Category Archives: Politics

Is America Moving Right?

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If you are conservative in America, you have grown used to the fact that the conservative commentariat is more concerned with staying in good with the Left than making the conservative case on behalf of their supporters. They are endlessly lecturing the Right about their tone and their tactics. If some “unauthorized” right-wingers, like talk show hosts or bloggers, comes up with some way to tweak the Left, Conservative Inc. starts lecturing everyone about the need for good behavior.

When the base complains about all this fraternizing with the enemy, guys like Jonah Goldberg claim that the job of the conservatives like himself is to sell ideas, win the argument. That means engaging the Left anywhere and everywhere using facts and reason to change minds. Further, they say that to do this they have to keep the debate civil and make sure they are on good terms with the other side. After all, we’re all on the same team. It’s just a difference of opinion.

The counter to that is that by going on these shows and engaging Lefty on his terms, they are accepting the premises of the Left. Once you accept the premise the argument is already lost. What’s left is a negotiated surrender. For example, by accepting the premise that racism is immoral, so-called conservatives end up having to sign off on every Progressive social project, for fear of being called racist. If they reject that premise, they don’t get invited to cable chat shows, so they roll over and play dead for Lefty.

Anyway, this story is getting a lot of attention on all sides. The Libertarians think it means their winning, but they have been expecting the “libertarian moment” for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. On the other hand, conservatives wonder why they are not winning anything, despite the fact the mood is swinging their way. Of course, the Left fears they are not winning enough. They have to work harder to defeat the Right. Again, the premise of the study is suspect, but it is a useful point.

Anyway, Kevin Williamson has picked up on it and written a column about the difference between winning the argument and winning elections. He also notes how support for the GOP at the national level has waned a bit as local support has grown a bit. Again, he assumes the premise is correct. Like everyone else on the right waving around this study, he really wants it to be true. More important, they want to think they are the ones responsible for altering public opinion by making those clever arguments to Lefty.

Again, the study and the chattering about it is nonsense, but it reveals a truth about the political system in modern America. It gets back to the start of this post. The Left runs everything and the Right works mostly as a brake to slow the process here and there, but never stop anything. For that to work, the Right has to be willing to play the role in the media. That’s why they are always worried about not upsetting the Left. Their job is to police the right and make sure no one tries to challenge the system.

Now, one thing about that study which could be useful is this. The demographic changes happening in the country could be causing a change among white voters. In other words, the study is picking up a shift in white attitudes. That has nothing to do with the chattering classes, at least not directly, but it will have an impact on them at some point. If the white population is shifting politically, it means the financial system of Conservative Inc is in for a major disruption, but that’s a topic for another day.

The Price Of Gesture

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The American Left is not longer an ideological movement with a practical political platform and a list of demands. Instead, it has become a secular religion, that engages in ritual and gesture to signal piety to those within the movement. To outsiders, these gestures often seem weird or dangerous, but to insiders they are the coin of the realm. The right gesture can lead to a rise in the movement, while the wrong gesture can spell doom.

Gesture politics, however, is not without its costs. It is one thing to look down your nose at those downscale whites voting Republican and shopping at WalMart. It is quite another to vote in people who seek to act on the rhetoric. White liberals voted for Obama and the Democrats because they hated the people who supported George Bush. They had no other reason to support a guy unprepared for even minor office, much less president.

They did it because it felt good. When Obama was inaugurated, Progressive around the country held parties as if he was the savior and the rapture was upon us. It’s not that they thought he was Jesus or that he had supernatural power. They certainly acted like it, because that signaled their devotion. In a way, Progressivism is a meta-religion, in that it has all the rituals and spiritualism of a conventional religion, without the supernatural core, like a deity or a pantheon of deities. It’s very esoteric and mystical.

But, all that gesturing comes with a price when it results in public policy. ObamaCare was never a thought out policy. What passed was nothing like he ran on as a candidate. His proposal was a gesture to show his virtue. The final product was a collection of give aways to Democratic constituencies. The result is wrecking ball unleashed on an already fragile health care system. The cost for that is now coming due.

But people with no pre-existing conditions like Vinson, a 60-year-old retired teacher, and Waschura, a 52-year-old self-employed engineer, are making up the difference.

“I was laughing at Boehner — until the mail came today,”

Waschura said, referring to House Speaker John Boehner, who is leading the Republican charge to defund Obamacare.

“I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy.”

Both Vinson and Waschura have adjusted gross incomes greater than four times the federal poverty level — the cutoff for a tax credit. And while both said they anticipated their rates would go up, they didn’t realize they would rise so much.

“Of course, I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the

one who was going to pay for it personally.”

Amazingly, whole generations of Americans have been raised to think insurance is this magic well of money that is there for you when you don’t feel like spending your money on stuff like health care. Of course everyone should have access to this magical resource. It would be unfair to do otherwise. The Left really thought the only reason everyone did not have insurance was that the dastardly insurance companies were withholding it.

One of the strangest aspects of health care debates is that no one can comes to terms with the fact that all goods and services are rationed. There are no exceptions. They are either rationed by price, as in a market, or they are rationed by a monopoly of supply, usually a state monopoly. In the former, charity can mitigate the realities of the market place. This was common until it was outlawed. In the latter, there is no mitigation and the result is always pretty dreadful. Those are the choices for health care.

The Trouble With Conservatives

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John Fund is like one of those guys in a large organization that people know, but they don;’t know what he does. He’s in the halls, in the lunchroom, he turns up at meetings, but he never says or does anything anyone notices. Most can’t remember his last name. He’s just “John” or that guy with the short tie. Fund writes fro the Wall Street Journal and National Review. These are the two big platforms of Conservative Inc. Yet, you never hear anyone mention him or pass along a link to one of his posts.

Anyway, he has this post up at NRO. It is emblematic of what is defective with the conservative mind. They confuse policy, principles and politics. The current fight in Washington has very little to do with policy and nothing to do with principle. It is a partisan fight. Both parties fear they are losing their base. The best way to win over doubters is to pick a fight with the enemy. Rulers have been doing this since the dawn of time. Nothing brings the people together like a good short war with a hated enemy.

John Boehner is not a genius, but he figured out that he had to go along with the conservative members on this and take a stand. Otherwise they risked losing big in next year’s election. In the end, they may have to accept some minor cuts here or there, which will amount to nothing, but they will have rallied the base for the next fights. It’s nothing but theater to invigorate the base. The Democrats are doing the same thing. That’s the nature of tribal politics, so this will be the norm as we move to majority-minority status.

Maybe professional conservatives get this, but they are paid to sell what their donors want, so they prattle on about principles and political theory. Maybe that’s part of the whipping campaign to get the conservative base re-engaged. Maybe they are really as dumb as they seem. They seem to have developed an identity that depend on them appear to be above politics, which is a sure way to lose any political fight. The Left never makes this mistake. They are proud political warriors.

Anyway, the goal in political fight is to make the other guy look awful or silly so he will give you better terms. Forcing that Harry Reed to go on TV and defend this mess is good politics. Any time you can get Pelosi or Wassermann-Schultz on TV is a good day for Republicans. They will inevitably say something so nutty the public. Conservative Inc never seems to get this and instead demands immediate surrender so they can regroup for another day, when they have the policy just right.

The trouble is, the Republicans think these National Review types are the authentic voice of the base, so they are bullied into surrender, even when they have the politics right. It’s why the new politics, whatever comes next in the age of white identity, will first need to dispense with conservatives. They have been the handmaiden of the Left, helping them lead a war on the bourgeois white core of America. despite what they claim, they can never been an ally, as they have always been the enemy.

The Cult of Modern Economics

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Economics is not a STEM field, even though economists try hard to convince people it is a branch of mathematics. It is a social science decorated with mathematics. That gives it the veneer of respectability that a field like sociology lacks. That said, it often resembles a cult, in that it has developed an internal logic and language that makes perfect sense to those inside, but seems weird and nutty to those outside. For example, they treat Maynard Keynes in the same way Mormons treat Joseph Smith.

Anyway, the buzzing over the Fed’s sudden course change is a good example. This is a fairly typical example. It does not mention Keynes, but the the belief that creating credit money is always and everywhere a good thing is on display. The intellectual trap they have made for themselves is quite clear. If credit creation  adds to the GDP, then it is always good to create debt. There are no conditions under which it can be bad so expanding he money supply becomes a permanent part of the economy.

No one ever stops to wonder how this can be so? After all, if it were that easy, it should have worked all the other times it was tried. The answer, of course, is to say it is different this time. The “new normal” meme has become the get out of jail free card for every utopian dreamer. In the case of economics, any doubts about endless credit creation is waved away with the line, “things are different.” In other words, everyone is supposed to just take what economists say on faith.

Economics is the religion of modern times. In a previous age, rulers would have a holy man or a shaman to endorse his polices. Today, the economists provide this role. In Obama’s first term, Christine Romer was trucked into the White House to tell Obama and the country that the math” said a reckless spending spree was just what the economy wanted. That’s when the “multiplier effect” got loose in the conversation. Since then every minor economic shaman has some theory about a multiplier effect.

The nuttiness is on full display at this site. These guys have built out a series of interactive charts to show various “multipliers” and the impact of the current fads in the faith. For the record, they are making sport of the whole idea by showing the nonsense of it all. The fact is, government spending fueled by debt is great until you run out of people willing to lend you money. Then you become Detroit. Quantitative easing, which is just credit creation at below market rates is just a clever way to disguise it.

By pumping the extra money into assets like stocks, purchasing power is destroyed slowly, rather than in hyper inflation like you see with old fashioned money printing. At some point, the new money will leak into the real economy. Americans have been getting poorer slowly, but seem to be figuring out what has happened to them.Adjusting for inflation, the government share of the economy has more than tripled in the last forty years, per capita and adjusting for inflation.

 

 

In addition to the growth of the state at all levels, the amount of debt, both public and private, has exploded: At every stop along the way, modern economics has told our rulers that this was the right policy. The result is a massive, incompetent government systematically beggaring the public. More critically, it has allowed for the transfer of social capital to massive global companies and financial institutions. The price of cheap goods is living among strangers who you don’t dare trust as neighbors.

 

A World of No Secrets

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When it was revealed that the US government was reading everyone’s e-mails and tapping their calls, some not so well informed people recommended Tor as one way to keep the Feds out of your e-mail. Unsurprisingly, it turns out to be totally false. Tor was never a foolproof way to be anonymous on-line and it is entirely possible tor was always a honey pot. According to this Bloomberg story, not only was the network hacked by the Feds, it has some rather big security flaws.

The fact that the funding for the project comes from the Department of Defense should have been a clue, but people want to believe there is a way to outwit the collective might of the tech industry and the imperial government. of course, the rumors leaking from the FBI to the main stream media could be psyops. They can’t crack Tor, so they leak that they have, hoping people will stop using it. If Tor collapses, some other option will take its place, maybe created by the Feds. Such is life in the surveillance state.

The handful of Progressives who care about privacy say the solution is to pass a bunch of privacy laws like the Europeans. The Euros do have a more adversarial relationship with the Tech giants, because of their natural anti-Americanism. In reality, the American Left likes to talk about Europe, as it allows them to carry on like they are citizens of the world, rather than local bumpkins.The idea that the US government will limit himself is laughable, but no American thinks clearly about this stuff.

The Left has always been deranged about this stuff. They will trust the government to police itself, but they assume every corporation is out to get them. This in spite the fact their new ruler is expanding the surveillance state, while giving the store away to the tech giants. Of course, the American Left has never been consistent. Even so, 5,000 years of human history tell us that those with power will exercise it and eventually abuse it. It is why The Founders limited it and diffused it.

The fact is, the state can get away with just about anything, as long as the bulk of the people think they safe, fed and entertained. Further, if the abuse is not direct, as in agents of the state knocking down doors, people tend to rationalize it. The government spying on everyone is read by 90% of people as “the government is spying on them.” Lather on some talk about Muslims trying to blow up the world and most people will view opposition to the surveillance state as subversion.

Nothing happens until the money runs out. The America middle class is willing to sit on its hands doing as they are told as long as they have their Olive Garden and sportsball on the television. When that ends, then we will see things change. When there’s no more money to fund the welfare state, the welfare state ends. When there is no more money to borrow to fund the Imperial Army, the Empire ends. When there’s no more money for the America surveillance services, that will end.

The Next Phase For NYC

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Some people are wringing their hands over the prospect of a communist becoming the next mayor of New York City. It is not an unreasonable concern, as the city has gone from an ungovernable mess to a modern metropolis for the rich and powerful. New York has become quietly intolerant since the 1970’s and that intolerance has made the city a better place. The citizens, especially the rich ones, decided enough was enough and elected politicians willing to clean up the crime, urban blight and dysfunctional public sector.

It was not entirely by design. Rudy Giuliani won because he had a rep as a crime fighter and he had the right accent. He cleaned up the tourist areas and public parks. He also reformed the police department. Bloomberg won promising to leave things in place and he convinced liberal New Yorkers that it was OK to be tough on crime. He also showed how they could avert their gaze from the realities of gentrification, which is a fancy word fro chasing off the non-whites by jacking up rents.

Now it appears the radicals have figured out how to get back in power. Civilization is about not accepting a wide range of human behavior. Laws against violence, rape, sex acts and so forth are what allows civilization to flower. To be a liberal means not understanding this basic truth of the human condition, which seems to be the case with the next mayor. That probably means he will attempt to roll back that which has worked and replace it with polices that have failed everywhere they have been tried.

New York could go one of two ways. Right now it is following down the path of San Francisco. Economics and subtle racism have made San Fran a NAM free zone. The city is 5% black and 15% Hispanic. The rest is Asian and White. New York is getting less black and more white. Part of it is due to the economy of the city. Part of it is due to gentrification. Part is due to those police tactics to chase NAM males out of the city if they were inclined to dress like extras from a Jay-Z video.

How much of each is responsible for the transformation of the city is unknown, but the smart bet is the latter is a declining factor. That may be why the super-rich who run the city are not all that worried about having a communist mayor. The danger is gone so they can go back to indulging their weird political fantasies. It is reminiscent of the movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Once the tough guy does his job, he can be replaced by the soft guy who does not startle the ladies.

There’s also the fact that turning back the clock and restoring 1970’s era New York is not possible, given real estate prices. Radicals were able to turn the city into a sewer by unleashing non-white criminals onto the working class neighborhoods. The working class is gone and so are the criminals that displaced them. Today, the Bronx is full of hipsters and homosexuals paying outlandish rents. There’s no way to unleash non-white criminals on hipsterville, so the city is safe from that tactic.

Then there is the fact that New York is the hub of the global financial system. In the 60’s and 70’s, global finance occupied a much smaller part of western life, so it occupied a smaller part of the city. Today, the global financial elite consume most of the economic space and have enormous inflection over New York City. If the communist mayor becomes too much of a problem, the new robber barons will simply back his opponent and that will be the end of the communist mayor.

Still, it does suggest something about whites people, at least in this age. or perhaps it is something about whites in a democratic system. Two tough on crime and corruption mayors changed New York in ways no thought were possible. That should be the lesson of the last twenty years. instead, voters and the political operators feel compelled to return to ideas that were absolute failures. It’s like white people have some sort of suicide wish that causes them to vote for what is sure to fail.

Obama X

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In the Reagan years, liberals had a standard response to the fact Reagan was wildly popular. They said he was personally popular, but his policies were not popular. It was sort of true, in that some of his polices were unpopular, but his winning personality and the booming economy more than made up for it. Similarly, conservatives argued that the Clinton polices were not popular, but the affable Clinton was well liked. They had some evidence, but the Clinton polices were not all that different from the Bush polices.

The argument really fell apart in the Bush years. Initially, most white voters respected him as a decent guy. He was not charismatic, but efforts to demonize him never got very far because he was seen as decent and honestly, if not terribly bright. He won two elections largely because the public viewed him as the least bad option. Put another way, his polices were not all that popular and his personality was not ideal, but he was less offensive to middle-class white people than Gore or Kerry.

In contrast, we may actually be seeing an example of a president riding personal popularity in the face of his unpopular polices. There’s little doubt he won in 2008 because of the magic negro stuff. He was the living validation of everything the Baby Boomers believed about race and culture. Huge increases in the vote from black women, liberal whites and upper-middle class whites carried him to victory, even though his platform was ill-defined and not particularly interesting. The voters just wanted to like him.

The 2010 election and the continuing hatred of his signature achievement underscores this fact. The phenomenon is in full bloom with Syria. Obama is in the mid-to-low-40’s according to Gallup, yet his Syria policy has 27% support. Part of it can be attributed to the poor handling of the issue. That said, no amount of salesmanship is going to make another war popular. The best he could have done is match his own approval rate by rallying his party, but even they can’t get on-board with a war with Syria.

At the end of the Bush years, we saw what happened when the majority party used up all of its good will with the public. The 2006 election wiped out the GOP. We saw what happened when the president used up all of his good will. Bush fell into the low-30’s at one point. Obama is at 42% right now and this fiasco is not helping him. It will be interesting to see if his coalition starts to unwind as we saw with Bush. The Obama coalition may very well be more fragile, even temporary, but that may not be clear until the next election.

This piece from the NYTimes lays it out well. Personal validation has a short shelf life in politics. Eventually the practical overtakes it in importance. A big chunk of the Obama coalition is on board solely because it feels good. Of course, blacks support him on racial grounds, but they expect something in return. If loving Obama no longer feels good for liberal whites and blacks feel like they are getting shorted, Obama and the Democrats will have a very bad election in 2014. His personality may not be enough.

Of course, the one thing black politicians have often used when in trouble is the race card. Kurt Schmoke was the first Obama. He was a clean and articulate guy who came out of elite colleges and promised to be a new type of black politician. That is, black on the inside and white liberal on the inside. When that formula stopped working, he started dressing like Nelson Mandela and talking like Malcolm X. Perhaps Obama will find some way to play the race card before the 2014 election. Maybe he’s going to be Obama X.

How Does He Take A Punch?

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In politics, being lucky is the critical difference between being John Kerry and Barak Obama. Kerry, for all his faults, is an able politician. You don’t get to be senator by not having some political skills. He played the game carefully and made sure to take care of all the right people. Obama, on the other hand, is not a great politician, but he is a very lucky one. He bumped into the right people who helped him move up the ladder and he had the right opponents. That’s why he’s president and Kerry is not.

There’s another angle to this. Some politicians make up for bad luck or bad timing by being plucky and resilient. They figure out how to take a punch and keep standing. Bill Clinton is a classic example of the political survivor. Scandals that would have landed most pols in prison never slowed him down. Clinton could take a punch. We don’t know if Obama can take a punch. He’s been so carefully protected, no one knows if he has a chin. Even at this point in his tenure, we don’t know if the man can take a punch.

It looks like we will find out. The Left has decided to break ranks and abandon him over this Syria business. Grayson is a nut and probably should be in a mental ward, but he is a bellwether of sorts. If he is breaking ranks, that means the fever swamp is losing faith in their man over this. Then there is the international scene where Obama is getting embarrassed by Putin. There’s now a viscous cycle at work. As domestic support flags, international support flags, which drives down domestic support.

Obama is headed for an embarrassing defeat unless the GOP saves him, which is always a possibility. They think it sells with their voters to be on the warmongering side of every issues, so to them this looks like a good way to score points. That could be bad for Obama. The other choice is to cowboy up and go it alone, but that is not his style. Plus he does not seem like he is all that excited by the venture. Either way, he is going to have to win a few fights against some of his own people to get his way on this.

No matter how this plays out, Obama is going to take a hit politically. The question is how does he respond. Bush just put his head down and ran forward. Clinton found some low hanging fruit he could grab to change the subject. That’s what veteran pols do when they have been through some tough times. They develop a way to handle a loss. That’s why the best politicians usually have a loss early in their career. Obama has lived a charmed life up to this point. Now we find out if has that something extra to bounce back from a defeat or if he makes an early transition to lame duck status.

Why The GOP Must Die

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For all of my adult life, the GOP has been called the home of the Right. If you are a conservative, however you wish to define it, you are supposed to support the Republicans. Even when the Republican option is is a useless squish like Mitt Romney or a beady-eyed climber like Paul Ryan, the argument is they are better than whatever the Democrats are offering. Bill Buckley used to say he voted for the most right-wing electable candidate, which resulted in guys like George Bush running the party.

The disaster that was George Bush the Younger was justified on the grounds that he was better than Kerry or Gore. You can’t blame sensible white people for falling for this argument. Al Gore was having a nervous breakdown in the 2000 campaign. John Kerry is as dumb as a goldfish and surrounded by people who are not much better. That does not change the fact that the GOP works hand and glove with the Democrats to keep moving the political center further to the Left. It’s always heads they win tails we lose.

In Britain, this game worked for a long time with Tory voters, but it appears to be getting a test from UKIP. Those weirdos attacking the Tories from the right are not buying the old argument. They point out that the Tories are in a partnership with the Liberals, which makes them the enemy of the working man by definition. UKIP exists for one reason and that is to destroy the Tory Party. Their reasoning is a fake conservative party is worse than no conservative party. That’s true in the US as well. We need a new party.

Proof of this is right here. Here we have alleged “conservatives” looking for an excuse to undermine their own policy. We’re supposed to believe that these guys want to reduce the size, expense and scope of government. Yet every time they have the chance, they try to expand the size, expense and scope of government. If you are a small government type, this is why you should be sitting out elections. If you keep voting for these idiots, you are the idiot. The only orderly way forward is to destroy the GOP.

Syria: The Real Game

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This is a sensible take on the Syria mess. One thing that is always true about the so-called conventional wisdom in Washington is that it is always wrong. The reason is the people chattering away on TV or on-line don’t know anything and they don’t really need to know anything. There job is to be a circus of distractions. The most these people amount to are flunkies and coat holders for the political class. That’s how they end up on TV, where they can make good money says whatever nonsense they are told to say.

The writer of that linked post is also right about the point of the Obama foreign policy strategy. Obama does not care about this stuff. His people may care, because they are doing the bidding of other interests, but Team Obama is all about domestic politics, not foreign adventures. Using this situation to score some political points against the warmongers in the GOP is good domestic politics. It also gets him off the hook with Israel who would love to see the US invade another one of their adversaries.

Obama is not the hardest working guy and he is no political genius, but Progressives never lose sight of their purpose. They always look to cause trouble for their enemies, real and imagined, so they always have a strategy. They know his party will vote in lockstep with the administration. A handful of peaceniks will be allowed to vote against it for effect, but 90% will fall in line.  Given the comically bad leadership of the House GOP, the predictable result is Boner crying on TV as his party dissolves into a food fight over Syria.

In the Senate, the leadership on the GOP side is better, but you have warmongers like that senile old fool John McCain ruling the roost. There the administration will have an easier time of it. He can count on forty GOP votes, allowing the very liberal senators to vote against it. Given the number of vulnerable seats this year, this is a great result for the Democrats. They get their enemy warring with itself and team Obama gets to avoid the trap of war in Syria. When you have a purpose, you always have a plan.