Government is Force

Columnist Jonah Goldberg has been watching the Democratic National Convention.  And he has something to say about the remarkable idea that "government is just the word we use for those things we do together" a sentiment expressed in a short video shown at the convention.

Well, no, writes Jonah.  Government belongs to the world of non-voluntary tribalism.  We Americans have advanced beyond that to voluntary tribalism.  You could say, he continues, that we now beyond non-voluntary tribalism to the tribe of liberty.

Unfortunately there remain those that suffer from nostalgia for the good old days of compulsory tribalism when you were tied for ever after to the tribe into which you were born.  Unless you were a woman that got married out into the neighboring tribe.  Hello Catherine of Aragon.

I think we should expand the whole notion that Jonah develops.  The point about voluntary tribalism is that it expands the circle of trust beyond traditional tribal notions of kinship, of family and clan.  We could call it a philosophy of trust.  The non-voluntary tribalism, on the other hand, is driven by what philosopher Luc Ferry has called a philosophy of suspicion.  He was talking about Marxism.

Now the philosophy of trust yields a politics of responsibility, based on the responsible self invented in the Axial Age religions, while the philosophy of suspicion yields a politics of the victim.  Of course it does.

The interesting thing about the philosophy of suspicion is that, when the old non-voluntary tribes of blood have broken down--the tribes that defined people by their locality and their mistrust of the village down the road--suspicion finds new targets for its hate.  It finds its targets within the larger community, by dividing people by class and race.  The genius of Marx was to be the first person to redefine the philosophy of suspicion for the modern age.  He created the first modern politics of the victim and the first modern victim class, the proletariat.

So along come our Democratic friends and tell us that "government is just the word we use for those things we do together."

No it isn't, Democrats.  Government is the word for the rump of things that we still do under the old culture of non-voluntary tribalism.  In the new world of the philosophy of trust, peopled by the multitude of responsible selves practicing the politics of responsibility, there is less and less need for unthinking compulsion and conformism.

But there is a tribe of nostalgic reactionaries amongst us that want to turn back the clock to the bad old days of the philosophy of suspicion.  They talk about victims and rights, and programs and fair shares.  Stuck in the old world of suspicion and compulsory tribalism, they see pollution and danger, witches and heretics everywhere they look.  And they want to bring everything under the shadow of government and compulsion, so determined are they to eliminate the targets of their suspicions, whether Christians, greedy bankers and insurance companies, white racists, or patriarchs.

This is wrong, a remnant of the old order, that is poisoning our new culture of trust and responsibility.

Back in the days of the Roman Republic, the senator Cato the Elder frequently referred to the need to defeat Carthage.  "Carthago delenda est," he would say.

Our challenge is different.  Our need is to remind our liberal friends every day that government is not a nice cosy word for doing things together.  It is not.  Government is the word for things we force our fellows to do and that others force us to do.

Government is not doing things together.  Government is force.  And we conservatives should remind our fellow Americans--and ourselves--of this fact, and we should do so frequently.

Government is force.  Say it.  Write it.  Repeat it.

Race and the GOP

Oh goody.  There are 60 GOP blacks and Hispanics running for Congress.  So finally, the Republican Party is reaching out to minorities.

Or is it?  According to Patrick Reddy,

For years, since the 1960s, Democrats have courted the minority vote. Now, the Republican Party is getting more in tune with the new demographic realities of the 21st century.

He goes on:

The modern Republican Party has made solid progress in reaching out to moderate-to-conservative minority candidates who share their values on a truly colorblind basis.

Now that is all meaningless.  When you are "getting in tune" with demographic realities, it could mean anything.   And "reaching out to "moderate-to-conservative minority candidates."  What is all that about?

The truth is, as Michael Barone recently pointed out, that the Republican Party is and has always been the party of people that think of themselves as "typically American."  So, it really can't appeal to minorities until minorities start to think of themselves as, or want to become, typically American.

The telling fact is that the two black Republicans first elected to Congress in 2010 were Tim Scott (R-SC), an insurance agent, and Allen West (R-FL), a retired Army colonel.  How typically America is that?  Scott is representing a predominantly white district that includes Charleston(!); West's district now includes a sinuous district close to the Atlantic shore in South Florida.  The message of their election to Congress is that white Republicans don't give a damn what color you are as long as you can appeal to typical Americans.

The standout black Republican congressional candidate in 2012 is Mia Love.  She is running in a newly created semi-urban district south of Salt Lake City.  She's a woman from Connecticut that married a Mormon and eventually became mayor of a newly incorporated ex-urban city south of Salt Lake.

You can see what is happening.  The GOP is open, wide open, to talent.  It is recruiting minority candidates that have made themselves into typical Americans.  It is preparing itself for the time when the present minority population starts growing out of its "hypenated" stage and decides to become typically American.  Obviously the biggest target here is black America, artificially held into the Democratic Party by race hustlers like Reverends Jackson, Sharpton, and Wright that know how to play the race card and make blacks fear a return to Jim Crow.

From a strategic point of view, you can see the point of filling out GOP ranks with minorities.  It announces to minority individuals beginning to detach from the Democrats that the GOP has "people like me" in it.

But, for my money, the recruitment of minority candidates doesn't mean the GOP is "reaching out" to minorities at all.  It can't.  The GOP is based on the idea of the invisible hand and the human as an individual "responsible self."  The Democratic Party is based on the philosophy of suspicion, that "they" have gamed the system to keep down minorities, women, and the traditionally marginalized.

If you believe that you are a victim, or that you need the help of government to get a decent shake then there is nothing that is going to persuade you to vote Republican.  Democrats are always going to do a better job with their patronage/clientage politics at appealing to victims.

But the point is that, when any hyphenated American is ready to become a "typical American" then the GOP will have tons of office-holders that seem to be "people like me."

All The World's a Cult, Mr. President

We all know that cults are dangerous; they trap people in an artificial world where they can be intimidating into doing evil things.  In PJMedia Jeanette Pryor writes about her own experience in a cult.  She explains the difference between reality and cult reality.

Our interaction with the world and sense of its meaning depend heavily on individual discernment and personal analysis of cause and effect...

Cults promote a non-human way of knowing that bypasses both the sensory evidence we gather and the individual's rational processing. Cultic knowledge is a body of truths not acquired by experimentation and reasoning, but by virtue of the authority of initiated leaders.

But I think this overstates the difference between cult membership and ordinary societal or religious membership.

As Jonathan Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind, we humans are "groupish."  Here is how I wrote about his ideas in relation to corporate groupishness.

Humans love to belong to "teams", according to Haidt, from families to tribes to religions, and we do our best work when we work as part of a team. The most notable kind of team is the military squad, and it turns out that parade-ground drilling helps form the bond of the band of brothers, the critical bonding between soldiers that prompts them to sacrifice for each other. Rhythmic dancing is similar to rhythmic marching; it helps promote a "groupish" feeling.

But when we work as a member of a team we have to repress our "individual discernment and personal analysis of cause and effect" and accept the "authority of initiated leaders", otherwise there is no team.  We are social animals, designed to work in part as individuals and in part as team members.

In all parts of our lives we balance our invididual knowledge with the knowledge that we pick up from our groups and take on trust.  It's obvious that this extends to politics.  In the 2000s most Republicans accepted on faith President Bush's agenda to invade Iraq and build democracy there.  Democrats were firmly against.  Now with President Obama in the White House we have Democrats accepting on faith that the rich should pay a little more and that ObamaCare will improve health care.  Republicans don't believe a word of it.

The question for November 2012 is: when should you break with your group and leave the cultish atmosphere?  In 2008 Republicans were disgusted with the fallout of the Bush years and stayed home in the election, whereas Democrats were enthused with thoughts of Hope and Change.  What about in 2012?  We know that Republicans are a lot more enthusiastic about voting and that Democrats not so much.

The problem for the managers of Obama's reelection campaign is to keep enough people believing and enthusiastic to get over the finish line.  Thus, President Obama has a narrative that encourages his supporters to believe there is light at the end of the tunnel.  He goes on the Dave Letterman show and says that the debt is not a problem, short term, but it is a problem, medium and long-term.  We can solve the problem by asking the rich to pay a little more and reforming those programs that don't work any more.

The Wall Street Journal, of course is selling the opposite proposition, that you can't believe the president.  They run his words expressed on 60 Minutes with footnotes.

"When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history.1 And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90% of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren't paid for,2 as a consequence of tax cuts that weren't paid for,3 a prescription drug plan that was not paid for,4 and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.5

"Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10% of this increase in the deficit,6 and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.7"

The gist of the Journal's editorial, detailed in the footnotes, is that every word is a lie, including "and" and "the".  But the purpose of the president's narrative is not to persuade the Journal but to keep the wavering members of the Obama "cult" from leaving.

So the president pushes out a plausible narrative, and mixes it with attacks on his opponent to show that he is a man you wouldn't want to trust.  Also necessary is a fear campaign to remind people just how scary life would be outside the Obama cult.

Of course, Americans are not lemmings that will follow the leader over a cliff.  But every one of us, every day, makes the decision whether to stay with a group or leave it.  Some people leave at the first sign of trouble, and some people go all the way and commit suicide with with the leader in the Berlin bunker.

What will happen in 2012?  It is telling that the Republican convention was trying to reach out to independents, while the Democrats were trying to excite their base and remind them, with Michelle Obama, that Barack was a wonderful leader, and with Bill Clinton, that Republicans were cheats and liars.

But there is this.  The closer that politics gets to the kind of "cult" that Jeanette Pryor once belonged to, the more we should worry about America.

Capitalism: Which Type is Best?

Last week my email exchange with "Pete" ended on his challenge that we discuss the idea "Chris is a capitalist."

Presumably "Pete" thinks that this would put me in a box and expose my hypocrisies, because it would expose me as a heartless exponent of unregulated capitalism of the sort practiced by 19th century robber barons and 21st century Bain Capital.

But "Pete" set me to thinking.  What do we mean by capitalism?

In the 19th century, when the great critiques of capitalism were published, it seems that a new force had been let loose on the world, a new way of enslaving people to the will of the powerful.  Critics proposed that the unregulated capitalism of the textile revolution and the railway revolution should be broken up and subsumed under political power, by revolutionary change or by administrative subordination.  It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it turned out that their diagnosis was wrong: capitalism soon softened up, partly from legislation and partly from the capitalists' own discovery that they could make more money from contented employees than from slave laborers.  And the critics' prognosis was wrong.  The laborers didn't get immiserated and capitalism didn't turn, according to a law of history, into socialism.

The result is that we are all capitalists now.  The Marxists propose "state capitalism," in which the entire economy is absorbed into the political sector and run like a state bureaucracy.  There is still "capital" there is still "production" there are still "consumers."  But everything is decided by the political and administrative elite.  The problem is, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out in the 1920s, that under state capitalism you can't compute prices and therefore you cannot compute profit and therefore you cannot know whether you are increasing human prosperity or diminishing it.  Actually, you don't need to find out.  State capitalism always diminishes human prosperity.

Our liberal friends propose a mixed economy in which government takes a leading role in guiding the activities of private businesses.  Conservatives and libertarians have taken to using a pejorative for this kind of capitalism: we call it "crony capitalism."  Let us instead call it "state-directed capitalism."  In state-directed capitalism the politicians and the activists merely call all the big shots while leaving the routine stuff to the capitalists.  The problem is that politicians and experts aren't very good at calling the big shots.  They back stupid ideas like solar power and wind farms and they upset the credit markets with their various attempts at easy money.  At any rate state-directed capitalism yields government-sponsored or subsidized businesses like credit banks and wind farms that only make a profit because of government subsidies and regulation.  Health care and drug development are areas completely dominated by government subsidy and regulation although nominally in the private sector.  The result is sluggish growth and big messes like Solyndra and Fannie and Freddie.

Conservatives believe in a full-on kind of capitalism.  Let us call it "Bain capitalism" after Bill Bain and Bain Capital and Mitt Romney.  You might also call it "creative destruction capitalism."  This approach owns that capitalism is inevitably a process that Joseph Schumpeter described in the 1940s as creative destruction.  We can think of it with a life-cycle metaphor.  Businesses are always being born as some young fellow comes up with a new idea and mortgages his home to start a business.  Many businesses fail in the start-up phase, but some graduate into the growth phase.  Think of Facebook in the years up to its IPO.  Think of Amazon in the late 1990s.  Companies that survive the growth phase get into the mature phase.  Think of Microsoft right now.  Then, of course, mature companies start to age and things start to go wrong.  Think of the unionized auto industry.

Under Bain capitalism the idea is to forget about the political sector calling the big shots and trying to second-guess businessmen and the future and just let the businessmen get on with it.  Let's make it easier to start a business.  Let's make it easier for growing businesses to get access to capital.  Let's make sure that mature businesses cannot game the system with their wealth and political influence to squeeze out challengers.  Let's not try to keep failing businesses in business to "save jobs."  Let's connect the ageing businesses with the Bain Capitals of the world, try to fix them, and if not, liquidate and distribute their assets to others.

For over 150 years "Bain capitalism" has been judged as heartless, for it treats workers not as human beings but as just another resource.  We conservatives and libertarians beg to differ.

We believe that the first two capitalisms, "state capitalism" and "state-directed capitalism," while advertising themselves as necessary responses to the inhumanity of capitalism, actually make things worse.  State capitalism, as practiced by Stalin and Hitler and the Castro brothers, needs no indictment.  It was, perhaps, the most inhumane way of organizing the economy ever implemented.  But state-directed capitalism is not much better.  Whatever its advertisement, state-directed capitalism is inefficient and cruel.  It privileges the agenda of politically powerful interests, and it is very slow to recognize and correct its errors and mistakes.  We have only to look at the mistakes of the political establishment in its support of "affordable housing" and the granting of mortgage credit to people that couldn't service their mortgages.  The whole thing ended up in the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression of the 1930s and untold misery for millions that have lost their homes and their jobs.  Green energy is another scandal, a vast hinterland of political favors and subsidies, based on very incomplete science about climate change.  It will end it tears and trillions in worthless investments.

Juergen Habermas understands modern society as divided between the systems sector and the lifeworld. The systems sector includes business and government and steering media like money and power.  We could say we regret the systematization of everything but it's a bit late for that, so we are left with the need to control the power of the systems on the principle of the limitation of all power, government power and market power.  We need to remember always that the core of lived human experience is still the "lifeworld," the face-to-face experience of communication between humans using language.

Conservatives have addressed this social dichotomy ever since Edmund Burke in the 18th century.  We want to protect and to grow and strengthen the lifeworld in associations of the "little platoons," "civil society," or the "mediating structures" between the megastructures, the systems, of business and government.  It is civil society and voluntary associations, we believe, that best addresses the basic problem of the modern age, people like steelworker Joe Soptic being thrown out of work in a business failure "through no fault of their own."

We conservatives believe that everyone should belong to familial, church, fraternal, or mutual-aid associations that are separate from the businesses we work in.  Businesses come and go, mechanical contraptions, and we should stop trying to turn them into social welfare organizations.  We should look to lifeworld associations to provide security and solidarity and human caring.

We should recognize that modern society is irretrievably divided into the systems world and the lifeworld and we can't go back.  Systems are systems and we can't make them into the lifeworld.  On the other hand the lifeworld sector means face-to-face communication.  If it isn't face-to-face, it isn't lifeworld; it is systems world.

And therein lies our basic argument with our liberal friends.  Every time you chaps propose a new government program you are shrinking the lifeworld and beefing up the systems world.  Systems world is the world of instrumental reason, and instrumental reason is all about domination, of nature and other humans.  This has been going on for 150 years, and surely it is time to realize that it is time to try something different and stop creating new bureaucratic monsters.

That's why this conservative believes in "Bain capitalism."  Don't look for compassion and caring in the systems world.  Make the systems honest, and make them fair.  But compassion and caring can only exist in the lifeworld of face-to-face communication and consensus.

It is, as the philosophers say, a category error to imagine that compassion and caring can be grown in the mechanical world of systems and steering media.

An Answer to the Liberal Narrative

We humans are social animals.  More than that, we are story-telling animals.  We tell ourselves stories about how the world came to be, how it works, and how it will be in the future.

In recent years our postmodern friends have told us that "narratives" are in fact apologies for power; they are stories put about by the ruling class to make their rule seem soft and cuddly.  You could say that a narrative is the velvet glove hiding the mailed fist of power.

Here's a liberal narrative, that I received today from a liberal I shall call "Pete."  I suspect that he read my screed on the Chicago teachers' strike.  Here's what he writes (the paragraphs are mine):

You look like such a nice guy. It makes me sad that you have become a public debater who always argues one side even though you know the other side has compelling arguments as well.

I was born in 1946 in Southern California. My pals and I knew there was such a thing as a millionaire but few names came to mind; Rockefeller, J. Paul Getty, Carnegie - that was about it. A lot of people had enough money to more than get by, they had enough for ball games, the fair, movies and summer vacations or trips to the beach.

No one asked for or demanded an outrageous salary because after the first $200,000 or after the first $400,000 the government took it all. The 91% tax wasn’t a tool to redistribute wealth, it was a tool to prevent individuals from earning million or multi million dollar salaries. The result was that everyone had more. Because upper management costs were low , more money went to capital investment, employees made more and everyone profited. From the 1940’s to the mid 1960’s the tax rate remained at 91% with a Republican President and a Democratic President and there was a healthy distribution of wealth. Movie stars didn’t ask for millions, nor did studio execs, producers etc and it didn’t cost $25 to see a movie. Athletes did ask for 20 million, managers weren’t paid millions etc and it was cheap to see a game.

This list goes on endlessly and every time someone demands and receives a disproportionate share of the money everyone else has to pay. The old networks can’t afford to show games. They go to cable where we pay for ESPN. The money goes from our pockets to ESPN to the Franchise and to the player. There’s an unbalance sheet, money keeps moving in one direction. The CEO of United Health is paid $36,000,000 a year. United Health doesn’t pay her salary they don’t have any money. We pay her, money out of our pocket, money into hers.

The explosive growth in salaries happened during Reagans terms in office. Rates were slashed controls were lifted and it was a fight to see who could be the highest paid exec, movie star, athlete, CEO etc. That was the beginning of class warfare in America. Not a shot was fired. No one showed up for the skins. That was the beginning of the end of the middle class in America. Who’s going to be the first trillionaire? Time magazines Woman of the Year.

There will be massive demonstrations, civil disobedience etc because the story is getting out. What’s going to happen is that tax on earnings over $5,000,000 will be again taxed in the 90% range, and even more draconian the Estate Tax will go through the roof. In making the justification case you are acting the Pied Piper and little good will come from that. What I don’t understand is why. Everyone doesn’t have good intentions maybe that’s the best answer.

Let's think about the answer to this narrative.  It's the answer, I suppose, that Mitt Romney dare not make.

• Yes, the immediate postwar period was a halcyon period in its way.  Except for Jim Crow in the South.  But it is also true that the economy was a kind of racket, run by big government, big corporations, and big unions.  In other words, if you were a little guy, you'd better keep out of the  way of the big bruisers.  As for the high tax rates, I recall that Ronald Reagan, a highly-paid Hollywood star just stopped working rather than pay the high taxes.  And as for the good jobs at good wages?  Let's not forget Michael Barone's comment:
  
  As it happens, I grew up in Detroit and for a time lived next door to factory workers. And I know something that has eluded the liberal nostalgiacs. Which is that people hated those jobs.
• There's a good argument to make that the "good jobs at good wages" era ended in the stagflation of the Carter era.  So Reagan didn't break a healthy system but tried to fix a broken one.  At any rate, according to the capitalist narrative, capitalism is "creative destruction."  Let us be clear what this means.  It means that the world is going to change, as old ways get demolished and get replaced by new ways.  Capitalism makes the offer that, if you submit to "creative destruction," then we will all prosper faster.  The liberal narrative about good jobs at good wages doesn't tell us what happens when things go wrong, when some brilliant government program or investment starts losing money year after year.  E.g., has the GM bailout really solved anything, or just kicked the ball down the road?  What do you do about Medicare and its $40 trillion unfunded liability?
  
  Thus the conservative narrative about the Reagan years is that the extraordinary profits came from extraordinary opportunities thrown up by the moribund economy at the end of the "good jobs at good wages" years.
• The question is: what comes next?  My emailer "Pete" looks to riots in the streets as people rise up against folks like the CEO of United Health that makes $36,000,000 a year. (But do you realize, Pete, that insurance companies are a peculiar product of the current crony capitalist health industry where we the people get to run around paying for our health care with the equivalent of someone else's credit card?)
  
  Frankly, I do expect riots in the streets.  The educated elite ruling class has promised benefits to its supporters that cannot possibly be paid.  Being expert politicians, they will probably succeed in creating scapegoats like Big Oil and Big Insurance.  No doubt, like the coal miners in Zola's Germinal, the rioters will burn down, in their rage, the very thing that provides them with work and life.

And then we have to figure out how to rebuild America out of the ruins.  There will be, of course, extraordinary profits to be made in the creative period immediately after the wholesale destruction.

Obama on Debt: I Don't Recall

When David Letterman was interviewing President Obama a couple of days ago, he asked him about the debt clock at the Republican National Convention.  "Do you remember what that number was?  Was it $10 trillion," asked Dave?

Replied the president: "I don't remember what the number was precisely."

Mr. President.  Do you mean to say that you don't know that the national debt is north of $16 trillion?

President Obama went on to say that the debt is a problem long-term and medium-term.  But that the only way to we have found to deal with it effectively is with a balanced approach, cutting some spending, making programs work, and for folks like him and Letterman to "do a little more."

Actually, Mr. President, the best results on budget balancing came from Finland's efforts in the 1990s which included spending cuts and tax cuts.  You could call it an overbalanced budget program.

The reason why it worked well is that all government spending is a weight on the nation's economy.  All of it.  And all of the government's taxing is a weight on the nation's economy.  So the more you take the weights of taxing and spending off the economy, the faster it will bounce back.

And let's not forget government regulation.  That's another weight.

So the best policy moving forward is to reduce government spending and reduce government taxes as much as you can without provoking riots in the street.

Now the president also wants his balanced program to avoid placing the whole burden on the backs of the middle class.

Sorry about that, Mr. President.  But the overwhelming majority of government spending is shoveled out to the middle class.  In Medicare.  In Social Security.  In education.  Then there's welfare, but most of that money goes to pay for middle-class government workers.

There is, of course, plenty of crony capitalism out there, billions and billions of it. Let's cut it.  Let's cut all of it. But the middle-class spending programs amount to trillions and trillions.  Whatever politicians like you say, the major cuts will fall on the backs of the middle class.  And if we don't do it now it will be worse in the future.  Think Greece.  Think Argentina.

But there's another problem.  Maybe it's even bigger than the government debt problem.  It is the worker problem, according to Nick Schulz.  Younger workers just don't have the basic skills to work.  So what is the problem, apart from "finding people that can pass the drug test?"

In the Manpower Group's 2012 Talent Shortage Survey, nearly 20% of employers cited a lack of soft skills as a key reason they couldn't hire needed employees. "Interpersonal skills and enthusiasm/motivation" were among the most commonly identified soft skills that employers found lacking.

Yes.  Apart from the problem of finding people with "an elementary command of the English language" there is the problem that "'professionalism' or 'work ethic' is the top 'applied' skill that younger workers lack."

What about that problem, Mr. President?  And what would the attitude of the striking Chicago teachers be doing to solve that one?

The two great hits against the modern era are its ruthless discipline: the ruthless factory and workplace discipline and the ruthless mechanism of the government bureaucracy.  But the question is, what happens when the government lacks the discipline to keep its accounts and its debt in order?  And what happens when the rising generation lacks the discipline to keep a job?

What's your take on that, Mr. President?  Do you remember?

When is a Gaffe not a Gaffe?

A political gaffe, Michael Kinsley wrote years ago, is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

Well maybe, but I suspect that we can narrow it down a little.  A gaffe in the good old USA is when a Republican says something that liberals have forbidden us to say.

That explains the Romney Libya gaffe.  You are not allowed to criticize the liberal foreign policy of appeasement.  That makes you a warmonger, someone that shoots first and aims later.

It also explains the Romney 47 percent gaffe.  You are not allowed to express the truth that liberal politics comes down to giving people free stuff, from Julia to Wall Street, and that, sensibly enough, people that want free stuff tend to vote for the Free Stuff Party.

It is impossible for President Obama to utter a gaffe, because nothing he says will outrage liberals.  Conservatives were outraged by the president's "bitter clinger" remark, but it didn't count as a gaffe because the mainstream media didn't all line up to highlight it.  You can tell when a gaffe has occurred because Rush Limbaugh will be able to set up an audio tape of about seven mainstream media newsreaders saying almost exactly the same thing, almost as if they were reading Democratic talking points.

The reason that our liberal friends think that the 47 percent remark is a notable gaffe is summed up in the headline for New York's Jonathan Chait: "The Real Romney Captured on Tape Turns Out to Be a Sneering Plutocrat."  Well, Mr. Chait, I listened to the tape and what I heard was a results-oriented businessman discussing the campaign dynamics.  There wasn't much use in the Romney campaign targeting the 47 percent that don't pay income tax with a promise to reduce income tax rates.  That's what he said.

America's real sneering problem begins with the word "plutocrat."  If you check the Oxford English Dictionary you will see that the first use of "plutocracy" dated 1843 and the first use of "plutocrat" is dated 1850.  We know what that is all about.  It is about the Napoleonic post-war baby boom starting to flex its oratorical muscles.  And the word has been used as a pejorative, a term of abuse, ever since.  In particular it is used by intellectuals to sneer at businessmen.  The pejorative use stems from the double meaning of "plutocrat."  It means rule of the wealthy, but also rule of the underworld, because Pluto was the god of the underworld.

Actually, businessmen tend not to sneer at the workers or the poor.  They tend more to shake their heads in perplexity.  That's what the bourgeois owners of the coal mines in Zola's Germinal did when the miners went on strike.  Businessmen also get ticked off when the workers occupy their factories and start breaking stuff.  But I don't think they sneer at the workers.

Longshoreman Eric Hoffer wrote his piece about sneering, so we might as well quote him, since he backs up my point.

[Y]ou are reminded of what British and French colonialists were saying about the natives... "Wait until you see what a mess these savages will make of things."

We know that rule by intellectuals... unavoidably approaches a colonial regime.

We now realize that government by persuasion has been an invention of the traders rather than of the educated. The trader is usually more interested in the substance of power than its appearance. The intellectual wants not only to possess power but to seem powerful.

It is well to remember that all through history the masses have found the intellectual a most formidable taskmaster.

A ruling intelligentsia... treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.

The truth is, as Candidate Obama told his fundraiser in San Francisco, the mass of people are a bit of a problem for liberals.  They cling to their guns and God in their little towns where the jobs left 20 years ago.  In other words, Obama thinks of the American people exactly the terms developed above by Eric Hoffer 40 years ago.

Back to Mary Douglas and her Purity and Danger.  We all develop a system that explains how the world works and how to live successfully in the world.  A gaffe is something that sits crosswise to our cherished system, and therefore threatens it.  The gaffe is therefore experienced as pollution and the party that dared to utter it has to be removed.

Of course if the offending gaffe-meister persist in his heresy, his pollution of the purity of the system, then who knows where it may end.  It may end in the end of the current ruling class and their system.

But that's another story.