The Struggling Middle Class

Remember when Algore gave his wife that bend-her-backwards kiss at the 2000 Democratic National Convention?  And remember how the crowd went wild?

I thought then that something had changed in American politics, and I didn't like it.

After all, the Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the little people, working families struggling to make ends meet.  Here was something different, and I'm not sure exactly what it was.  Perhaps reality TV rearing its ugly head.

My point is that if you are a member of the struggling middle class, struggling to get and keep a decent job, struggling to make the mortgage payments, struggling to keep your marriage together and raise your kids together you really don't belong in the party of the Big Kiss.

Because the party of the Big Kiss is the party of Obamaphones, the reversal of welfare reform, the dependency state, identity politics, IRS corruption, blithe decisions not to enforce the law if it's politically inconvenient.

Why is it then, that George Zimmerman, the "white Hispanic", was an Obama supporter in 2012?  How can a man trying to "do something" about a rash of burglaries in his neighborhood vote for the Party Hardy party?

Sultan Knish writes about the great divide that the Martin-Zimmerman case reveals.

It's a culture clash of a primal kind. Settlers and nomads. Cops and robbers. Builders and destroyers. And it was never going to end well. The elites want the settlers to make way for the nomads, the cops to acknowledge their role in alienating the robbers and the builders to admit that their construction is really the destruction of the way of life of the destroyers. They don't understand the struggling lower middle class and they don't care to. They have a great deal of empathy for the Trayvon Martins swaggering around another neighborhood that decays at their touch, but none for the George Zimmermans, sweating, mopping their brows, worrying how they're going to hold everything together.

 That is the scandal of American politics.  It is a scandal that the George Zimmermans of America don't all vote as one for the party of the responsible self, the stupid party, the Republican Party.

Of course we know why.  If you are a member of the struggling middle class but you aren't political then you are only going to hear the Democratic talking points echoed through the mainstream media.  You are not going to hear the Republican talking points, because they don't get transmitted through the media, not unless you make the decision to listen to talk radio or watch FoxNews.  So all you hear is that the Democrats care about working families, about people like you.  And the Republican Party is the party of bankers and big corporations and religious extremists.

Where's a patriotic American to go?

It was the peculiar talent of Ronald Reagan that he did communicate to the struggling middle class.  That's why I encountered a pack of Reagan Democrats, people that looked like technicians and construction guys, in the 1980 Washington State Republican presidential caucuses.

We know now that Mitt Romney struck out with the struggling middle class.  And we know why.  Struggling voters feared the ruthless corporate turn-around guy that Joe Soptic had encountered.  The struggling middle class believes in economic populism, not settled-science economics.

It's an irony, of course.  The future for struggling middle-class folks depends precisely on entrepreneurs recklessly starting up new businesses, on savings accounts that pay decent interest and don't lose their value to inflation.  It depends on ruthless turnaround guys like Mitt Romney doing a Roto-Rooter on failing old businesses.  It depends on reforming the corrupt and wasteful entitlements from healthcare to education.

But people are afraid to change.  They are afraid of losing what they still have.  They are afraid of surrendering to the market; they put their faith instead in government force to protect their meager job tenure or access to health insurance.

I'm no political genius, so I don't know how to put together a political narrative that turns the table on the liberal narrative, one that sells the struggling middle class on the notion that Democrats don't care about people like them, that the big corporations and the banksters all toe the line of the Democratic Party, that the dreadful insurance companies are trapped in the system that Ted Kennedy set up 30 years ago when he boosted Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), that politicians will always try to divide us, and government is force.

But that's what the Republican candidates for 2016 need to figure out.  Ronald Reagan did it.  Mitt Romney didn't.  Go figure.

Searching for Hope

First of all, a majority of the people get fed up with the government.  So they form an opposition coalition to throw the rascals out, and eventually, they do.  But the new government can't satisfy all the hopes that it ignited as it campaigned against the corruptions and injustices of the old regime.  So people start to peel away from the government party and form a head of rebellion.  They form an opposition coalition to throw the rascals out, and eventually, they do.

And so on, according to one theory of politics.

If you are a conservative, this is the winter of our discontent.  At this point, we can only hope that it will be followed by a glorious sun of conservative reform.

We see the recovery from the Crash of 2008 horribly mishandled.  We see a destructive Obamacare that will turn health care into the DMV of health.  We see the post-partisan president sending Department of Justice operatives down to Florida to gin up a race war.  We see an immigration bill that will increase the number of visas for low-skilled immigrants at a time when low-skilled Americans are being hammered by the slow Obama recovery.  We see a regulatory attack on conventional energy that kills jobs.  We see an underhanded campaign to impose gay marriage on an unwilling population.

How bad can things get?

Politics is division.  Even as we sit here in deepest gloom the successful Obama division that got him elected in 2008 and 2012 is breaking up.  It's said that the Obama coalition depended on sharply higher black turnout and enthusiasm from young people in 2008.  In 2012 a major factor was that low-income whites stayed home rather than vote for corporate whirlwind Mitt Romney: the Joe Soptic factor.  Look up at the previous paragraph but one.  You couldn't devise a record better designed to break up the Obama coalition.

Politics is division.  The question is who will come forwards to define the post-Obama division.  Can he or she bring underemployed young people together with aging low-skilled workers together with entrepreneurs and women frightened by the failures of Obamacare?  And unite them against liberal privilege and pride and the race hustlers and the union thugs?  In other words, can Republicans come up with a candidate that excites populist rage but bases it on solid growth economics?

Nobody knows.  But those of us that hope remember the fall of the Soviet Union.  There it was, this powerful monolith, armed with its propagandists and its KGB thugs, not to mention its western lefty apologists.  And then one day it was no more.

The key to the fall of the Soviet Union was that its ruling class no longer believed in the Communist idea.  They saw the failure and the corruption and they simply did not know what to do.

The optimists in the conservative camp thought that the Clinton era was the time of perestroika, when liberals lost their faith in the competence of big government, when the god of big government died.  Hey, didn't Clinton actually declare that the era of big government was over?

Alas, it was not to be.  After Clinton left office the Democratic Party moved left, and doubled down on class and race politics.  And the party doubled down on the administrative state, pushing huge new regulation of business and the huge new entitlement of Obamacare.  They even created their own little echo of junk-science Lysenkoism with the chimera of global warming.

The American people are oddly quiet right now, despite their disappointment and their troubles.

You'd have to believe that, some time before 2016, their disappointment will kindle into a furnace of rage.  The question is, who will provide the spark?

O.J. Plus Zimmerman Equals The End

If you're an average white racist bigot you might be asking yourself when's it gonna end?  I mean the whole race-hustling business that maintains the idea of white guilt.  For white guilt, we know, must be requited by affirmative action, quotas, and reparations.

The corollary is the idea that blacks can't be racist because they are oppressed.  You can only be racist if you have the Power.

So the question is: when would we be able to tell that blacks were no longer oppressed, assuming that there is some objective criterion for such a judgment.  Assuming that there is some criterion other than: because left-wing activists say so.

I would say that if it ever happened in America that a black defendant that murdered a white girl got off because a black jury refused to convict then you would start wondering if the worm had turned.

I would say that if it ever happened in America that black activists and the mainstream media could force the government to prosecute a white man who pretty obviously had killed a black man in self defense then you would have some justification for saying that the age of Jim Crow was over.

That's why I say that OJ + Zimmerman = The End of Oppression.

The point of the OJ criminal trial, when O.J. Simpson was tried for the murder of his white wife and acquitted by a black jury, was this.  The trial advertised to the world that blacks had the Power.  They had the power to say to the criminal justice system: we ain't gonna convict one of our own.

The point of the Zimmerman prosecution, when "white Hispanic" George Zimmerman was prosecuted for the second-degree murder of black Trayvon Martin, was this.  The fact of the prosecution advertised to the world that blacks had the Power.  They could rise up and protest and demand that a white guy be put on trial even though police had judged he had acted in self-defense.  They had the power to say to the state government in Florida that we demand you put one of the "other" on trial.

You can see where I am going with this.  If blacks now have the Power --  the power to act on a modest scale more or less as white southerners did back in the days of Jim Crow --  then maybe they aren't oppressed any more.

And if blacks aren't oppressed any more, maybe it's possible for blacks to be racists.

In fact, it turns out that blacks think that blacks are more racist than whites, according to a recent poll.

Among black Americans, 31% think most blacks are racist, while 24% consider most whites racist and 15% view most Hispanics that way.

But that is another story.

President Obama's Accidental Achievement

On coming into office, President Obama told us that he planned on "fundamental transformation."  I wrote yesterday that fundamental transformation is a progressive conceit.  And anyway, Obama is failing in his fundamental transformation, big time.

He has utterly failed to be a "post-racial" president.  Instead he has ginned up racial division.  He has utterly failed to improve health care.  Instead he has created a "train wreck."  He has utterly failed to make government more transparent.  Instead he has led an administration that is notably non-transparent and notably quick to use the federal bureaucracy to intimidate the president's opponents.

And that leaves out the stupidity of the stimulus, the hyper-regulation of Dodd-Frank, the chimera of climate change.

So liberals will probably get their "fundamental transformation."  Only it won't be the kind they were planning on.

Instead of the endless liberal moral melodrama featuring endless liberal Scarlett O'Haras, we are more likely to get an age of Rhett Butler: the age of I don't give a damn.

On race, there's a good chance that the president's race hustling will finally provoke the end of white guilt.  After the beer summit and the Trayvon Martin case, it's time to say, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

On health care, there's a good chance that the president's mendacious promises and incompetent rollout on Obamacare will create room for some practical reform, moving away from highly regulated first-dollar coverage towards HSA-type catastrophic coverage and transparent pricing.  In other words, letting Americans decide what they want to pay for out of their own pockets with a decent provision for the old and the poor.

On the economy, there's a good chance that the hyper-political hyper-regulatory follies of the last decade will be so discredited that we can do some sensible reform: reversing the cheap money, high borrowing for the federal government and switching to hard money and spending cuts.  And the demolition of Sarbox and Dodd-Frank wouldn't hurt.

On climate change, there's a good chance that the Ruling Class's obsession with carbon dioxide will collapse as the science proves to be a lot less settled than we were told, and the crony capitalist scandals of green energy discredit the whole effort.

Back in the 2000s Judis and Teixeira were boasting of an Emerging Democratic Majority.  My guess is that it will evaporate in 2014 and 2016.  Why?  Because the Obama Democrats failed to show a bright future to the women, minorities and young people that they captivated in the 2000s with the promise of hope and change.

The truth is that they had it in their grasp.  If Obama had really brought the end of race politics, if he had done an Obamacare that featured a bipartisan compromise, if he had curbed the stimulus, and pushed a less regulatory Dodd-Frank, he might now be leading an America bursting with hope and confidence.

But he didn't.  That's because neither he nor the elite liberal ruling class has a vision beyond the idea of ruling and administering the United States like a feudal estate.  They, the ruling class, are the guys with the ideas and the power. We, the country class, should shut up and do what we are told.

George Gilder is just the latest to tell us why the liberal way doesn't work.  In Knowledge and Power he argues that humans advance by surprise and learning.  People come up with new ideas that nobody thought of before.  And then they learn how to apply the idea to society: the fabled learning curve.  Think the last two centuries starting with the Industrial Revolution.

But the liberal vision is one of revolution and stasis.  The idea is to set up an administrative system with a political reform and then sit back and let it run.  We know what happens when you do that.  You get a sterile system that slowly runs down and dies.

The recurring story of the last two centuries is that the way to flourish is to surrender to the process.  Come up with a good idea instead of going with the flow.  Think of serving others first rather than grabbing for your share.  But the truth is that we are all afraid.  We want to be sure that we get our share; we worry that we won't have anything valuable to contribute.  And so we gum up the works with force and rigid system.  And fight over a shrinking pie.

We can do better, and with the ruin of his administration President Obama may be clearing the way to a better future.

How's That Fundamental Transformation Doing?

Now that President Obama is into his second term, let's take a look at that "fundamental transformation" he was talking about right after the election in 2008.

"Fundamental transformation" is the basic conceit at the heart of progressivism.  It imagines that by changing the configuration of free stuff it can end centuries of oppression and inequality.  Here is young Ezra Klein imagining, in the aftermath of the Obamacare employer mandate delay, that we are just a course change away from Obamacare success and health care as free stuff.

Congress should use the next year to improve the employer mandate. There are plenty of better ideas out there: The Senate Health Committee’s bill used a mandate with a smaller penalty, but one that accrued to both full-time and part-time workers. The House bill tied its penalty to the percentage of payroll an employer spent on health care. We can do better, and we should.

And then, in a couple of years, when the exchanges are up and running and expensive employer-based plans are getting hit by the “Cadillac Tax”, perhaps employers will be open to rethinking whether they should be in the health-insurance business at all. If and when that happens, Congress should happily help them ease out of it.

Notice how Klein does not really think of health care as something where the American people are involved in the decision making.  "We" will decide, and in a couple of years employers will be ready for single-payer.

The ruling class is the ruling class, and that means that the default option is that it has the power to nudge the nation towards its vision of society.  The current ruling class believes in a society where the big shots get called by the educated elite on the key questions of pensions, health care, education, relief of the poor and sexual relations, and the economy and the environment.  Indeed, pretty well everything.

In between calling the big shots, the ruling class gets to administer the whole thing.

The best way for the ruling class to get where they want is to jog along, adding a new program here, adjusting an old program there.  But ruling classes not not really like such a low-energy governance.  They want to sit on Olympus and make the heavens echo with the thunderbolts of their power and glory.  That is what "fundamental transformation" is for.

But the risk is that fundamental transformation will wake the sleeping multitude.  It will make them realize that they don't want fundamental transformation at all, but just a little bit of free stuff here and there before they go back to sleep.

When this happens it is called "biting off more than you can chew."  The Obama administration has been in such a hurry to fundamentally transform everything that it might teach the American people that really they would rather just be left alone.

That gives conservatives a chance for political power and the opportunity to dial back on the fundamental transformation.

Although, of course, the truth is that conservatives have no intention of leaving the American people alone either.  We want to blow up the welfare state and all its anti-social free stuff and create a beautiful vision of a truly civil society of neighbors and associations.

If we conservatives ever got to do that, the American people would probably be as mad as hell and run us out of power for a generation.

A Ruling Class That Wants to be Free

I don't blame President Obama.  For over a century the educated ruling class has longed for the freedom to finally implement its program of pragmatic, expert-backed government programs to end poverty and every other social and economic ill.

Finally, with Obama's election and a filibuster-proof US Senate he and the ruling class had their chance for a decisive breakthrough.  They would end the chaos in the financial markets with a proper regulatory regime; they would end chaos in health care with a first step towards a properly thought out comprehensive plan for national health care.  And they would take decisive action to end carbon pollution with a comprehensive program to phase out fossil fuels in favor of renewables.

And yet.

Something is wrong.  The Federal Reserve is still printing money to keep interest rates low, four years after the bottom of the Crash of 2008.  The economy is not recovering at anything close to the usual pace.  The comprehensive health program is foundering as businesses in terror stop hiring.  And the green energy plan is running full tilt into an energy revolution that will make natural gas and oil abundant for centuries -- and worst of all, the climate is not heating up like the settled science predicted.

To me, it all sounds like the Nazi invasion of Russia.  After a year or so, it ran out of gas in the foothills of the Caucasus, a few hundred miles from the oil wells that Nazi Germany wanted.  And then the Russians at Stalingrad broke up the left flank of the huge Nazi salient. So, after various mistakes, the Nazis failed in their strategic thrust into Russia.

But we ask today: what were the Germans trying to do?  They were in the process of becoming the most advanced economy in the world.  They didn't need to own the natural resources or plunder them like the conquerors of old; they could buy whatever they needed with their valuable merchandise exports.  The Germans invaded Eastern Europe just at the point where it had become obvious that the age of invasion and plunder was over.  Wealth, we had found out in the 19th century, is not sitting on the ground or in a mine or an oil well.  It is between the ears of each citizen.

So here we have the educated ruling class in the United States that thinks that the only way to the future is for it to invade and plunder the entire social space and fill it with comprehensive and mandatory programs.  It is an invasion that is doomed to failure just like the Nazi invasion of Russia.

You can see the world changing even as the Obama offensive starts to falter.  There is Michael Barone, who talks about the end of Big Unit America.  There is Walter Russell Mead, who writes about the end of the Blue Social Model.  There is America 3.0, by James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus about the change from a society run by "powered machinery" to a "post-industrial, networked, decentralized society."  Then there is Kevin D. Williamson and The Future is Going to be Awesome about the inevitable failure of big one-size-fits-all pensions, healthcare, and education.  Finally, there is good old George Gilder, back with another bleeding-edge book.  This time it's about Knowledge and Power, how the information theory of Claude Shannon is really the basis of capitalism,  and how it's going to transform the economy.

If all these people are saying almost the same thing, then something is astir in the land, rather in the same way that supply-side economics was astir in the 1970s.  And oh so conveniently, our liberal friends are crashing and burning the economy in another Bourbonesque effort to prove that they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

What all the writers above are saying is that the essence of capitalism is that it is always surprising us.  To use Gilder's information theory approach, entrepreneurs are always creating new information out of the noise of the world.  But as the noise from government increases then it becomes more difficult for the information from the entrepreneurs to get heard.

I've been saying for a while now that you don't just come to the end of an era, the era of the educated ruling class, and hand it off to a new ruling class.  Usually the ruling class has to run out of money first, like in Egypt or in France under the ancien régime. On this view, the overreaching and the failures of the Obama administration are a necessary prelude to a genuine change in our society.  The ruling class has to be off-balance, demoralized and discredited before it will agree to surrender its power.

Our ruling class wants to be free -- to dominate us.  In George Gilder's view the ruling class needs to be chained and fettered.  It is the entrepreneurial class that should be as free as air -- to amaze us.

Cost and Trende Have Spoken on Immigration

The GOP's kindly friends in the Democratic Party have been telling them for months that that the Republican Party  needs to get with the program on immigration, otherwise they'll never ever get an Hispanic to vote for them.

Fuggedaboutit, say conservative election analysts Jay Cost and Sean Trende.  The GOP's main problem is that people don't think it cares about average people like them.  Exactly, because my friend Stephen thinks of the GOP as the party of the bankers.

If only.  If only it were true and those greedy bankers were busily slipping money to Tea Partiers instead of marching in lock-step with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-WallStreet) because they know what side their bread is buttered.

The biggest problem Mitt Romney had in 2012 was the downscale white voters that didn't show up to vote.  In a choice between an "urban liberal like President Obama or a severely pro-business venture capitalist like Mitt Romney" writes Trende, they decided to stay home.

You can see how Obama's Joe Soptic TV ad nicely made the point that Romney was exactly what he was, a severely pro-business venture capitalist.  It doesn't really matter that what the downscale white voters objectively need according to settled science is a million venture capitalists shaking up the economy and renewing failing, badly managed corporations, because the good old jobs with good wages are gone forever.   Not only that, but the downscale white voters are not now, and never will be again, the little darlings of the ruling class that they were back in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.

But enough of the past.  Cost and Trende argue that there is nothing in the Senate's immigration bill for ordinary downscale voters.  Any politician that planned to appeal for the votes of ordinary, average people would be making populist attacks on the immigration bill, saying that it took jobs away from ordinary Americans and handed them to corporate and union fat-cats.

Gee, Sarah Palin just did that, calling the Senate bill an "amnesty bill filled with favors, earmarks and crony capitalists' pork".

This is what politics is all about.  Politics is division.  It is about hanging the labels of crony and greedy and banker and special interest on the other guys, and for Republicans that means the Democratic Party.  It is about showing that the Republican Party is the party that really cares about the ordinary American that isn't enrolled in the rank and file of the special interests: your greenies to reds to pinkos to blacks to browns to fems to gays.  Whatever happened to an America that cared for ordinary people, without separating and mobilizing them into warring and exclusive identities?

What a joke.  Here we have bourgeois capitalism, that has raised the common man from indigence to a suffocating prosperity.   Yet the common man is convinced that capitalism and capitalists are out to screw him.

Oh, I know.  In the old days the poor man could only hope to attach himself to a powerful patron.  And still he would starve and his children would die.  For many people, even most people, it still goes against instinct to imagine that the way to prosper is to throw yourself on the mercy of the consumers, and believe in the idea that you prosper by serving others rather than forcing them to cough up a livelihood for you upon the threat of force.

But that's the world we live in.  Until we can change it for the better.