"You and Your Family"

You always want to go to Rush Limbaugh to get your gut check on the previous day in politics.  Love him or hate him, Rush is the man with the golden gut.  And his analysis is that the core of Mitt Romney's acceptance speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention was this memorable line:

President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.

It deals very neatly with the central delusion at the heart of modern liberalism: we've got the social problem licked and now it is time to move on to bigger things.  All this, remember, while the whole "blue social model" is collapsing everywhere from Athens to LA.

All in all, the Republican National Convention was a success and showed us how the Romney campaign will be fighting the election.  It will be hope and change, based on Mitt's leadership, judgment and ability.  Against the proven incompetence of Barack Obama, who did the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong way, i.e., the opposite of Aristotelian virtue.

Of course.  There are only two campaign themes.  There is "Four More Years" and there is "Hope and Change."  Everything else is just a detail.

But what bothers me is the central promise of modern politics: to help you and your family.  This is the basic "lie agreed upon" in modern life.  It is the idea that the big remote central government can stand ready to help you and your family.

Reality is something different.

Big government cannot help you and your family.  It can stabilize the credit system with Dutch finance.  It can build big bureaucratic programs that slosh money around, and that you can exploit for your own benefit.  It can, in emergency, mobilize to get food and supplies to you, although Walmart did that better after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Here's how Big Daddy can really help you and your family.  It's the story of Mitt Romney, Mormon church elder helping a family after a devastating automobile accident.  Andrew Ferguson tells the story.

I was struck by the story of a Mormon family called (unfortunately) Nixon. In the 1990s a car wreck rendered two of their boys quadriplegics. Drained financially from extraordinary expenses, Mr. Nixon got a call from Romney, whom he barely knew, asking if he could stop by on Christmas Eve. When the day came, all the Romneys arrived bearing presents, including a VCR and a new sound system the Romney boys set up. Later Romney told Nixon that he could take care of the children’s college tuition, which in the end proved unnecessary. “I knew how busy he was,” Nixon told the authors. “He was actually teaching his boys, saying, ‘This is what we do. We do this as a family.’ ”

It's not the same thing when government gives you an unemployment check after you have lost your job.  The politician is not coming round to your house to give you a hand. Not with his money, he ain't.

I've been hammering on the theme of "confiscation" in recent days.  What I really mean by that is exactly what liberals do and what Mitt Romney was promising in his speech: government that helps you and your family.  The problem is that it is the job of civil society to help you and your family.  The way that society works is that people help each other, and community leaders help more than most.  Every single thing that government "confiscates" is a string snipped out of that social safety web.

It is a fallacy and a delusion to believe that "helping" ever happens outside of the face-to-face society of family, friends, neighbors, and church members.

In the old days, in hunter-gatherer society, the whole of society was face to face.  So you relied on your fellow tribesmen and women to help you in need.  But the basic fact of modern society is that huge sectors are removed from face-to-face relationships and are organized not on a relationship basis but on a systems basis.  Thus Habermas talks about "steering media" like money that direct human behavior.  Instead of exchanging goods and services through face-to-face conversation, people do it by the hands-off exchange of money and markets.

The same thing applies to politics.  Politicians affect the conversation of the town meeting, the assembly of the whole community.  But they are really doing something else.  Modern politics is a spectator sport.  The voters sit in the stands experiencing the game vicariously while the professionals duke it out on the playing field.  President Obama's team playbook emphasizes fairness and sharing.  Governor Romney's team playbook emphasizes individuals striving to lift their families up.  When the game is over the spectators go to their voting booths and vote for the team of their choice.  To say that such a combat is "social" in the way that discussing tribal affairs over a camp-fire is social is to live in a dream world.

We can never go back to the community of the hunter-gatherer.  The Garden of Eden is gone forever.   Our world is much more complex.  We must learn to operate the levers of modern technology, from money and credit to power tools.  Yet, as James C. Scott has written, the world cannot operate as a pure mechanical system.  Humans still interact face to face, and it is the face-to-face communication that acts as the vital lubrication that makes the whole system work.  Great powerful automated systems are amazing.  But you still need the human touch to set it up, and apply a nudge and a check every so often.

That's the way to really "help you and your family."  Could we ever get a government with the wisdom to stand back and let us all get on with it?

Ryan's Rhetoric: A Suggestion

You gotta love that Paul Ryan guy.  For his demeanor, his rhetoric, and his zingers.

How about those faded Obama posters?

But I want to add a new concept into the lexicon of conservative rhetoric.  It's a simple idea, as all good ideas are.  It's not my idea, but it is stolen from Roger Scruton in his new book on the environment, How to Think Seriously about the Environment.  He uses the concept of elite "confiscation" to critique the way in which our educated class confiscates problems away from ordinary people.

To illustrate his point, I am going to quote the various places in Environment where he uses the word "confiscate".

p. 134: "In all such cases top-down solutions have a tendency to confiscate problems from those whose problems they are."

p. 395: "the unscrupulous use of Trade-Related Property Rights to confiscate the social capital of peasant economies."

p. 158: "Once again we see the counter-productive nature of regulatory policies that confiscate risk and remove the incentive to prepare for it."

p. 171: "It comes from believing that this problem is our problem, and therefore my problem, as a member of the group. That belief disappears when anonymous bureaucracies confiscate our risks, and pretend that they can regulate them into extinction."

p. 402: "By acting always to enhance oikophilia [, love of home,] and not to confiscate its sphere of legitimate action, the state will prepare us for the sacrifices [to come]".

p. 400: "The greatest danger to the environment, it seems to me, comes from the growing tendency of governments to confiscate the powers and freedoms of autonomous associations, and to centralize all powers in their own hands."

p. 360: "[A]lthough [the EPA's] regulatory regime has provided guarantees against the worst forms of pollution it has done as much to confiscate as to support the oikophilia of ordinary Americans".

p. 150: "Any such regulation... should never confiscate a problem from those who have the job of solving it".

Do you get what he is saying?  He is indicting the whole big government idea, because its whole idea is to say: you poor diddums can't really be expected to educate your children, because we experts can do it better.  You can't really be expected to save for retirement, or deal with unemployment, or provide for your health care.  So why not let us tax your employer and the rich and we will do it all for you.

We conservatives usually like to talk about "responsibility," and that is fine.  But it really misses the point.  The whole thrust of progressive politics, starting with Marx, is to "confiscate" problems from society at large, to deny the opportunities for responsibility, and sequester them forever in the political sector where liberals live.

This confiscation is bad for one simple reason.  We humans are social animals.  We live by our cooperative social thoughts and acts.  But if we don't use them, they atrophy, just like a muscle that we don't exercise.

And then, when a crisis comes, we don't have the skill or the will to do the social thing.  We are no longer social animals, but dependent animals.

Scruton picks up a point made by Aaron Wildavsky, the idea of "resilience," which prepares us for adversity.  You can manage risks by "altering the object that presents them" or by "altering the subject that confronts them... by changing ourselves or our competences in order to cope better when things go wrong."

In the liberal welfare state the liberals confiscate risk and confiscate the opportunity for ordinary people to develop the resilience and the competence to cope with things when they go wrong.  Are they really helping us?  Or are they helping themselves, grabbing all the satisfactions of social life, of life in common, for themselves?

Whaddya think, Paul Ryan?

Trumping the Race Card

When Americans voted for Barack Obama in 2008, were we racists?  Were we voting for a man because of the color of his skin, rather than the content of his character?

In my case, I voted for Obama because it was time for Democrats to put their money where their mouth was on the War on Terror.  And anyway, I think that the essence of democracy is Buggins Turn.  You alternate the parties in power so they don't get paranoid.

So if Americans vote for Romney in 2012 does that make us racists?  If we don't like the way the US Justice Department decided not to prosecute New Black Panthers for standing in the polling station door does that make us racists?  If we don't like President Obama's liberal bureaucrats tearing up the consensus on welfare, does that make us racists?  If we don't agree with ObamaCare does that make us racists?

Jonah Goldberg is looking at the race card today and wondering why we haven't got to post-racial politics.  He reckons that if Michael Eric Dyson, professor of sociology, can judge Mitt Romney's lame birth-certificate joke as "resorting to 'some of the basest, most despicable bigotry we can imagine'", then things can't really be that bad on the race front.  I mean, can a lame joke be that much of a problem?

A lot of Americans thought that in voting for Obama they would put America into a post-racial era.  After all, if you vote for a black guy for president, then surely nobody can call you a racist any more.

Yeah.  Good luck with that, old chum.  But Goldberg thinks that the race baiters may be shooting themselves in the foot.

But I think both the cynical and the sincere race-obsessives fail to fully appreciate the damage they’re doing to their own cause. In 2008, the hope for many was that Obama would transcend race, moving the nation beyond the exhausting topic. Today, instead of being post-racial, our politics are saturated with ridiculous charges of racism. “No Drama Obama” is instead a source of constant drama, often hyped in the most ludicrous ways.

 What Obama has done, in the analysis of Shelby Steele, is change from a race "bargainer" to a race "challenger."  Race bargainers give whites the benefit of the doubt on race, on the understanding, nod nod, wink wink, that they vote those benefits.  Race challengers accuse whites of racism up front until they vote the benefits.

But what if typical white Americans have decided that enough is enough, forget the bargaining, forget the challenging, they have voted in a black president: been there done that?  Suppose average middle-class Americans reckon they now have to take care of their own needs in this sluggish Obama economy?

Well, who knows?  That's why we have elections.

What Comes Next?

Pat Buchanan says that this election is the "Last Hurrah" of the "New Majority" put together by Richard Nixon.  In 1972, Nixon "annexed the Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Christian conservatives of FDR's coalition to win 49 states in 1972."  With the Todd Akin gaffe on "legitimate rape" that whole coalition seems like an embarrassment.

Come on Pat.  The social conservative majority had its Last Hurrah with Bush's 2004 reelection, and collapsed in the shame and ignominy of 2006 and 2008.  And if Todd Akin is a laughingstock, then the idea of the abortion ladies headlining the Democratic National Convention next week is absurd.

Nixon's majority has been history since 1992.  Instead, we are at the end of the Third Way era, the idea that you could have your cake and eat it too.

Here's what I think.  I think that the American people are confused and waiting for leadership.  You can see that from Frank Luntz's experience with undecided voters here.

After the exhaustion of the Bush years, the Democrats had a once in a generation opportunity to create a new coalition based on the promises of America's first black president to get beyond the partisan divisions of the previous decade.  People were hoping we could get beyond the race wars and the culture wars.

Instead, President Obama has intensified partisan division in the country.  Instead of putting race behind us, he has unleashed the race-card sharps.  Instead of using his majorities in Congress to craft a bipartisan consensus on economic policy, health care, and environment that would co-opt Republicans as junior partners in a new era in federal policy, he rammed stupid partisan garbage straight down the nation's throat.  President Obama has thrown a gigantic opportunity into the garbage can, and so everything is up for grabs.

My own view, expressed yesterday here, is that we have reached the end of the stunningly hypocritical "socially liberal, economically conservative era."  For years our top 20 percent has been happily talking socially liberal while acting socially conservative.  Meanwhile the bottom 30 percent has been descending into social hell, with reduced marriage for women and less work for men and shattered homes for children.  Our Democratic friends like to say that we should return to the days of high tax rates and good unionized jobs at good wages of the era from 1950 to 1979, but they are longing for a time that can never return.

Socially liberal and economically conservative are like oil and water.  If you want to be socially liberal then you are going to need a big government welfare state to pick up the pieces of shattered lives.  If you want to be economically conservative then you are going to have to be socially conservative too, because a small government requires big, responsible citizens.

So what does that mean for the future?  You could simplify it all into two ideas, but that would be too naive and simple.  But what the heck.

First of all, we need an America where ordinary people get to solve their own problems in their little platoons.  That means that liberals must stop "confiscating" problems and insisting that only they have the chops to solve big national problems.

Second, we need a social culture symbolized by the idea that abortion should be "safe, legal, and shameful."  In other words, we shouldn't be trying to legislate morality.  No indeed.  But humans are social animals.  That means that we collectively, in our conversations, rough out an idea of right and wrong, and then we properly judge those people that violate our ideas of right and wrong.  I'd say that one thing Americans ought to be able to agree on is that taking the life of an unborn child is not a good thing.  Sex is a serious business, and pretending that it is recreational, or just a matter between her and her doctor is a lie.  But criminalizing social issues is stupid.

Freedom means nothing if it does not mean the right to make a mistake.  But actions have consequences, and, socially liberal or socially conservative, economically liberal or economically conservative, a mistake is a mistake.  The question is: how do we, as social animals, help our fellow citizens in avoiding stupid, life-harming mistakes?

The second question is: when do we stop lying to ourselves?

Once America's top 20 percent resolves its stunning hypocrisy on the "social liberal, economically conservative" issue then the confusion of the Frank Luntz's undecided voters will disappear.  They will all start mouthing the platitudes of the New Responsibility consensus.

And the political party that best communicates the ideas of the New Responsibility era will win most of the elections.

America's Moral Challenge

Throughout its history, writes Michael Barone, the Republican Party has attracted "voters who are generally seen by themselves and by others as typical Americans."  For many years that also meant northern and Protestant.  And the Democratic Party base was Southern and also Northern Catholic.

But now everything has changed, and the Republican Party's base is typical Americans that are "white married Christians."  A consequence of this is that over the last two decades the Republican Party has lost the votes of educated suburbanites, as Democrats have attacked the social conservatism of non-college whites as "extremism" while still insisting that the GOP is the party of northeastern big-business WASPs.

You could say that the 2008 was a perfect storm for Republicans as affluent suburbanites recoiled from the Texas taint of the George W. Bush years and happily voted for America's first black president.

Today, of course, the affluent suburbanites aren't quite as affluent, and they feel that they didn't quite get what they bargained for in America's first post-partisan president.

But I think there is a real moral problem with the educated suburbanites that advertise themselves as "fiscally conservative and socially liberal."  Because I think that the socially liberal world-view is responsible for America's biggest problem.

The problem is exposed in Charles Murray's Coming Apart about white America.  Briefly, the top 20 percent, the educated elite, is doing fine.  But the bottom 30 percent is not doing fine.  And the main problem with the bottom 30 percent is that about half the children don't have married parents.  Lower-income women often don't get married to the fathers of their children, and lower-income men often don't work.

There is no particular mystery about this.  America is organized for the benefit of the upper 20 percent and the kind of life they want to lead.  The top 20 percent sends their kids to college-prep high schools and on to college and graduate school.  When they are established in a career at about 30 then it is time for marriage and children.  And 80 percent of 30-49-year-olds in the top 20 percent are married.

For people like this the "socially liberal" world view makes sense.  You are relaxed (but careful) about your sexual life, and take care not to get a kid started before you are ready for marriage.

But suppose you are not college material.  Suppose you don't get on in school.  Then you are living across the grain that the top 20 percent has designed and built for America, and things aren't going to be so easy for you.  There are credential problems associated with the good jobs; there is the minimum wage, which makes it difficult to get started and work your way up by acquiring skills as you go.  There are the swingeing taxes on employment, especially outdoor work like construction, that make labor expensive but sequesters a lot of labor income in government trust funds for Social Security, unemployment, and workers comp instead of giving it straight to the worker.

But heck, if you are a young man you still want to get laid, and if you are a young woman you still want to have a baby.  Social liberalism means that it's OK to get laid and it's OK to get an abortion or raise a kid as a single parent.

Only, of course, kids of single parents have much worse prospects that the kids of married parents, including the problem of abuse from the sexual partners of single parents.

Now I have a word for the situation in which the bottom 30 percent is placed by decades of government and social policy dictated by the top 20 percent.  I call it "injustice."  I think that the educated top 20 percent has ripped apart the culture and the well-being of the bottom 30 percent like a tornado.  They confiscated the right for the bottom 30 percent to solve their own problems and live life on their own terms.  The top 20 percent built the society they wanted for themselves and they threw money at the people that didn't want, or couldn't compete, in their Brave New World.

Nobody has asked "non-college whites" what they want.  And the college whites, the people that live in affluent suburbia and work in office parks with good salaries and benefits, have been led by liberal Democrats to sneer at the opinions of the non-college whites: "bitter clingers" as Candidate Obama explained to his rich-bitch contributors in 2008.

There is hypocrisy here.  The top 20 percent do not actually live the "socially liberal" lifestyle they affect to support.  They are pretty family oriented and pretty careful about their sexual behavior.  After all, the upper-20-percent life trajectory requires a careful husbanding of human and economic capital.   You need to study hard in school and then work hard in your profession.  You need to select a mate carefully, to make sure that your investments in your career aren't compromised.  Fortunately, if you make a mistake--an unwanted baby or an arrest from an excess of high spirits--then Mom will clean up your mess for you.

In my view the great challenge for America in the years ahead is to thrash out a new moral culture.

No, wait.  In my view the great challenge for the upper 20 percent in the years ahead is to give the "typical American" non-college whites the cultural space to build out their own authentic culture without marginalizing it as "extremism" or "bigotry."

This will not be easy for the top 20 percent.  It will take an effort in "consciousness raising" similar to the effort that pushed the civil rights revolution through in the 1950s and 1960s.

The problem is that just as there were powerful Southerners standing in the schoolhouse door pushing back against civil rights there are powerful liberals today in education, politics and culture pushing back against any move to mainstream marriage and reform education and the workplace to make it more non-college friendly.

So things are going to get worse before they get better.  And many people in the bottom 30 percent will suffer grievously.

Who Is Mitt Romney?

Presidential campaigns almost always package their candidate as a kind of demi-god.  There's no mystery about this.  Modern presidents are almost always presented as the Father of their country, a leader of the American tribe, and presidential handlers naturally want to touch the mystic chords of memory that attach humans to their tribal leader.

In the case of Barack Obama, this reached a crescendo of kitsch in the famous acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention at which he spoke in front of a faux Greek temple.  The good thing about all the messianic rubbish of 2008 is that the real Obama came nothing near the absurd image that the liberal echo-chamber gave us.  People are disappointed, even demoralized.

Mitt Romney, in the Wall Street Journal today seems not to care about his "image," the perception that people get of Romney the man.

[T]he former businessman and governor, who gets more respect than adoration from voters, vows in an interview that he won't be part of the celebrity-style culture often favored by politicians. Despite pressure to be more revealing, he says he won't use his campaign as "a way to personalize me like I'm a piece of meat."

No doubt.  But you can be sure that his handlers are focused like lasers on using next week's Republican National Convention to get out to the voters an idea of who Mitt Romney is.

Probably he is not much more that what he seems, a results-focused business executive who has lived in the world of private equity, getting new businesses off the ground and trying to fix troubled businesses and turn them around.

Really, if you wanted to pick a guy to symbolize what America needs after a generation of putting things off, it would be the guy who writes, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, about fixing a problem of fraudulent billing at a Bain Capital company.  A competitor had been fined for fraudulent billing, so Mitt decided they had better check up on their diagnostic laboratory company, Damon.  Sure enough, Damon was doing it too.  So Mitt swung into action and audited Damon.  Writes Mitt:

The experience taught me that when you see a problem, run toward it or it will only get worse.

There is a military motto that says the same thing:  "March towards the sound of the guns."  Why?  Because if you get to the battle-field in time you will have a chance to decide the outcome.

This tells us that Mitt Romney is a classic leader with the will to win.

In the old days, military leaders ran a highly disciplined organization that used soldiers like dumb pawns in a game of chess.  And big government followed the example of early-modern armies, building rigid bureaucracies.  Same with big business and its rigid assembly lines.

But eventually military and business leaders changed their organization model.  They changed to the model advocated by Gen. Hans von Seeckt in the 1920s, who wanted soldiers that were "self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility."

Now every army wants the same, and every business too.  That is why businesses are always going on about "teams."  That is why Bain Capital always worked hard to educate and train the people they supported with their money.  They knew that success wasn't about the money; it was about the team.

But there is one sector of America that hasn't got the message.  It is liberals and big government.  That is why President Obama pushed through his ludicrous ObamaCare that will reduce health care to a single rigid one-size-fits-all administrative program, run from the top down with no self-reliance, no dedication, and no joyful responsibility.  Just political blame games.

The problem with big government is not just that it is cumbersome and ineffective and that, when it really gets serious, as in the Soviet Union and Mao's China, its centralized plans end up killing people in their millions.  The problem is that big government is inhuman.

Barack Obama comes from a world that hasn't got the message.  Mitt Romney comes from a world that has.  So America has a choice this fall.

Let's Play the Race Card

PJMedia's chief honcho Roger L. Simon tells a little story about his journey from left to right today.  After he had "come out" he got a call from Michael Berman, brother of a liberal congressman from west LA and a liberal campaign mastermind.  Only Michael was no longer a liberal.  Why?

Because of what the Democratic Party did to black people, he said.

But some people, like Francis Fukuyama, still haven't got the message.  He uses a long piece about the TV series The Wire that chronicles the mean streets of Baltimore, Maryland--the gangs, the drugs, the wasted lives--to worry about the black and the white underclass.  So what does The Wire suggest to him?  Off he goes into the weeds of liberal delusion.

Blacks were the only social group that faced caste-like barriers to mobility. Their social and economic liberation and subsequent advancement required political power to achieve, first in a Civil War that ended slavery and left more than 600,000 Americans dead, and then in a long struggle against legal segregation whose end required strenuous enforcement by Federal authorities.

The trouble is, he continues, that many on the right think that the end of segregation solved the race issue, and that the "government efforts like the Great Society’s War on Poverty were a counterproductive failure" and that nothing can "be done with regard to inner-city social policy."

The message of The Wire is that the mess in the inner city comes less from "poor individual choices than [from] dysfunctional institutions", he writes.  Self help won't do the trick.  And while we think that nothing can be done here in the US, inequality is decreasing in Latin America through growth and "intelligently crafted conditional cash transfer programs like Oportunidades in Mexico and Bolsa Família in Brazil."

No doubt.  Meanwhile the US is spending a trillion a year on education, $0.7 trillion on welfare, not to mention $2 trillion a year on middle-class entitlements.  So do we now pile additional top-down programs on top of the utter waste of the current corrupt and ineffective programs?  Or what?

Fukuyama talks airily about the inadequacy of "self help" but conveniently forgets that the urban problem has always been a cultural problem, of immigrants to the city finding a way to acquire the culture and the skills that it takes to make it in the city.  And he forgets, what he wrote at the top of his article, that politicians and experts don't really give a damn about the poor.  The politicians just want their votes, and the experts just want their sinecures and their tenure.  If the politicians don't care and the experts are just thinking about their careers, who else is going to get the black underclass out of the ditch if not blacks themselves?

It all comes down to this.  America has got to dish out some "tough love."  No, not to African Americans, but to educated elite liberals.  For too long educated liberals have sucked at the government teat and, burping from the rich nanny's milk, have pompously told the rest of us what to think and what to do.

It's time we told the liberals to "get lost."  Because, as Michael Berman told Roger L. Simon, anyone who has seen what Democrats and liberals have done to African Americans cannot in good conscience vote for Democrats.