The Second Amendment March on Washington

Obviously it will be a while before Republicans get a chance to enact good conservative legislation for America.  Even if they wanted to.  It is clear with his appointments that President Obama is going flat out to enact the most liberal agenda he can before time runs out.

Although I wonder about the idea that the Dems can retake the House in 2014.  Do they really think that or is it just bluster?

Meanwhile here is something we can do.  We can march on Washington to celebrate the Second Amendment.  Based on news reports that Americans are descending on gun shops in their tens of thousands and buying all the guns available, you have to think there is gold in them thar hills.

But I don't think we should have just the regular "march" where people gather on the Mall to hear speeches.  That is so lefty.

What I have in mind is a real march.  Men (and women) marching in companies.  In step.  Maybe they should be singing the "Song of Angry Men" from Les Mis.  They should be marching in companies because the company of 150 men is the natural size of a face-to-face body of men.

And there should be flags.  Usually your average regiment will have two flags, so I suggest a US flag and a "2" flag.  You know what the "2" is for.

Now I don't know Washington DC so I don't know how you'd do this march.  But I see the companies marching past a viewing stand somewhere on the Mall, at which huge articulated puppets, as in War Horse, representing the three great presidents, would review the marchers.

I see the three puppets representing Presidents Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan.

When the marchers pass the reviewing stand they would recite, from memory, the Second Amendment to the US Constitution:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Then the marchers would head home.

I think a march like this would be a good morale booster for all conservative Americans.

And it would utterly flummox our liberal friends. 

Lose the "Low-information Voter" Sneer

Everyone on the right is sneering about the "low-information voter."  Even the sainted El Rushbo has succumbed.

I say: Let's lose this loser excuse, and for a simple reason.  We are all low information voters.

If we are liberals we get our information from NPR and the New York Times.  Now there's a reliable way to get information!

If we are conservatives we get our information from FoxNews and a host of online rants.

If we are ordinary Americans that don't gorge on political propaganda every day then we get our information from the local TV news, from reality TV, and from Hollywood.

So who's the low-information voter?

Let us recall tha the late great election was decided on about one and a half issues, as all elections are decided.  What were the issues?  The rich should pay a little more: funny how the president forgot to mention that FICA taxes would be going up on the 99%.  Jobs: but maybe the American people reckon that those government benefits are a better deal, for now.

Given the choices, who is to say that the low-information voter is wrong?

The fact is that the government runs about 20,000 programs and just about every one of them stink.  But what voter has the time and inclination to study up on even 100 of them?

That's one reason conservatives call for limited government.  There is no way that voters can pass judgment on a government of 20,000 programs.

Let us forget the "low-information voter" whine and get back to work.  Work means persuading the folks in the middle that we are the good guys, we are the ones that care about them, we are the ones that care about families, and we are the guys that have a plan.

And, of course, it won't hurt that in 2016 the Dems will be running a white guy and the race card will be worth a lot less.  So the Mitt Romney of 2016 will be able to continue his negative ads into the general election and do the character assassination that he couldn't do on Barack Obama.

Here's more.  It won't hurt in 2014 and 2016 that Republicans and conservatives can start bellowing about a "lost decade" and blaming Barack Obama for everything.  That is the reason the presidency seldom gives one party more than two consecutive presidential terms.  After eight years of the usual miserable and corrupt governance, low-information voters rightly decide it is "time for a change."  Or even time for "hope and change."

I wouldn't be at all surprised if the low-information voters will want "change" in 2016.  What will conservatives say then?

The End of a Dynasty

For years and years I used to wonder about the dynasties in China.  I would read about how a dynasty got old, how it failed to keep up the armed forces, how eventually marauders from the north--Mongols, Bannermen, whatever--would sweep down and kick the existing dynasty out.

OK, fine, I would think.  But how does it work?

I think I can now understand the process, face to face, as it unfolds before our very eyes.  Of course it helps to read Reinhart and Rogoff in This Time is Different.

The simple fact is that governments are armed minorities, and they stay in power by giving money to their supporters.  When a government first takes over, by military conquest or by a political movement, it doesn't have too many supporters to support.  So it has plenty of money to spend.

But over the years the government has to pay out more and more to keep the supporters happy.  And the organized supporters get better and better at extracting support from the government.  Eventually the government runs out of money, it defaults on its sovereign debt and on its promises to its supporters, and finds itself unable to resist some new political force that swoops down out of the north--or the east or the west.

You can see the process working on our present dynasty of the educated elite.  It started in the 19th century with a moral crusade to help the working man, and prevent exploitation of the miners and the factory workers by their ruthless employers.

Today it's simply a racket.  The government takes in huge bounties from working people in the payroll taxes and even more from businesses in the form of incomes taxes and regulations, and then distributes the loot to its supporters.

The urgency with which the Democrats in power are using every ounce of political muscle to increase federal taxes is just an illustration to show what is going on.

The problem is that the more the government expropriates to spread out among its supporters the less is available to grow the economy.  Liberals tell themselves bedtime stories every night about how government spending is essential if everyone wants to be tucked in at night, but the numbers tell a different story.

When the government gets in a jam and can't sell its debt to the market, the way out is with "rescheduling debts", i.e., debt default, and spending cuts.  It's been done again and again.  Of course, when you do that you get a couple years of zero growth as the economy adjusts, but after that you get robust growth.

But the current dynasty can't afford to do that.  Their supporters are not moral crusaders, willing to give up a little for the sake of the nation.  They are simple rent seekers, whether seniors like me that want their entitlements or government employees that want their tenure and their pensions, and they want their money, now.

Otherwise, what's the point of voting for a bunch of thieves and demagogues?

The Education of Barack Obama

I know that we are all supposed to think that Speaker Boehner is an idiot, the naif that got rolled by President Obama in the fiscal cliff deal.

But I am trying to look between the lines.  Take Stephen Moore's the "Education of John Boehner" in the Wall Street Journal today.

Boehner thinks we have a "spending problem."  But the president does not.  He thinks we have a "health-care problem."

Boehner agreed with the president about the health-care problem. Said he to the president: "Clearly we have a health-care problem, which is about to get worse with ObamaCare. But, Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem."

But that is the sticking point.  I'll bet the president thinks that ObamaCare is going to solve the health-care problem, with all its administrative bells and whistles.  And so do all his liberal friends.

It doesn't matter whether they are right or not.  They have to believe that.  Otherwise they would be getting ready to do a bipartisan deal with the Republicans and cut spending.

And that points up the basic delusion that liberals have about government.  They think of themselves as disinterested experts and ethicists making considered public choices about governance.  That's what that Seidman chappie thinks when he rags on the constitution as an evil product of slave-owning white property owners.

But the liberals are wrong.  Starting with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Democrats have been running a national patronage machine.  They are buying votes and political power with government spending programs.  And they will continue to do so until the money runs out.

And by the way, the appetite for free health care is limitless, Mr. President, and your ObamaCare will become a bottomless pit of special interest giveaways and vote-buying.

The Democrats are riding the whirlwind.  Their power is based on delivering more and more benefits to their voters.  But we all know how grateful gift recipients are.  For about one minute.  Then they want more.

So the Democrats must keep offering more, or go out of business.   They cannot say: gee, it looks like we are going to have to cut those benefits in the future, 'cos there ain't no more money.  What do you mean no more money?  They have justified all that spending in moral terms: helping mothers with disabled kids, fighting inequality, etc.  How can you compromise on a moral agenda?

Both sides in the political arena call themselves rational and sensible and the other guys mean and delusional.  That's the way that playground fights go.  And so's your father.

But the Democrats won't agree to spending cuts until they have sent their supporters over the cliff.  It's not because they are evil, but because their supporters won't agree to spending cuts until they are lying in red ruin, like a herd of buffalo at the bottom of a Plains Indian buffalo cliff jump.  There's one up in Alberta, thoughtfully called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.

But by then, President Obama will be long gone.  I expect President Rubio will be to blame.

Obama's Crisis Politics

What will be the net result of President Obama's crisis politics?  Whether he does it by design or because that's who he is, the president seems to prefer to govern by periodic crisis rather than regular order.

Maybe he's a genius, for the best time for government to act is in an emergency, when people are more inclined to go along with the crowd.

The thing is, as Fred Barnes writes, that successful US presidents have usually governed by consensus.

President George W. Bush made bipartisan deals with Democrats on education, energy and, shortly before leaving office, the bank bailout known as TARP. President Reagan got together with Democrats on tax reform and Social Security. President Clinton reached agreement with Republicans on welfare reform, balancing the budget and Nafta's free trade. Mr. Clinton also negotiated reform of Social Security, a landmark compromise that died (before being announced) when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke.

But not President Obama.  He goes for I win, you lose.  Or he seems to.  Barnes says that this will come to bite him in the future.

 The essence of bipartisan deals is win-win: Both sides are satisfied, even if not elated. Mr. Obama's approach is that he alone gets to win. The approach worked, more or less, on the fiscal-cliff deal, but it won't produce the larger bipartisan agreements that Mr. Obama now needs.

But does the president need larger bipartisan deals?  What does the president want?

My guess is that he wants to lard up the budget with as much spending as he can to make the new level of spending the new place of departure for deficit reduction.

On that view, Democrats would deal with a new Republican president in 2017 on the notion that the balanced deficit reduction plan would be part spending, part taxes, based on the baseline of federal spending at 24 percent of GDP rather than 20 percent of GDP that obtained before the Obama years.

Maybe so.  But I like to look at this another way.  I like to think that the Democrats are in an impossible situation.  Their spending cannot go on forever, so at some point it will stop.  But Democrats cannot agree to spending cuts because their whole shtick is spending.  Cut spending and you are cutting your supporters off at the knees.  Cut your supporters off at the knees and they will cut you off at the knees.

That's why I think our current politics is a replay of the ante-bellum politics of the 1840s and 1850s.  The South was pushing slavery against the tide of history, getting more and more intransigent about it with every year.  They had to, because the Southern economy was built on the expansion of the very profitable plantation slavery.  They had hyper-partisan guys in the South back then just like the Angry Left of today.  Then it all fell apart.  After the Civil War the South was reduced to a century of curdled rage, and the people that lost out the most were probably the freed slaves.

Really, the situation today is not that different.  The welfare state cannot go on like this.  It is running out of money right now, and slowing the economy with its demands for transfer payments.  When it stops, the people relying on its benefits are going to be hurting, and the longer we put off reforms the worse they will suffer.

Why, you ask, would the Democrats do this to their supporters?  I go back to Joseph Schumpeter.  Democracy, he writes, is not the rule of the people, it is the rule of the politicians, professional election winners.  The only thing that matters for an elected politician is winning the next election.  You win elections not by what you do but by what you promise.

Politics is division: you win by promising loot to the voters.  Government is force: the winners force the nation to pay the loot to their supporters.

But there is a limit to division.  You might end up dividing the country into a civil war, for politics is civil war by other means.

And there is a limit to force.  As in killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Is that what President Obama's politics leads to?  Only time will tell.

Telling the Conservative Story

Everyone agrees that we need a better "story."  Yes, we are all postmodernists now, and we are all obsessing on the "narrative."

Over at NRO, Kevin Williamson wants a narrative that recognizes that the Democratic voters are not just people that want to live at the expense of other people.  They are also risk-averse people: women and minorities in particular.  And people do care about inequality--more at least than conservatives are willing to admit.

Over at RedState, Erick Erickson wants a focus on economic conservatism in a new 21st century way that focuses on the family.

All very good ideas, but we should forget the basic problem that conservatives face.  We do not have the hegemonic power over the culture that liberals have.  We don't get to choose the news stories; we don't get to educate the children; we don't get to write the TV shows and the movies.

What does that mean?  It means that conservatives are always on the strategic defensive.  The prime exception that proves the rule is the rise of Ronald Reagan.  He would never have got elected president but for the economic and cultural mess of the 1970s: the inflation, the hippies, the oil crisis, the wage and price controls.  The fact is that, by 1980, it was doable to persuade the moderates of America that liberalism wasn't working.

But conservatives in the Reagan years never obtained anything close to cultural hegemony.  The test of that was the Bork nomination.  Two minutes after regaining the majority in the Senate in 1986 (Reagan's second off-year election) the Democrats demagogued the nomination to the Supreme Court of distinguished jurist Robert Bork into a heap of rubble.  Because they could.

The same applies to the Obama years.  Obama demagogues on the rich paying a little more because he can.

Conservatives are at least a generation away from any hope of cultural hegemony.  At least!  That means that the broad middle of Americans will only vote for conservatism when liberalism, what they learn at school, what they learn from media, has failed, right before their very eyes.

There is a catchphrase for this from Ben Franklin: "Experience keeps a dear school, but they will learn in no other."

Yes, conservatives must speak to the risk averse, because the risk averse are going to learn pretty soon that relying on government is a pretty risky life plan.  It is like putting all your eggs in one basket.  If you think that relying on government to raise your kid or provide for your retirement will do the job for you, I have a bridge I want to sell you.

Yes, conservatives must speak about family, because family is the best insurance you can't buy.  The women and minorities that vote for big government are going to learn just what a bad idea trading the family for government benefits can be--not just for your children but for society in general and men in particular.  George Gilder wrote about this a generation ago in Visible Man. 

If conservatives had something close to cultural hegemony--or even something close to a real cultural voice--then we could persuade millions right now.  We could have persuaded them in 2012 because our cultural power would have ground the Obama campaign into dust.

But the fact is that we can't.  Any time a conservative talks about the culture s/he gets buried.  So the only way is the Ben Franklin school, the school of bitter experience.  We've got to get back to the "liberalism doesn't work" days of the late 1970s.

Conservatism is at bottom a faith about the way the world works.  It says that human society works best when we maximize voluntary cooperation through markets and through civil society, the "mediating institutions" between government and the individual.

Liberalism is a faith that you cannot trust the mediating institutions.  Here are Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their lefty manifesto Commonwealth.  Their vision is a re-creation of the "common."  They realize that socialism and communism, as practiced in the social democratic states and in the Soviet Union, are non-starters.  But so are the "most significant social institutions of capitalist society in which the common appears in corruption form... the family, the corporation, and the nation."(p160)

Oh goodie.  So again, our lefty revolutionaries are going to sweep away the imperfect socialization of today for what? A vision of "life in common" that has no real exemplars.  Not yet.

It's true that the family, the corporation, and the nation are the worst social institutions imaginable--except any and all of the alternatives that have been tried in the last century.  Lord knows they aren't perfect, but the fact is that the two-parent family is the best environment for raising children.  The corporation is the best way for creating products and services, and the nation is the best idea yet for enlarging human sympathy beyond the boundary of the kindred.

Government is force, politics is division, and reason is domination.  That's why humans are social animals, because social animals thrive when they find a gentler course than government, politics, and reason, and manage to avoid bumping into these hard and inhuman extremes.

And here is what conservatives were brought into the world to do: persuade their fellow humans to abjure the false gods of government, politics, and reason, and learn to live with each other in amity and comity.

In the next few years we are going to have a splendid opportunity to do just that.

Beyond that there is the Great Hope.  That one day in America we will be able to talk about family, business, and nation without ducking to avoid the brickbats from the liberal cultural hegemons.

Happy Conservative New Year

It's a gloomy time for conservatives, after the Obama reelection and all.  And it's doubly discouraging to experience his flat out meanness, expressed the other day when he bad-mouthed Congress.

Sorry, Mr. President, that's not how we do things here.  We the People, and our representatives in the commentariat, get to do the line about Congress being the only native American criminal class.  You are supposed to be working with Congress.

But think of this.  Things are not well in Liberal-land.  Evidence?  The bad-tempered op-ed by Louis Michael Seidman, a constitutional law prof, in The New York Times "Let's Give Up on the Constitution."  This worthy practitioner of deep thinking has come to consider that the constitution is "evil".

As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

What is the world has a liberal law prof got to complain about after the Supreme Court just passed on Obamacare and after Obama just won reelection?

Plenty.

Think about it.  Back in 2009 liberals had no notion that they would be where they are in 2013, with embarrassing fiscal cliffs and a Republican House.  They thought they would sweep all before them with their grand plans.  Recession?  Give it a whiff of stimulus!  Health care?  Implement the obvious specific, universal health care.  Global warming?  Green energy and cap and trade.

Yet here we are, with a sluggish economy, trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, and liberalism in such a mess that it must descend to faux crises every year to keep the spending spigot open.

No wonder liberals are annoyed.  Why, the problem can't be liberalism.  It must be the antiquated "system."  Why, did you know that the constitution requires that "the Constitution requires that revenue measures originate in the lower chamber. Why should anyone care?"  There is worse.  Imagine this:

Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

Oh the horror!  Mind you, I can't think of a worse way of deciding the affairs of a nation than just knuckling under to the "considered judgment" of a high "government official."

Then our worthy professor goes off on a riff showing that government officials have been ignoring the constitution since the founding.   So why shouldn't we do the same?

Think about this.  We conservatives are rightly outraged at the tax increase on wealthier Americans.  Because high-income Americans are not the idle rich, reposing in their Manhattan duplexes, but productive Americans building businesses that create jobs.  That's what the rich do these days, in case you haven't been paying attention (Manhattan duplex dwellers excepted).

Now look on the bright side.  Democrats are agreeing to lock in permanently the Bush tax rates for 99 percent of Americans.  But here we are still with our trillion dollar deficits.  Something has got to give, sooner or later.  And it will involve Democrats voting, this year or next year or some year, to raise taxes on the middle class.

Then there is spending, still out of control.  The fact is that something will have to give on entitlements, sooner or later.  Guess who gets screwed then.  Democratic voters.

I like to say that tactically, the Democrats of the 2000s have been brilliant.  They have kept Republicans on the back foot for ten years.  But what good has it done them?  The spending budget is out of control and there is now no way out except spending cuts and/or tax increases on the middle class.  They have created the Obamacare monster that women are going to hate as it cuts into their expectations for unlimited health care.  Strategically, the Democrats are strung out with vulnerable flanks everywhere.

Let's cut out the moaning, conservatives.  Liberals are in an impossible position, and it's only going to get worse.  The liberal prof's article on the constitution is merely an early "tell."  Look for liberals to be breaking away from President Obama by the 2014 midterms.  And then it is Katy bar the door.

And remember: the midterm in a president's second term is usually a real loser for the president's party.  By 2015 the Republicans could have both houses of Congress for the two years running up to the next presidential election.  Just like the Democrats in 2007.