Healthcare Horserace

The health care debate has been in sort of a holding pattern for a couple of weeks now: the Democrats don't know exactly what problem they're trying to solve. Some days they want cost reduction, on others they want to guarantee access to low-income Americans (frankly, I don't think they can make progress on either count but I'm just a skeptic). In any case, they know that they want to pass a health care bill of some kind to claim a political victory.

In the last couple of days, there have been a couple of developments. The Blue Dog (ie, centrist) Democrats in the House supposedly cut a deal with Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman to make the "public option" health care plan contingent on this or that and set the doctor reimbursement rates at this instead of that. In response, the liberals on the committee revolted. They are threatening to walk if they don't get the public option they want.

From the pov of preventing the further collectivization of medicine, this is a bad tactical development. Once we get to the point of being accountable for accomplishing something useful, the liberals don't have a plausible story to sell to the American people. More than anyone, they have to be able to book a political win for its own sake. They have to give the centrists whatever they want to get a bill through Congress, and they will. As I see it, this maneuver is a preemptive attempt to save face now in order vote for half a loaf later. Thus, I'd say we're in more danger of getting the camel's nose under the tent now than earlier in the week.

I Used To Be An Anglophile, pt II

When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in the United Kingdom, it tends to reduce moral imagination. Whenever I deny the existence of a right to health care to a Briton who asserts it, he replies, “So you think it is all right for people to be left to die in the street?” - Theodore Dalrymple (HT: The Corner)

This phenomenon is sadly familiar to anyone who has watched Prime Minister's Questions on C-Span for the last decade or so. No matter what the question, Tony and Gordon's answer is always, "Which nurses (or schools or police) are you going to cut?" In the end, the joke is on the taxpayer because the Tories (like the GOP over here) don't really intend to cut very much.

More than that, the moral imagination is tied to the practical imagination, and the UK is lacking in both.

Gettin' Paid

"Information wants to be free." This is something of a cliche among hackers and futurists.

Because information can be copied and propagated much faster than real things, intellectual property is never exactly the same thing as real property. And because the development of private property was such an important building block in the history of economic development, we tried to put extend the concept we developed for land, horses, and bushels of grain to software and naming rights. But this is an abstraction, and abstractions leak.

One result of this is a quasi-Marxist exploitation of capital in an anti-matter universe. Instead of the capitalist denying to the laborer the fruit of his work, the consumer gets the benefit of millions of dollars in various kinds of technological development without having to compensate the capital that funded it. The moral of this story isn't to feel sorry for the capitalists. Among other things, for the most part developers of intellectual property couldn't have developed it without access to other intellectual property which may not have been compsenated either.

It's just that the inability to monetize intellectual achievements tends to retard their growth. As society gets wealthier it gets tech-ier, and this problem gets bigger. It would have been nice to confront it in better economic circumstances. The current economic crisis has suffered from really bad timing, on many different levels.

The Heartfelt Heart

The course of human progress is not very predictable. But inasmuch as it can be predicted, I forsee the next several decades to be substantially about the unwinding of Cartesian mind-body dualism. Rod Dreher provides a useful data point here.

Variations On A Theme

From James Pethokoukis: corporate America is successfully paring down its cost structure, and in some cases making money doing it. For its next trick it needs to figure out how to make things people want to buy.

My Party, pt II

If we stipulate that, historically speaking, loyalties to political parties in America have largely been a matter of tribal allegiance (and I think we should), then what now? Certainly generations of votes from residents of Vermont and Illinois haven't stopped the current residents of those states from voting for the other team.

There's two explanations for this: the first is that party loyalties are still tribal, it's just that the members of the tribes are different. The other one is that whereas party loyalties have been tribal for most of America's history, they are ideological now. It may be some of both. This is an odd situation in American politics, but as Robinson points out that there is at least one clear antecedent for it: the founding era of the Republican party. Was the GOP the political expression of the abolition movement, or the successor the Whigs and Federalists in the North and Midwest? Well, both.

Ultimately the regional differences of that era weren't settled until the Civil War (and to some extent not even then). That might be a bad omen for us today. But you also could say that the unification of America into the truly United States was hard enough to come by, therefore not to be given up easily.

Technology Totem

"Technology Entrepreneurs Will Save Us." That's the title of this blog post by Rich Karlgaard. If I were the sort to rail against the messianic pretensions of free-market fundamentalists, this would worth a good laugh. But I'm not, so let's just say I'm not convinced of Rich's thesis from a simple pragmatic angle.

What is tech? Leaving all the gooey futuristic stuff aside, for thirty years or so it's largely consisted of advances in chips, software, and biotech. These are still decent fields for development, but the consumer has largely adjusted to them and is not looking to buy the latest of their wares.

If I had to guess, the next frontier with the potential of reenergizing the economy will be Spiritual technology. The thing is, if it's spiritual, is it really tech? And if it is, will people pay for it? I have something of a contrary streak, so I tend to answer no to entrepreneurial people but yes to religious people.

My Party

Returning to the issue of loyalty, then, I believe that our loyalties must start small and be based in loyalty to family and clan, friends, neighborhoods, co-workers and villages, and only through these mediating structures to larger-scale political groupings. Party politics seems to me to be a huge problem. - Boethius

Reading this brought to mind It's My Party, by Peter Robinson, and I skimmed it again for the first time in years. It's not necessarily a profound book, but it does have the important virtue of stating things which are obvious in retrospect, but wouldn't have crossed my mind otherwise. In any case, Robinson reminds us that party loyalties are largely tribal.

Furthermore, he argues this is actually a good thing. First of all, without them we would be in danger of fighting a civil war whenever the tribal disputes get too hot. Moreover, the fact that they are based on tribal loyalties means that they have some staying power. Therefore the existence of the opposition party is always a check on the tyranny of the government. In Robinson's book there is the example of the New Deal. The Democrats were dominant then like they are now. But, the banker/merchant class and Upper Midwest Protestants stayed loyal to the GOP for little other than tribal reasons. When Roosevelt overreached, for example his attempt to pack the Supreme Court in 1937, the existence of the Republican party still denied his ambitions even if it never politically defeated him.

In fact, if there were to be any cause of optimism today, it's because we've dodged that bullet for now. There was a period, say from December to March, where it looked like the GOP might die away altogether. Some say it still might. With Obama's recent missteps and the rise of the GOP in the polls, at least it's not imminent.

Getting Along

This, by Peter Lawler, has been the occasion of some back and forth between Daniel Larison and the PoMoCons. For me, I think Lawler is correct to argue that the coalition of the unwilling is really at bottom an attempt to repudiate man as an Aristotlean political animal.

The European elites are postpolitical fantasists. Ie, they want to move past citizenship and nationhood, on the assumption that if technocrats can maintain enough social control over the populace then disputes over honor and treasure can be cooled down before they escalate to war. "Midwestern isolationists", ie, the paleocons are prepolitical fantasists. If we all stay at home hoeing vegetables in the backyard, we'll never have any contoversy with foreigners worth going to war over.

Larison is right to note that anti-capitalism really doesn't enter into it, at least here.

Trust Me, I'll Keep Score

I'm with Megan McArdle on this one. From a free-market perspective we'd like to be able to rely on reputational concerns as a corrective against exploitation in the private health care insurance market (like we do for other kinds of insurance). But I don't think we can, at least not nearly as much. The insurance companies are the only ones who can accurately monitor the financial impact of a course of treatment, and the tempatation to leverage that is and will remain too great. This is a substantial part of the reason why health care economics will continue to be difficult for a while.

I have a hunch that cost reduction in health care won't happen until patients have lots of nasty conversations about money with doctors. Neither party really wants that, so here we are.

I'm Happy To Report.....

....that at least one person agrees with me. (HT: FirstThings)

Say Say Say

The French economist Jean-Baptiste Say formulated Say's Law, usually summarized as "supply creates its own demand", roughly the same time that Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations. That is, in a wide enough context, overproduction is impossible. The process of production creates demand among the producers, in fact exactly enough to buy the product according to an accounting identity.

According to John Kenneth Galbraith, Say's Law is an article of faith among economists, meaning that it is taken for granted by professional economists without much in the way of empirical evidence. This might actually be the case in a different way at the moment. Before we knew pretty well that other people wanted houses, cars, and computers and so on. Now, we have to create that don't exist and take it on faith that somebody will buy them.

More On Loyalty

In the fickle world of politics, I'm not willing to stop with understanding 'at the gut level'. - Boethius

First of all, there is no reason why we have to stop at the gut level to explain the loyalties of mainstream American conservatives. They can be made quite explicit. As I mentioned a few posts ago, they have loyalties to the Republican party on one end and Greater Red State America on the other. It's just that for most people who spend less time analyzing this sort of thing than I do, these loyalties are intuited rather than stated.

As far as the larger issue of why we are or should be loyal to the United States as opposed to Des Moines, for all of its defects it is America where we have our citizenship. Ironically enough the best explanation I've seen for this recently comes from the Tarnac9, a small group of French antiglobalization activists (or terrorists, whichever you prefer):

The moment has come to put the category of “citizenship”, the heredity of an urban modernity that doesn’t exist in anywhere, into discussion. In the metropolis, being a citizen means simply reentering in the biopolitical job of governmentability, seconding the “legality” of a State, of a Nation and of a Republic that doesn’t exist if not only as ganglion of the Empire’s organized repression. The singularity exceeds citizenship. Vindicating one’s own singularity against citizenship is the slogan that, for example, migrants write daily with their blood on the Mediterranean coasts, in the CPT in revolt, on the wall of steel that divides Tijuana from San Diego or on the membrane of flesh and cement that separates the Rom bidonvilles from the shamefully sparkling City Center. Citizenship has become the award for faithful allegiance to the imperial order. The singularity, as soon as it can, happily does without it. Only the singularity can destroy the walls, borders, membranes and limits constructed as the infrastructure of dominion by biopower. - Tarnac9 (HT: also ironically, FirstThings)

Ie, it is at the level of our citizenship that our nihilist adversaries seek to attack us. That makes sense when you think about it because the state is legitimately accountable to its citizens and its those who wish to divert American power to their own ends must defeat that bond of accountability.

Of course America is an odd beast in this respect because we are citizens of the United States but the states are still theoretically at least sovereign. In the interest of localism we can wish that the states had more real power at the expense of the federal government and in fact the GOP has made that part of its program. Sometimes the Republicans go the mattresses for this and other times they just pay lip service to it. But in either case the United States (both as a nation and a government) is the level where the American polity interacts with the rest of the world. And for the sake of its integrity we should be loyal to it.

The flip side to this, is where the government acts in ways that are not plausibly intended to represent the American polity as a whole, then there is no duty of loyalty. The various Farm Bills, housing assistance programs and so on may be good ideas in some sense but first and foremost they are redistribution schemes that grant or withhold favors to some subset of Americans, and for that reason no one owes any loyalty to them. It was the Iraq war that upset this particular apple cart for a lot of people. Because we had all gotten used to the modern Leviathan state as the battleground of the spoils system, we had lost the ability to appreciate circumstances where the debt of loyalty really does apply.

Going To The Mattresses

William Kristol and James Pethokoukis have items out suggesting that the Obama Administration is ready to take a combative turn as it pushes to get cap-and-trade and some kind of health care reform through Congress. Republicans and the right-wing blogosphere will be complaining soon about being bulldozed if they're not already. I don't care about it that much in the abstract: I think it's making an unnecessary fetish out of the sausage-making parts of lawmaking. Ultimately, the other team has the majorities. It's naive to think they won't make use of them.

But concretely speaking, it's another story. Whenever the President has tried to short-circuit the deliberative process on a big-ticket bill, it's never for a good cause. Recent examples of this are the Bush Administration's attempt at comprehensive immigration reform, Medicare Part D, and the Obama stimulus. War opponents tend to include the Iraq War vote as well, but think that one is a bad rap.

What makes the Obama bills uniquely bad is that their proponents can't explain in complete sentences what these bills are intended to accomplish and how they're supposed to do it. If this state of affairs continues, and the liberal base continues to insist that these bills get pushed through (as Kristol and Pethokoukis imply), we are looking at the seeds of 1994 all over again: no bills and no majorities.

Sympathy For The Devil

I agree that many of the Al Qaeda folks would like to impose Islamic culture, with the religion that comes with it. But part of their rhetoric involves pointing out the compromised nature of Islam in places like Saudi Arabia, where U.S. interests have corrupted the ruling elites (in [Osama] Bin Laden's eyes). But again, I doubt that it is fully 'U.S. interests' being served there, rather than the interests of the financial elite whose bases of operation are, unsurprisingly, New York and Washington. -- Boethius

There's a lot to respond to in Boethius' latest, but I wanted to note this train of thought tends to legitimize the likes of Osama as the legitimate leadership of that area of the world. Not that we should reject it out of hand necessarily but it is problematic. It's especially topical in Bin Laden's case because he is a non-state actor who lacks control over the machinery of a state, in contrast to Saddam, eg.

And not that it makes much difference, but Bid Laden's gripes against the US-Saudi relationship are pretty weak anyway. He doesn't like the fact that Saudi Arabia has relied on US petroleum engineers to help drill its oil and that the US stationed soldiers on the Arabian peninsula. But the US pays fair market value to everybody it trades with, and there wouldn't have been any US soldiers in Saudi Arabia if Saddam Hussein didn't invade Kuwait, with the threat to invade Saudi Arabia shortly thereafter.

Just like in relations between neighbors, in relations between nations we want to mind our own business and avoid giving offense unnecessarily. That doesn't mean it's plausible to do it.

Rambling On About Loyalty

Koz writes:

"Elaborating on the particular loyalties of dissident conservatives, it's worth contrasting them to the mainstream Right. For the mainstream Right, there is a nexus of political loyalties that's fairly well understood at the gut level. The mainstream Right is connected on one end with the Republican political establishment, and on the other to Greater Red State America. This is in addition to the general patriotic loyalty to America in general."

In the fickle world of politics, I'm not willing to stop with understanding 'at the gut level'. In fact, this is precisely the critique that we curmudgeonly types level at liberals who parrot whatever Jon Stewart or Rachel Maddow or Barack Obama says, just because it feels right. We pride ourselves at welcoming ex-liberals 'mugged by reality', that is, having had to think through their inherited liberal opinions, even when they led in places more gut-wrenching than intuitive.

I used the examples of Boston and LA precisely because I don't feel that I have much in common with people in those places, other than the not inconsiderable fact that we belong to the same country (though I do wonder if you don't harbor some similar feelings as I do when you repeatedly say to the most populous state in the Union "Drop Dead."). To me, it is significant that Bin Laden probably is not planning terrorist attacks on Duluth or Mobile or Des Moines. His beef is not with 'red state America' or even 'blue state America', but very particularly with Washington and New York. And speaking of Bin Laden, I didn't use the words 'fear' or 'victim' in my original post. I agree that many of the Al Qaeda folks would like to impose Islamic culture, with the religion that comes with it. But part of their rhetoric involves pointing out the compromised nature of Islam in places like Saudi Arabia, where U.S. interests have corrupted the ruling elites (in [Osama] Bin Laden's eyes). But again, I doubt that it is fully 'U.S. interests' being served there, rather than the interests of the financial elite whose bases of operation are, unsurprisingly, New York and Washington.

At what point does loyalty demand that we issue honest criticism of our government? I would think that this would be a primary way for conservatives to express loyalty ("Government is The Problem!"), but I found this very difficult to do while Bush was Prez. Why is the critic's patriotism routinely questioned by the likes of O'Reilly? This guy rules criticism out before he even allows anybody to say anything. Why are people like that dominating conservative discussions? Frankly, I think that's totally un-American. We are supposed to be responsible citizens who debate our way through policy decisions and therefore safeguard the freedom of speech zealously. Or do we really?

It struck me today that we've made words like 'clan' and 'tribe' into bad words in the U.S. 'Family' is only barely hanging on. But these are where real loyalties begin, with real relationships. Part of the difficulty with the sort of patriotism that is demanded of us today is that it deliberately undermines any mediating structures between the individual and the massive State. Thus, not only is criticism difficult, but real action, which I stress is in the American tradition, is difficult. All associations have to be voluntary, and we all know how little promises to stick together mean today.

Last question: At what point are our government's depredations at a level where they surpass George III's? IMHO, we've probably passed that point.

I hope to post soon on Spiritualism and the pope's encyclical soon. I think that there is a lot of fruitful dialogue to come in those areas!

Spitcraft

This is a subject near and dear to me, though sadly neglected on this blog. It is at least tangentially related to the subject of some email correspondence between Boethius and me some years back, something we christened Spiritualism, to be contrasted with philosophical materialism. It was a bit difficult to summarize the train of thought of the Spiritualists (abbreviated "Spits"), except to say that the epistemological and ontological foundation of an act of a person, combined with intent and experiencing the consequences, is at least as strong as the objective, "real" world.

In any case, I believe that we are at or near the end of the "Cartesian template" for human progress. This is a historical phenomenon that started, oh, 10 to 40 years ago, but in an indirect way it is very important to the current economic crisis. The process of development in technology continues, but the willingness of people to pay for its accomplishments has gone way down. Our economy will continue to struggle for at least as long as it appears that there are no good options for smart, energetic people to devote their time to.

This book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, has been the latest big thing on the alternative Right for a while. I haven't read it but I suspect that I would be sympathetic with its thesis. But I don't want to overstate the case that the ideas in it will serve as the foundation for economic revival. It may be that bourgeois America will escape its cubicles. If it does it will be for the sake of the workers' well-being. But that's only half the equation. There will also be a revolution on the consumer side as well, something that creates a sense of urgency. But the consumer is feeling poor, and will be wary of buying the latest brand of snake oil. The consumer has to go through a phase of social or spiritual development as well. Only then will he know what's worth spending money on.

Me to California: Drop Dead, pt IV

Here's an interesting indicator, first noted by the legendary economist Arthur Laffer: Renting a 26-foot U-Haul truck to go from Austin to San Francisco this July would cost you about $900. Renting the same truck to go from San Francisco to Austin? About $3,000. In the great balance of supply and demand, California has a large supply of people who are demanding to move to Texas. There's a reason for this. - Kevin Williamson in National Review

And All For One

There's a grab bag of things worth mentioning regarding Boethius' latest.

The first thing is that I am very little conflicted about loyalty to America, and in particular that it constitutes one polity. There are a lot of ways to think about this, but I look at it from in a very practical way. No matter what the difference in weather, food, or accents, when I fly from Chicago to Los Angeles it's still the same country. It's not only about the formalities of passport control, but for me at least it really does feel that way too. But in flying from Los Angeles to Guadalajara, you land in a different country. It's as simple as that.

Elaborating on the particular loyalties of dissident conservatives, it's worth contrasting them to the mainstream Right. For the mainstream Right, there is a nexus of political loyalties that's fairly well understood at the gut level. The mainstream Right is connected on one end with the Republican political establishment, and on the other to Greater Red State America. This is in addition to the general patriotic loyalty to America in general. This is important because it creates the possibility of understood premises in a conversation with a mainstream conservative. For the dissident conservatives, leaving aside any questions of loyalty to America in general, their secondary political positive loyalties are quite murky. Even if one of them claimed to be loyal to paleoconservatism or Crunchy Conservatism, the objects of such loyalty are too fragmented to count. Therefore there tends to be a hint of sophistry in their arguments: it's always a little too vague just who's interest they're arguing for.

The libertarians are an interesting case: to the extent they exist as part of the Right at all, they function as dissident conservatives some of the time and mainstream conservatives the rest. Politically speaking I think their biggest issues have to do with organization, which come to think of it is sort of related to loyalty in their case.

About Bin Laden et al, I don't believe they fear being the victim of persecution by the state for the sake of religion. Instead they intend to be the religious persecutors themselves, through the state or whatever means of power they can use. We can hope, that the physical and cultural barriers between us and them mean that we can protect ourselves from them easier than some would have us believe. IMO that's an interesting, highly contingent judgment call. By contrast, the question of loyalty is this circumstance ought to be trivial.

Placing Loyalty

Koz writes, "one thing that turns me off from the dissident conservatives is their lack of manly loyalty. We've been made to understand ad nauseum that their aspirations are higher than George W Bush's approval rating or Mark Levin's book sales figures. Great, then what exactly are they supposed to be loyal to, if not that? Whatever it is, they haven't told us."

I am quite happy to agree on this point, and it is perhaps the principal weakness in thoroughgoing libertarianism. I suppose Lew Rockwell and Jeffrey Tucker would argue that a libertarian is free to be loyal to whatever he wishes and it is not their business to force their loyalty toward something else (mainly The State).

I've often argued that libertarianism is a bit like the Physics 101 problems sets in which we are allowed to posit a frictionless surface for the sake of learning about how acceleration works. This is very helpful either at the beginning of one's physics career, or at times, when a thought-experiment is needed to test some other highly complex set of variables. Libertarianism, in my opinion, should get more attention from the right, but in the end, policy decisions will have to deal with the real world, which includes relationships that libertarianism does not always take into account.

That said, I think that a principal problem with the Republican party is that the manly loyalty so yearned for by Koz (and myself) is assumed to be directed toward the Party and toward America. Now we should be loyal to our friends and to our homeland. But who are our friends, and what constitutes our homeland? I personally have always had difficulty on a gut level feeling like I'm somehow part of the same patria as Bostonians and Los Angelenos. As for the Republican party, well, I agree with them on _some_ issues, but actually fewer and fewer. Does manliness consist in simply being loyal for the sake of being loyal? Or are commitments born of some other considerations?

Thank you for the kind Indepedence Day wishes. I am most grateful to live in a country where I am free to practice my religion, under a Constitution that ranks among the great political documents of history. Let's hope it makes a comeback!

Update

After completing this post, I came upon this excellent article, comparing the libertarian views of Ayn Rand's The Atlas with the anarchist views of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. It reminded me of some things to clarify in what I posted last night. That I am more in sympathy with Tolkien than Rand explains much of my critique of libertarianism. When asked my political views, I normally respond 'classical liberal and subsidiarist; when that's not possible, I'm a monarchist'. "The Return of the King" is a necessity in Middle Earth because of the ravages of Sauron's forces and the lingering dangers unleashed by it. But when peace returns, political decision-making devolves to the lowest possible authority necessary--what I mean by 'subsidiarist', a term borrowed from the Catholic Church's philosophy of government, post-Vatican II.

Returning to the issue of loyalty, then, I believe that our loyalties must start small and be based in loyalty to family and clan, friends, neighborhoods, co-workers and villages, and only through these mediating structures to larger-scale political groupings. Party politics seems to me to be a huge problem. We see that Republicans are pondering throwing overboard their pro-life principles for the 'greater good' of...of...beating the Democrats? What about the loyalty shown by the religious right for the past thirty years?

Faced with the menace of communism, there was plausible reason to rally 'round the cause of national security, meaning allowing for an expansion of a larger-scale political decision-making scheme. I am not at all convinced that terrorism presents the same necessity; if anything Bin Laden, et al, hate not our freedoms, but the looming specter of total state domination to the exclusion of religious principles. I dare say were we more free, they might respect us more, not less. In fact, I don't find that we are all that free politically. If I want to change something in my own Chicago neighborhood, well, I have no real recourse but to try and placate the higher powers of Daley's cabal or maneuver around implacable federal laws. And all this may, and often is, easily defeated by persons willing to participate in the corruption that such large-scale power entails.

Returning to loyalty: why be loyal to one's neighborhood when the prospect of real spoils looms if we forsake the neighborhood and remove ourselves to the abstracted levels of City Hall? Mutatis mutandis, if we go for the real golden goose of federal tax moneys and power? What sort of persons will wind up in national politics we can predict based on this, and these sorts of persons are not normally going to be ones that will elicit my sympathy, much less loyalty.

Long Live the Male

"[F]or men in America, the only plausible ideal of conduct is the idea of the Gentleman. What else is there? The Rock Star? The Cowboy? Norman Mailer's White Negro? The Underground Man? Huck Finn?" -- James Burnham to Jeffrey Hart

Well, let's take the winding road today. This has been overtaken by events a little bit. But sometime last week, when Sarah Palin was governor of Alaska and it appeared that she would remain so for a while, Stacy McCain kicked the hornet's nest again. I won't dwell too much on homosexuality here, except to note that this is actually tangentially related to my complaints against the dissident conservatives, relating in particular to the modern male sex role.

It took a while for me to figure this out, but one thing that turns me off from the dissident conservatives is their lack of manly loyalty. We've been made to understand ad nauseum that their aspirations are higher than George W Bush's approval rating or Mark Levin's book sales figures. Great, then what exactly are they supposed to be loyal to, if not that? Whatever it is, they haven't told us.

Men without loyalties outside themselves are perceived to be weak, and men who are perceived to be weak are not respected by other men, in particular me. This is particularly topical right now because the current economic travails are subtly affecting our perceptions of sex roles in ways that might actually help the much-beleagured bourgeois American male.

For at least as long as I've been alive, there's been a certain empty boorishness inside the typical American male. Not that all of us are mindless jerks, but most of us wouldn't know how to be a genuine article gentleman even if we tried (this applies men of just about every race and ecnomic class, btw). In fact the very concept of gentleman has shifted to reflect this very fact. Instead of referring to a man who serves as a visible marker of civilization by virtue of his standards in dress, bearing, and manners, we now speak of a gentleman as a good-hearted mensch in his personal relations. I'm sure it's possible to make a bigger deal out of this than it really is, but it's there nonetheless.

With the current economic crisis however, the bourgeois American male is challenged to do things that he actually has a chance of being able to do, and that are worthy of accomplishment. Until very recently, it was possible for anyone for anyone with an ounce of energy or at least as much intelligence as average houseplant to earn his own keep. Given that was the most demonstrable accomplishment of the American male, no one was very impressed. Well, that's a bigger deal now than it used to be. And given the fundamental sector shift the economy is going through, it will likely be an ever bigger deal in the future.

Reihan recently wrote an interesting article about this, where he largely sees it the other way, going so far as to call the current economic crisis a "he-cession." I would be more sympathetic to his thesis if the future of economic growth was a simple battle of brains vs. brawn. But I don't think it is. In fact I think we crossed that particular bridge a long time ago. Instead, we need energetic perseverant visionary leadership toward creating things (and careers) that don't exist yet, the foundation of a new economy we don't understand all that well. And as much as I love the girls, that's not who I'll be putting my money on to do it. And from what I've seen of the dissident conservatives so far, I'm not betting on them either.

Finally, let's give best wishes to our friend Boethius on the occasion of the anniversary of American Independence, a foremost accomplishment of visionary perseverant males. It's one of his favorite days of the year, being the patriotic Roman-American that he is.

Take This Job and Shove It

The political world is buzzing over the resignation of Sarah Palin as governor of Alaska. I personally am not. Various pundits are suggesting that her national political career is over. That's probably so, but so what? Unlike most of the political establishment, she had a real life before she entered politics, and will have a real life to return to when her political aspirations are over. It's hard for me to see offhand what she gets in compensation that's worth enduring the cheapshots from David Letterman or Andrew Sullivan. To some extent we were lucky to have her for as long as we did.

Let's recall, the essential point of Palin's candidacy was bandwidth. That is, the Republican party is not defined by George W Bush, Congressional sex scandals, George Ryan, No Child Left Behind, or whatever else is left at its feet, fairly or otherwise. As Obama blunders and time passes this will less of an issue, and less justification to support Sarah Palin relative to Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, or whoever.