.  That means that it mustn't be protected and coddled by a mothering mainstream media.

(Now I find that there is a word for this coddling.  It's called the Taranto Principle.)

That means that when your side screws up you eat them for lunch.  You don't bury outrageous scandals like Fast and Furious on page A23.  You don't sit in silence while, e.g., Medicaid, flushes down the toilet.  You don't buy into the Democratic Party spin that it was greedy bankers that caused the Crash of 2008.

Of course, you do that not because of any partisan reason but because you want to be the best you can be.

Put it this way.  In the good old days, the hard-bitten, hard-drinking newspaperman may have been a ruin, but he believed with a passion in comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.  Sound familiar?

So get this.  In today's America there is no more comfortable person than a sinecure liberal.  You know who I am talking about.  I am talking about college professors with tenure.  I am talking about liberal trustafarians.  I am talking about tenured government employees.  I am talking about the not-for-profit sector.  I am talking about unionized media employees (yeah, don't forget that big-media journalists are all union members).

So any media worth its salt would be making life miserable for the sinecure liberals.  Only it doesn't.  The result is the Obama trainwreck last night when the president's bubble-tested bromides fell as flat as a ten-day-old Coke.  And did I tell you that the president is mean?

Well, too bad.  The result of media malfeasance is that Mitt Romney broke through the media blocking unit last night into open country and the American people got to see for the first time what a can-do All American problem solver he is.  Who knew?

Who knew was everyone that had taken the trouble to read half a page of biography about Mitt Romney.

Here's just a reminder.  When Mitt was turning around the Salt Lake Winter Olympics, which you could regard as a 24-7 job, he also had to deal at the same time with the nightmare of Ann Romney's developing MS disease.  The CEO of the Salt Lake Olympics was stopping by the grocery store on the way home so he could cook dinner.  What a guy.  What a preparation for the job of President of the United States.

That's the kind of guy who is going to be the next President of the United States.  And it's just as well, given the mess the country is in.

Some people say that Mitt Romney turned up at this moment in history because the United States is an exceptional nation, and that God takes care of children, drunks, and the United States of America.

Who knows?  They might be right.

October Surprise Bowl, 1st Quarter

Political partisans all live in fear of the October Surprise, the game-changing gotcha in a presidential race that always turns up in October.  It all started in 1972 with Henry Kissinger promising "peace is at hand" in Vietnam a few days before the election.  George W. Bush nearly lost the 2000 election after a story about his DUI surfaced in the week before the election.

Now, of course, political campaigns plan for it, on offense and defense.  In fact, I dare say they plan it out as a four-quarter bowl game, since there are four weeks in October.

I'm not sure that the weak-kneed AFSCME garbageman ad counts as an October surprise: more likely a JV busted play, because it turns out that, far from being a guy that doesn't have a clue what it's like to be a gargbageman, Mitt actually spent a day as a garbageman when he was running for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002.  And he made a mess of it.  It's in his book, No Apology.

But you'd have to assume that the 2007 tape of Barack Obama doing the jive-talk thing to a meeting of black ministers and made available to the Daily Caller is the real thing.  A real October Surprise, doubtless fed to the media by the Romney campaign.  The point that the video makes is the one that Republicans want to make about Barack Obama.  He is not the racial healer that ran for the presidency to heal the festering sore of race politics.  He is a full-blown black racist, riling up the brothers just like a Jackson, a Sharpton, or a Wright, and telling his black listeners that the Republican federal government doesn't care about them.

(Yeah.  If only.  That's what Frederick Douglass prayed for over a century ago.  Do nothing about the Negro, he said.  Let him alone. "Your doing with us has already played the mischief.")

Well, that's just the first play in the first quarter.  No doubt there is more to come, from both sides.

However, you really can't say that the collapse of the Obama foreign policy is an October Surprise.  We were supposed to get through the election before the roof fell in on that.

But for conservatives, the timely October Surprise from the Romney campaign is a good sign that the Romney team is out to win.  And there is always the chance that it is putting the Obama people off their game plan.

The Reverse Cloward-Piven Strategy

Back in the 1960s a couple of lefty sociologists came up with a grand plan.  Richard Cloward (1926–2001) and Frances Fox Piven (b. 1932) that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system.Their idea was to replace the welfare system with a guaranteed annual income.

The idea behind the Cloward-Piven strategy is that when the system gets overloaded the poor will take to the streets to demand change and the establishment will, in order to prevent riots and mayhem, accede to the just demands of the poor and the underprivileged.  Some people think that Barack Obama is implementing a Cloward-Piven strategy as he expands government and chokes the private sector.

When people worry that another four years of Obama would be the end of the United States, they are buying into the assumptions of the Cloward-Piven strategy.  They are thinking that once Obama overloads the system it will end up as a European social democracy with a wall-to-wall administrative state.

Don't foreget that conservatives have a kind of reverse Cloward-Piven strategy.  It is what I call the Irving Kristol rule.  Conservatives should not be green eyeshade accountants and try to balance the budget, wrote Kristol back in the 1980s.  They should just adhere to a rule of tax cuts.  Cut taxes as deeply and as broadly as politically possible.

Yes, but what if the government runs out of money?  What if we have to cut programs?

Exactly.  That is not a bug, but a feature.

The question is: what happens when the government runs out of money?  Do the streets run with blood?  Or does something else happen?  Does the underclass, what used to be called the "mob," set the city afire?  Does the middle class demand that the rich "pay a little more" or does the middle class demand that the government cuts the waste?

One thing to remember.  Back in the days of the Paris Commune it was possible for rebels to build street barricades and hold up in the dense "rookeries" in which the poor lived.  But the French government found an answer to that.  It built broad boulevards, according to the plan of Baron Haussmann, to make it easy for the army to march to any troublespot, and it demolished the rookeries.  Think 20th century slum clearance in the USA.

Obviously, if you look at the Euro economy in Europe and the Obama economy in the US you can say that the jury is still out.  The European ruling class is trying to kick the can down the road with bailouts and money printing.  But the current benefits cannot be paid, so something will change.

Probably in Europe the Latin countries will leave the Euro and devalue.  The Nordic countries will leave the Euro and continue to work and save. (Because the Germans fixed their labor market problems back in the 2000s.)

Here in the US I suspect that we will see something different.  First of all, the Cloward-Piven strategy actually got implemented without a crisis.  We now have, informally, a guaranteed income of about $30,000 a year for a single parent with a couple of children.  And it happened without riots.

We have had riots, of course.  There were the Watts riots and Detroit riots in the 1960s.  And the LA riots over the Rodney King verdict.  But the riots didn't topple the regime.  They just resulted in the destruction and demoralization of the black neighborhoods where the riots occurred.  In LA during the Rodney King riots the liberal Hollywood types stood guard with shotguns at the entrances to their winding upscale drives.

On the other hand, the middle class has had something to say whenever the government has screwed up the economy or society in the last half century, and every time it has had its way.  It turned against the Democrats in 1968 after the Sixties and elected Richard Nixon for law-and-order.  It turned against President Carter in the stagflation of the late 1970s.  It turned against President Clinton in 1994 when he lurched left.  The middle class lurched left when President Bush presided over the Crash of 2008 and then turned on a dime and lurched right when President Obama refused to prioritize the economy over the left-wing Obamacare.  The middle class always votes for stability.

So what do you think the middle class is thinking in 2012?  What would you do in the stagnant economy of 2012 if the presidential race were a contest between a Cloward-Piven community activist and a corporate and administrative turn-around expert?

Golly.  I just can't figure that one out.  It's too hard!

Nothing New: Liberals in Denial

In his review of Charles R. Kesler's I Am The Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism Mark Lilla does us all a favor.

He shows us just how deep in denial our liberal friends remain.

He starts by sneering at Kesler's story-so-far, which tells a story of Hegel (and the big state) leading to Wilson (and the updated Constitution) through FDR's New Deal to LBJ's Great Society, "bringing with it existentialist self-absorption, moral relativism and passivity in the face of the new administrative state."  Lilla, you see, thinks that blaming German ideas for the mess in America is a case of "blame the Kraut."

On the way, he fails to mention Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, which is probably where Kesler got most of his "blame the Kraut" stuff.  Does that mean that this self-described "centrist liberal" never read it?  It's an outrage, eh Jonah?  Because, whether they know it or not, and I suspect they prefer not, liberals get all their stuff from the Germans, from the big state to the government schools to the government-run social welfare.

So then Lilla makes his pro-forma rhetorical concession towards the conservative narrative.  Yes, the Great Society did overreach, he admits.  But Ronald Reagan really did change things.

Reagan did in fact restore (then overinflate) America’s self-confidence, and he did bequeath to Republicans a clear ideological alternative to Progressivism. But he also transformed American liberalism. As an author named Barack Obama once wrote, Reagan “put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” By delegitimizing Great Society liberalism and emphasizing growth, he forced the Democratic Party back toward the center, making the more moderate presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama possible. Reagan won the war of ideas, as everyone knows.

OK. Let's concede this.  Ronald Reagan did force Bill Clinton to pretend to be a centrist.  And then, after a two-year lurch to the left, Newt Gingrich did force Clinton to the center.  But Reagan didn't win the war of ideas.  Nor did he transform American liberalism.  The point about Barack Obama is not that he is moderate, but that he represents a flood of 30 years of liberal ideas dammed up by the prestige of Ronald Reagan.

Liberalism transformed?  Let's take a look.

• Are liberals converted to the idea of low tax rates and sound money?  No and No.
  
• Are liberals converted to the idea of minimal regulation that recognizes Hayekian reality that the man in Washington can't run the economy, because he can never have sufficient bandwidth? No.
  
• Are liberals ready to back away from the administrative state and reinvigorate civil society and the little platoons?  A solid No.
  
• Have liberals begun to realize that race politics is poison and that Affirmative Action and diversity imprison minorities in a liberal plantation?  Definitely No.

So how in the world can "centrist liberals" like Mark Lilla think that they represent a sort of common-sense consensus while conservatives are hyper-ventilating extremists?  You know the answer.

Because everyone that elite liberals know agrees with them.

You'd think that, with the imploding welfare states of Europe before their very eyes, with Grecian default just a matter of time and Catalonia threatening to split off from Spain, that liberals would be getting second thoughts about their project, but chaps like Mark Lilla remind us that the end-of-dynasty elites seldom see the end coming.  They are like the Bourbons, who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.  Or as Fred Bauer from the Daily Caller writes:

In the life of almost all civilizations, a time comes where, as Yeats put it, “things fall apart.” The internal principles and assumptions that used to seem to work begin to break down.

That's where we are with liberalism.  Step by step liberals built their administrative welfare state, from Social Security to unemployment to government schools to centralized health care.  And it was good.

The idea that the whole thing was a ghastly mistake, a denial of the basic social and cooperative instincts of humankind, that it lasted as long as it did in spite of all the wonderful programs and policies and cosy liberal sinecures: that is unthinkable.

The trouble is that if we are to get through the next few years without a serious crack-up--as in serious inflation and/or debt default--then liberals have to come out of denial and buy into the idea that conservatives have a point.

But "centrist liberals" like Mark Lilla remind us just how deep in denial our liberal friends remain.  And that means that things have to get worse before they get better.  Probably a lot worse.

The whole problem can be epitomized in the flatulent idea that the rich should pay a little more in federal taxes.  Let's think through what that means.  It means that the wealth created by the rich should be put to work in government spending rather than in creating new businesses and new consumption items.

Really?  Is there anything more important right now than in creating a new boom in businesses and jobs?  Is there really anything the government is doing right now that is more important than getting the animal spirits of businessmen revived?

We know, because the last century amounted to a petri dish experiment to prove it, that the administrative state is a horrible mistake.  It is a monument to the conceit of the educated elite.  Maybe "centrist liberals" haven't woken up from their nap after consuming the Sunday New York Times yet, but there are leftist thinkers that have ripped up the idea and the practice of the administrative state.

There is Juergen Habermas, the residual legatee of the Frankfurt School, who talks about "internal colonization" in his Theory of Communicative Action.  There is James C. Scott who talks in Seeing Like a State about the aesthetic pretensions of high modernism, how modern elites have tried, again and again, to force society into the mold of their elegant administrative vision, simplifying complex social structures to make them "legible" and thus controllable by a ruling elite.

The significance of Habermas and Scott is that they confirm the Hayek thesis, that human society is too complex to reduce to an administrative state.  While Hayek merely asserts that the administrative state is impossible, Habermas and Scott show how the modern educated elite has attempted  to simplify society to make it amenable to administrative control.  In Habermas, the judgement is that the administrative state is flawed because it results in "internal colonization," a colonial state like the colonies of British India and Africa; in Scott the judgement is that the administrative project has notoriously failed, time and time again, resulting in famine and misery, from the enclosures of Europe to the collectivizations of Asia and Africa.  Obamacare, on this view, is yet another attempt to make real, messy health care conform to the elite's exquisite aesthetic vision of health care.

The reason that every dynasty seems to be followed by a "time of trouble" issues from the stupidity and blindness of late-dynasty elites.  They just cannot bring themselves to see that everything they so lovingly created is crumbling down around them.  They use every last ounce of their political power to keep their hegemony going until one day the whole thing collapses and the barbarians rush in.

And the people perish.