Libertarians

I’m trying to show how attractive classical liberalism can be once it is scoured of the conservative barnacles of the now irrelevant Cold War alliance and once it begins to take seriously (rather than just ignore) the powerful arguments of the best contemporary liberal thought. - Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson wants to believe that the association with the Right has corrupted American libertarianism. Unfortunately for him, he's exactly backwords on that point. The historical association with the Right is the only thing that keeps libertarianism even remotely legit. Without it, libertarianism in America amounts to, "Pleeeease let me smoke my dope in peace." It may be a decent argument even, but it impresses nobody.

And about engaging the best arguments contemporary liberal thought, that's like talking to the best cello player in Fresno.

American Islam

David Frum has a new post up about Mormonism, which strikes me as being essentially an American form of Islam, some of the strengths and vulnerabilities of the Islamic version of Islam. Theologically, both are founded on kooky precepts which nobody really believes. But both are sustained by as a means to support communities of their believers. Fortunately for Mormons, America has never been the site of Hobbsean war of all against all. Therefore the tribal violence of Mormons and against Mormons has gone away, leaving just good stuff, communitarianism, strong families, etc., to continue in its wake.

Btw, the apparent point of Frum's post is to rehabilitate the hypothetical Presidential candidacies of Mitt Romney and Jon Hunstman. I don't think that'll work. Eventually somebody has to take the theological kookiness of Mormonism seriously, and GOP base voters will if nobody else does.

Snobbery, pt II

What he said.

It may be obvious from the link but it's worth pointing about exactly why the Will Wilkinsons of the world will play second fiddle to the Sarah Palins if freedom in America has any future. Simply speaking there are by orders of magnitude more Palins that Wilkinsons so in any coalition containing them both, the Palins will be the lead dog.

It's a little less obvious (and counterintuitive to many) but the Palins are actually smarter for the same reasons. That is, because Will Wilkinson wants to impose top-down social control over their "reactionary" impulses, he is necessarily going to be on the wrong end of a Hayekian information gap, something that any libertarian ought to know.

The Message, pt II

A day of organizing is worth a week of blathering about "strategy," and an hour of fund-raising is worth far more than a month of navel-gazing op-ed columns pumped out by the punditocracy. - Robert Stacy McCain

I agree with (the other) McCain most of the time, and in fact with most of the post the quote is from. But as much as we might be disappointed with the conservative punditocracy over the last couple of months or years, we can't get by without them. Organizing, candidate recruitment and fundraising are all fairly substantial commitments in the lives of those who participate in them. What is it that we're shooting for that justifies all that energy? I don't think we can be successful in those areas until we get some decent answers.

Winning the Debate

Back in the day, conservatives used to console themselves that they were "winning the debate" over this issue or that. That is, even if we hadn't yet changed the laws to our liking, nobody with an intellectual credibility was willing to defend the liberal status quo with respect to rent control, Communism, or welfare. I remember being occasionally being frustrated upon hearing this, especially in the middle-to-late 90s, where I thought we'd done enough to be winning more than debates.

Now of course, conservative influence is at a low tide, so we should be grateful for small favors. So I guess we ought to be happy that even though in Realpolitik terms we've lost everything that matters, we are in fact winning the debate, for the first time in quite a while I might add.

Most of it has to do with the stimulus package. Recently Matthew Ygesias criticized Harvard economist Greg Mankiw for not being sufficiently condemnatory of Sen Jim DeMint's alternative to the Obama stimulus. From here, he conclude that Mankiw is not merely a reputable economist but also something of a Republican hack. In Jon Chait's mind, this is a "devastating critique."

At one level at least this is plainly ridiculous. Frankly I'd be interested to know what Mankiw thinks about DeMint's plan, but the zeroth order reason why Mankiw hasn't written anything about it is because the DeMint plan had no chance of becoming law and nobody took it that way. And Yglesias surely knows this because a couple of links earlier he criticizes Mankiw's own ideas as being politically implausible.

What's impressed me most about the recent debates is that the Right, largely but not completely represented by libertarian economists, has not only argued their corner well but also demonstrated much more emotional balance about the whole thing. Somehow liberals can't shake off their pissed-off malcontent personas even after they've won.

Cost of Snobbery

"Here I'm starting from the premise that American politics has been fitfully sorting itself into a meritocracy-versus-populism dynamic, with one party (the Democrats) dominated by the mass upper class and the other party (the GOP) representing the middle and working-class voters who resent this newish elite, for good reasons and for bad. The European model Reihan gestures at has succeeded - to date - by largely marginalizing the latter temper, with the result that the continent's right-populist types (your Le Pens and your Haiders) are simultaneously more extreme and more powerless than the equivalent figures in the United States. But conservative populism in the United States is way too potent to be marginalized in that fashion, I think...." - Ross Douthat

Ross writes an interesting post about how libertarians might fit in the big-picture American political dynamic as it evolves over the next decade or so. Leaving aside the libertarians for a moment, I disagree with Ross that right-populism in American cannot be marginalized. I for one think that's America's biggest political risk for the moment.

More than that though, we should wonder why the populism should currently be associated with the Right in America. Fifty years ago, it was associated with the Left (and politically speaking found its home with the Democrats). One one level, it makes more sense that way: modern economies, especially modern capitalist economies, are socially volatile to the point the people with the strong ties to the blood and soil might want help from the political establishment to protect them from being knocked around by incomprehensible forces bigger than they are. Nonetheless, it doesn't work that way, at least now. And the reason why is very illuminating.

Relatively speaking, the conservative base in America has strong families, which, besides being intrinsically valuable, are also protection during bad times. It's a very important but largely ignored reality that intrafamily economics are much more efficient than the general economy. The consequence of this is, with respect to being able to provide for themselves the conservative base has a broader imagination than typical liberals do. We get to slightly comic situation where the supposedly simple-minded Palins shoot their own food, whereas people with master's degrees in comparative literature are agitating for stimulus packages. It seems obvious to me, but the idea that not everybody can get a bailout is actually quite controversial.

Not Good News

We all know that the Obama stimulus package seems likely to pass at this point, and that's not good news. But what's at least as interesting is that how this reflects what the American people want, or will want. Check this out. A man in Elkhart Indiana asking a question to President Obama not only wants a bailout, he doesn't want to suffer the inconvenience of waiting in line to get it. It's quite an honor for the American taxpayer to be able to send his money to some guy he's never met, for nothing in return and at that person's convenience. It's nice work if you can get it.

This is an important transition point toward becoming a Euro-style social democracy. The political class wants to sever the the bounds of accountability imposed by people from flyover country. So it pushes out federal money so as to make everybody dependent on their largesse. From there, he who pays the piper calls the tune. But takes two to do this tango, and the power-happy pol has found his partner.

Life as We Know It

"The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good, and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same." - Screwtape, The Screwtape Letters

Hellish or not, this was essentially how life was lived for for most of humanity. I took a couple of courses in Roman history in college, and the professor was a big-deal scholar on the subject. On the first day of class he emphasized to us, that at the time of the Republic or the Empire, roughly 80% of the population worked as agricultural field labor, six days a week for at least ten hours a day. Therefore what conventional Roman history is taken to be "about" (Emporers, poets, generals, Senators, philosophers etc.) is our best guess of what we know or believe of the remaining 20%.

Anecdotes like this tend to evoke an aura like hearing about how Abe Lincoln walked x miles from his log cabin to school every morning, but I want to emphasize something else. Not so much how hard life was back in the day, but how it was defined in terms of things that have to be rationed, ie time and space.

What's different for us now is that is that life is much more capricious, and together with that that the "gooey" stuff matters so much more. Bill Gates is worth some number of billions, but his best friend when he was seven makes do with 90K/year. Michael Jordan won six NBA Championships but Karl Malone won none. And on and on. The reasons for this are never completely explicable, but we try. More importantly, we constantly evaluate the difference between success and failure, happiness and regret, in our own lives. But the essential factors, whatever we conclude they are, are not rationed.

If we spend an hour playing Tetris, the hour is gone. We can't use that hour again to write a letter. But a musician can express his passion or curiosity by writing a song. He doesn't have to give those things up once he's finished. In fact it's at least possible that he'll have more of it then. Therefore life itself is a miracle. We are spiritual beings who operate under important mechanical constraints, but those do not define us. For most people these are religious subjects and what we belive about them is defined largely by what religion we belong to. I don't mean to disparage that, or make any particular religious point at least in this post. But to truly express our selves goes way beyond moving rationable things in time and space, and we don't have to rely on any particular religious tradition to know it. Life as we know it is enough.

The Way Out, pt VI

What he said. I like especially how Kling focuses on profits. A lot of the current economic commentary is about credit, and financial institutions. And we do need credit to have profits. But to a large extent we shouldn't be worrying about (or spending money on) financial institutions with the hope that they will provide the credit to the broader economy.

One thing that's largely been missing in most of the recent economic commentary is that we are likely to be in the middle of a substantial sector shift. People have obviously rethought their expenditure patterns with new budgets and ordering of wants. Capital allocation will reflect that, and we know from Hayek that government cannot pull that off. Ie, now more than most times, there is no "aggregate" demand.

If the government can enter the market as a consumer, it can legitimately try to goose growth a little bit by cheating the process toward more expenditure. But the most important thing on the government side is to be relatively conservative of its debt levels.

Whither Stimulus?

In perfect timing with the theme of my last post, Matthew Yglesias argues (at tip to Ross Douthat) that we shouldn't sweat exactly what's in the stimulus because there's a decent chance that it's either stimulus for the economy or good for the country as a whole. I don't think Republicans should hyperventilate over this. The liberals would want these programs whether the economy was in recession or not, and now that they're in power they're going to try to get them. Instead, we should get them off the fence: the amount of money in the bill is so large that its proponents ought to be able to justify why they want it. It's very likely that we should oppose some or most of it anyway, but we won't know why necessarily until the other team has had the chance to make a case in favor of it. In particular, we should see just how much belief the other side has in the neo-Keynsianism they've been arguing for the last few months. It's very possible that it's less than we've been led to believe.

Bandwidth

The concept of bandwidth has gotten a lot of attention since the beginning of the Internet Age. In it's literal meaning it's a computer geek thing of course, but the general concept, ie, the amount of information that can be successfully sent across a channel at any one time, extends to any form of communication. Occasionally you can even hear management-guru types talk about the desirability of "high-bandwidth relationships."

In any case, what I'm interested is the application of bandwidth in political sphere. It's a subject that's gotten little or no attention, but it should. The ability of a politician or pundit to make his audience hear as he intends to be heard is a very valuable commodity, and in many cases a scarce one. Anyone who has had the misfortune to be a conservative or a Republican recently has been affected.

Let's recap. Starting from the middle of 2006 or so, the American people fundamentally tuned out President Bush (and by extension the Republican Party). It's not so much that they disagreed with him about this or that, as much as they simply quit listening. Conservative politics have carried an ethos of make-believe ever since. No has to care what Mike Huckabee or Rush Limbaugh says, because nobody's listening anyway. This lasted until the selection of Sarah Palin as bottom half of the GOP Presidential ticket. Gov. Palin was clearly fresh on the scene and had nothing to do with President Bush. For two glorious weeks or so, the Republicans weren't forced to carry the dead weight of the Bush Administration. Unfortunately, when the Republican party finally got the chance to be heard on its own terms, it turned out that John McCain didn't have much to say about the economic crisis. The world went back to ignoring the Republicans, and that more or less settled the election.

And here we are. President Bush is now former President Bush, and Democrats have subsantial majorities in both chambers of Congress. President Obama proposes $819 Bn, $1.2 trillion, 43 quintajillion whatever "stimulus" package. The amount of money is so large that the Republicans are actually back in the game a little bit. So, right away Michelle Malkin calls this the "Generational Theft Act of 2009." Congressional Republicans have complained that the bill is comprised mostly of giveaways to favored constituencies. I have some sympathy for their arguments but I fear that this is the sort of knee-jerk reaction that will continue to get ignored.

If I were in charge of the Republican message, the first thing I would point out is that the original TARP plan passed Congress was intended to respond to a particular kind of crisis. Ie, do something or else the world's financial system will collapse in two days. We might still be in a crisis but if we are it's a different sort: getting out of our current economic jam is going to be a long hard slog. Whatever the economic remedy is, we need it done right more than fast. Second, I'd point out that President Obama and the Democrats haven't told us what this plan is supposed to accomplish. I'd try to get the Democrats out in front for what this package is supposed to do and hold my fire until then.

In any case, the Democrats are the majority and they will get to set the agenda for a while. Whatever attention the Republicans get from the American people, they should use carefully and wisely.

Oh Yeah....That'll Work

One thing we've seen over the last month or so is the attempt of various left-of-center types claiming to have "won" by default the debate over stimulus economics, present past. Here's a couple specimens. As much as libertarians and conservatives like to complain about the chilling effects of PC and such, this particular example variation of it is more comical than anything. Nobody is going to be intimidated by it, and in the year of Our Lord two thousand and nine nobody except doctrinaire liberals are heavily invested in FDR/New Deal mythology.

For me, it's one reason things aren't as bad as they look for my team. There is no wizard of liberal Oz, just a little man behind a curtain.

Environmental Fantasy, pt II

The world goin' one way, people another. - Poot, The Wire

I'm not going to get too far about any particular topic on this blog without talking about the political consequences. For the last week or so, one theme has been that the situation isn't as bad as it looks for conservatives and conservative ideas, even as the Republican party is far out of office as it's ever been.

The more I think about it, environmentalism is a two-edged sword. The motivations behind are going to weaken a little bit because everybody's attention will be taken by our various non-environmental crises. There was a famous poll taken last year which claimed that the American people weren't willing to pay one cent per gallon gasoline tax to solve or alleviate global warming (at a time when gas was over $4/gallon).

But precisely because environmentalism operates at a quasi-religious level, the attitude shift will be slow. What's worse, contra David Frum, Rod Dreher and others, it can't be coopted either for the same reason. Even if we wanted to, we can't do the environmental agenda like we could build a bridge or a jobs program. And because a fair bit of the Republicans' poor standing has to do with a credibility crisis, it's not a good time to promise things we can't deliver on.

Environmental Fantasy, New Appreciation for Reality

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. - FDR

It's a very pleasant experience when something we can see than some supposedly ominous threat turns out to be more or less inconsequential. Well, it's put up or shut up time for the environmental movement. The political environment (no pun intended) is friendly, so if the Obama Administration doesn't enact a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, can we safely conclude global warming was complete crock from the get-go?

Not necessarily, to answer my own question. But I think we will see a shift in perception. It's harder to get motivated about a hypothetical crisis fifty or a hundred years from now when we're in the middle of an actual one. We don't even have to convince ourselves that anthropogenic global warming can't happen. We may decide that it's something we can adapt to, or even like it.

Several conservative commentators have argued that modern environmentalism is more like a religion than a science, or just special interest pleading for the cynical-minded. If this is true (and I for one believe it is), this hasn't gotten a lot of mainstream traction. But if we try to argue that environmentalism is just religion for postmodern liberals, we have to acknowledge that it's relatively short on rituals, priests and Scriptures. Instead let's acknowledge that the epistemology of environmentalism is aesthetic: harmony and tranquility are good, mindless noise and consumerism are bad. And on its own terms, the environmental aesthetic is at the very least unobjectionable, and often praiseworthy. But there are other aesthetic goods, (eg happiness, elegance, justice, etc.) and in our lives we usually rely on judgment and context to fit them in as best as we can.

On a more concrete level, the inductive logic between the environmental aesthetic and what we recognize as environmental advocacy today is very flawed. And slowly but surely I suspect it will increasingly be perceived to be flawed.

Demand for Aggregate Demand, pt III

Hat tip to Reihan Salam for this one. A blogger from the other team essentially translates what I'm getting at here, here and here into Left-liberalese. Here is the key point:

The real danger of this moment for the Republicans is structural reform, fundamental changes to the American welfare state, or labor law, or regulation of carbon.That's where we'll see the big league, scratch and claw, any means necessary opposition. - Chris Hayes

Let's just add to this that structural reform is the operative danger for the Democrats too, they just haven't caught on yet.

Me to California: Drop Dead

In 1975, the municipality of New York had a severe crisis and required outside assistance to prevent default. The city received a loan from New York State and when that was not sufficient, asked President Ford for assistance. Ford was slow to offer assistance, prompting the New York Daily News to print the headline Ford to City: Drop Dead. Of course that was something of an exaggeration, because in early December of that year President Ford signed a bill authorizing loans of up to $2.3 Bn per year for the following few years. But, the conditions that were attached were very important: tax increases, wage freezes or cuts, staff cuts, and all the rest of it. And equally as important, the terms of the loan also commadeered the city's revenue streams to pay back the feds before the city's political establishment could get a hold of it.

We are again in period of debt crisis, of course. As big as it is, New York City is only one municipality. We are now in a situation where several states and many municipalities are danger of bankruptcy. But California is the worst case. And it's inconceivable that Congress and the Obama Administration will not bail out a state that gave 55 electoral votes to Obama and elected umpteen Democrats in the House of Representatives. Therefore, let the Congressional Republicans get out in front: yes, we'll propose the government loan California (and implicitly every other state) whatever it needs to stay afloat, with similar terms that President Ford bailed out New York City. By circulating the idea first, the GOP can frame the issue on their terms instead of merely offering some less of the same alternative.

The operating principle is that we ought to help our states and municipalities if we can, but the terms of assistance should be onerous enough, especially to the political classes there, so that they should never plead poverty to the feds if there's any chance they can make it without federal money.

The other team is the majority of course, and they might choose to give California money instead. Everybody really knows, that the GOP is, relatively speaking the party of fiscal conservatism. George W. Bush was an expensive exception, but an aberration nonetheless. We might as well take the opportunity to remind everyone.

Shovel Ready

Like Steve Sailer and others have pointed out, the Obama Administration (and liberals in general) would like to use federal stimulus money to fund big new infrastructure projects and big Green infrastructure projects in particular. Unfortunately, the planning and design stages for such things take years and years, therefore defeating the notion such projects will do anything to stimulate economic growth. Wait till the liberals figure out that the stimulative projects that are shovel ready are the ones that have little or no environmental impact to wade through, ie, new weapons systems for the Pentagon, or are built in the middle of a barren desert, ie, the fence across the Mexican border.

Demand for Aggregate Demand, pt II

Like I mentioned before, I have a gut feeling that the political foundations of the American welfare state are the weakest that it's been in my adult lifetime, therefore there is a compensating increase in interest in the nuts and bolts of Keynesian economics. But, one aspect that's gotten relatively little attention, especially with respect to it's political implications, is that the Keynesian theories of fiscal stimulus are very business cycle dependent. For now, everything's kosher because we're in a business cycle trough so aggregate demand is weak so government fiscal policy will supposedly stimulate it. But of course that hasn't always been the case in recent memory and hopefully won't be the case again sometime reasonably soon.

Furthermore, whereas the ability to finance the stimulus used to be an academic triviality, is reasonably likely to be in jeapordy before before we are clearly in a recovery. It is not going to go without notice, either by our current creditors or our prospective ones, that Iceland has already defaulted on its government debt and several other European countries including the UK are on the verge of it. Whatever happens, voters are not likely to forget soon, just as the political impact of the Great Depression took forty years or so to dissipate. Whoever can propose credible cuts in formerly sacred cows of government spending might get a more respectful hearing now than ever before.

The Way Out, pt Ia

Today, Megan McCardle has a great post on a subject I brought up a while ago, ie, the inefficiency in shopping from the wares of the Education Establishment to prepare for success in the labor market. (Perhaps coincidentally, Instapundit put up a link to this as well.) If anything, I'd quibble that the ivy-and-quad campuses are less efficient than the for-profit vocational "colleges." A Democratic Administration notwithstanding, Americans tend to be more responsible than most for working through their own problems. By the end of this economic crisis, education in America might look a lot different than it does now.

Demand for Aggregate Demand

(Mostly borrowed from a comment on another blog.)

Bryan Caplan has noted that Keynesian aggregate demand theories are enjoying a resurgence at the moment, but wonders why. My theory is that the political foundation of the American welfare state is in greater flux now than it has been for a long time. Let's go back a little bit. The philosophical and practical justification for the New Deal was to save people from complete destitution. As time passed, the welfare state grew but the justification behind it shifted away. Sometime between 1979 and 1993 say, the political establishment almost entirely gave up the idea that the point of spending on social programs is to help the poor.

The American people have adjusted to the idea that the safety net is there is smooth away the rough edges of life in a capitalist economy. (No comment on the underlying truth of that proposition, only that the perception of it is the political foundation of the contemporary American welfare state). That foundation is getting weaker. People are starting to figure out that what really want out of the economy is the opportunity to earn a living instead of welfare state protections. The academic and political left-of-center want to protect the welfare state, and Keynesian theories of aggregate demand is the tool for that particular job. Nobody needed that tool before now because the welfare state was built on political foundations that didn't require it.

This has, for me at least, some interesting consequences. Among other things, while Republican political strength is the lowest now that it's been in my adult lifetime, the mix of issues is the best it's been for five years at least.

One other thing: some of us cynics tend to view the typical theories of aggregate demand, deficit spending and fiscal surplus as an intellectual fig leaf for an assertion of social control by the political establishment over the population through government giveaways. And that is a substantial part of the story, though it's important to note, not all of it. So for that, we should thank libertarian economists like Tyler Cowen and the authors of Econlog, to sort through them on their own terms (as well as their political motivations).

Blue State Blues

Since the election it's been mostly the same ol', same ol'. So far the big news has been political corruption in Illinois, highlighted by the arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the allegations by US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald supporting the arrest. In California, the state budget deficit is expected to reach $40 Bn by 2010, to the point where the state will have to get emergency assistance from the federal government or go bankrupt. Finally, the Detriot Big Three are more than bankrupt, they would have run out of cash altogether except that they too, got bailout money from the feds.

There's something in common in all three of these. If were a professional Republican politician or pundit, I'd be pointing out what it is.

The Way Out, pt V

Nobody has a real good handle on how all this is going to shake out, but I strongly suspect that one of the things that will be a part of a hypothetical recovery is the combination of low unemployment and lower (than present) wages.

We need people working to maintain stability in our economy and standard of living, and the more the better. But we also have to cope with the process of revaluation. Certain things that we had previously thought were valuable in better economic circumstances will turn out to be less valuable. Therefore the people who make these things need to be paid less. But, there are other things, some of which we know about and others we don't, that will turn out to be more valuable than we anticipated. As we go down the road of figuring out which is which, typical workers seeking a raise naturally migrate from low-value labor to higher-value labor. That is, they will if the capital flows are more or less transparent.

All this sounds good and antiseptic. Unfortunately, there is likely to be substantial pressure to keep inefficiently deployed capital where it is to mitigate the disruptive impact of moving it somewhere else. Obviously this has been most prominent recently with respect to the car company bailouts, but that's admittedly an extreme case.

More generally, labor does better relative to capital in an expansion, because most people are employed so labor is scarce and the demand for it is high because there's opportunity available in the economy to produce high returns. Capital does better relative to labor in a recession because those things don't hold and also because capital tends to be more maneuverable whereas labor tends to be stuck where it lives. But, people tend to resent capital in the best of times and even more now since "capital" or "capitalism" gets the blame for the Wall Street failures and the subsequent bailouts. The temptation for demogoguery will be high.

The Pirate King

"It is, it is a glorious thing to be a pirate king" - Gilbert and Sullivan

Hat tip to Naked Capitalism for this one from London Banker.

The Banker is clearly right that the biggest risk we face now is the lack of access to credit for the US gov't. That is a real possibility now for the first time in my life, and one that might impose fiscal discipline on the government where generations of Republicans failed. On the other hand, it might not, and then we will in truly interesting times indeed.

I like how the Banker describes the deleveraging of the US financial sector as financial piracy against East Asia and the Gulf States. Unfortunately, he's just wrong on that score. The reason that the US (and to some extent the UK) got its role as the world's banker is because it has the a strong tradition of property rights and the Rule of Law. It is only in that environment that a private banking sector as we know it can develop. These other countries don't have these things, that's one of the reasons why they have to send the money over here. That's something to bear in mind, "...Despite the US being the epicentre of all the failed debts, failed securitisations, failed credit derivatives, failed rating agencies, failed banking businesses, failed corporate governance, failed accounting standards, failed capital adequacy models, and failed regulatory forbearance..." If, as a result of this bubble bursting, they were to develop these things it would be best for all concerned.

There's also the fact, as Spengler would surely note, that US has the risk-taking young people willing to borrow. The greying populations of East Asia don't so it's not exactly clear who's going to be able to generate the "reasonably predictable positive return" the Banker requires.

Finally, the Banker doesn't dwell on it too much in that post, but he also likes to hate on the knowledge economy. For all the talk about sustainability, it ought to be clear that the knowledge economy is much more sustainable than the alternatives, usually taken to be agriculture or manufacturing. The trend in that direction has been going for decades, arguably centuries. Not only are manufactured goods cheap to produce, there also not worth very much. What's worth more to you, a correctly filled prescription by a reputable pharmacist, a new iPod, or a twenty pairs of socks. I'm guessing there's not too many people who would choose the last.

Trahison des Clercs

One of the most depressing facts of this Presidential cycle is the wholesale loss of the intellectual class to Obama and the Democrats. Both Slate and Reason published quasi-endorsements from all of their contributors, and put together they form a particularly gloomy spectacle. Everybody wants to be able hold the red-state bourgeois accountable for the supposed failings of America, but nobody wants to do anything to help.

The Achilles Heel of Islam

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JK18Aa01.html
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EH05Aa01.html

Spengler is a pseudonym of a columnist for Asia Times. In the links above he hits on a pet theory of mine that I have not seen very much public discussion of. Islam in many ways is much weaker than she appears, something that has obvious consequences for the future of jihad in the next decades.

Spengler emphasizes the weak textual foundation of the Koran as sacred scripture. I think the larger point goes way beyond that. That is, that Muslim apologetics, the ability to pronouce the reasons for belief in religious teachings and persuade others of them, are embarrassingly weak to the point of being something of a joke. In fact, that's almost the point of the matter. The teachings of Islams aren't things to be believed as much as submitted to, because Allah is greater than us.

In my view, this is the religious expression of the tribal nature of society in the Middle East and other places where Islam reigns, and captures the crucial anthropoligical insight there: survival is a collective accomplishment. There is no individual so strong or smart so that he can guarantee his own security. So, he must depend on various group loyalties (to family, to clan, to tribe) to protect him. And because he is dependent on them at the level of his very existence, he submits to the group's will. Fortunately for us, we have developed strong traditions of the Rule of Law, property rights, and impartial police. Otherwise we'd be in the same boat.

But there is more to religion than that. It also functions on a historical and teleological levels. And it is very likely that viewed in these ways, Islam is simply not true, and not perceived to be true by people who consider the question closely. This is a huge vulnerability whose impact we haven't seen yet, but likely will.

The Political Wire

A couple of weeks ago, Ross Douthat hit on a topic that I've been wanting to bring up for a while: the politics of The Wire (the HBO miniseries). Ross makes the key point when he writes:

In this sense, The Wire is the rarest and most precious of beasts: A work of art that's intensely political but rarely devolves into agitprop.

On the surface, it might be taken as a liberal show, as its creators are certainly liberals and there are no recognizable conservatives the show. More importantly, if there were, they would appear as hopeless squares in that environment, which validates how liberals tend to think of conservatives in general. But it's more complicated than that.

First of all, the show explodes any notion of being culturally simpatico to the modern black underclass, the staple of liberal inclinations on urban issues for decades. Clearly for those of us in the bourgeois world, those people are not us. The greatness of the show is that they are compelling in their own right.

I think there's an implicit contrast with The Sopranos. In general, the narrative of black people in America is much more prominent than Italians. But this doesn't necessarily extend to the criminal class, where The Godfather is a major touchstone of American culture. The consituents of Baltimore's drug wars are forgotten people. We want law enforcement to enforce some measure of quarantine on them away from bourgeois America, and as soon as that happens we won't spare them a second thought. Nonetheless, protagonists of The Wire are completely compelling anyway, while at the same time not making any excuses or rationalizations of their criminality. Through this prism we see that what happens to them is important, even if in real life it's not important to us.

The Message

Let's grant to David Frum that politics is a game of addition. Who do we add to Joe the Plumber to make a winning coalition? If we go after wealthy coastal voters, we have to be able to demonstrate greater credibility on economic issues than the Democrats. Depending on what happens in the Obama Administration, I suspect that might be very plausible soon enough.

I don't think it will work to shave the values issues. Politically speaking, the differences are too wide, as Ross points out. Not only that, there's nothing we can deliver on anyway. For the bluebloods and the bobos, much of the values conflict (environmentalism in particular) is an attempt to maintain superior social status over the red state bourgeios and those that represent them, ie, the Palins. Given that the Palins are exactly the sort of people who keeping us from being a typical useless Euroweenie country, we gotta have their back. And if it were up to me, this is exactly the argument I'd make to the bluebloods. For whatever is wrong with the USA, it should be clear that it's in better shape than the major Western European countries, every which way it's possible to measure.

The First Thing....

....the conservative movement needs is a message that it's willing to be held accountable for. David Frum is one of the most astute conservative commentators out there, but this wasn't one of his better efforts. If we have a message, we have to propagate it. If we don't, the few Senate seats that are "saved" won't accomplish very much.

If we throw in the towel on the McCain campaign (this was three weeks ago, mind you) the message we're sending is "we surrender" which is definitely not our intent.

Who is John Galt?

In Ayn Rand's dystopia Atlas Shrugged, mainstream culture is gradually taken over by collectivism piece by piece. In response, John Galt and the productive members of society sequester themselves in Galt's Gulch and allow the rest of the world to rot according to its own devices.

This scenario has been suggested (in a couple of variations) in the context of our most recent election. Ie, if my guy doesn't win, I'll just check out and leave the rest of you to figure it out for yourself, and you'll be sorry then. One version of this has to do with Hollywood types who are distraught that the United States is more Republican than they'd like. Somehow they never pull it off. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Sean Penn would have to forgo $10M per picture, whereas those of us in our log cabins would somehow have to make do without Mystic River.

On a slightly more serious note, I think it's much more plausible to consider families like Palins as the John Galt of our time. We might be able to go without Sarbanes-Oxley compliance specialists and auto sales managers for a while, but if people quit having children, fixing transmissions, and plowing snow, we'd be in big trouble in a hurry. But at least as important as what people do for a living is what they do for free. And it's married people with children who populate things like the PTA, the Junior League, and supervise the Boy Scouts. Of course, people like the Palins aren't going to hide from society in a hissy fit. But they do need a fair bit of cultural latitude or their time, money, and inclination to carry the world on their shoulders withers away. As things stand now, people need at least as much space to be normal as they do to be eccentric.

To The Republic For Which It Stands

For those who have been looking for silver linings in Sen Obama's election victory, it has been said (or muttered) that at least the country didn't have to endure riots and post-election anger if Obama had some so close only to have the football snatched away just before he kicked it. For my part, I disagree. There may be some good things about election of Obama, but that is not one of them. In fact, one of the few good consequences of a hypothetical McCain win is the hope that for a substantial part of the million or so Obama fans who gathered in Grant Park on Election Night; the bike messengers, fifth-year college sophomores, and guys who got their city job because their uncle is a supervisor for Streets and San, that they would have rioted for a day or so, and then been so disillusioned with the whole political process that they don't participate in it for the next few cycles.

This seems harsh at first glance, but for the good for the health of a republic, in particular ours. Most appreciate that it's good for social harmony that, by voting, people in general can feel they have some influence in public affairs. But even if that's an important part of the story, it's not the whole story. It's also important important that we are governed by citizens, not people at random, or even people who reside here.

Literally speaking, citizenship is a loose thing. In American law, everybody who is born here (among others) gets it. But there's more to it than that. Not everybody has the credibility, the societal capital, the personal means, or the intent to act on behalf of the community as a whole. The Palins clearly have these things, which is (among other reasons) why some of us were so enthused about them.

The Way Out, pt IV

There's an obscure English cliche, "Where there's muck, there's brass." It means that wherever there's difficult or dirty jobs to be done, there's money to be made. The problem with the economic pessimists is that they always tend to underestimate the muck to be shoveled away if people are fairly compensated for doing it. It's a forgivable error. The statistics so beloved of economics measure this poorly, if at all. Free market types are often ridiculed for using phrases like, "unleashing the power of the markets" but sometimes that's just the plain truth of the matter.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? According to Glenn Reynolds, Obama leads in 18 out of 19 states with the largest decline in housing prices (and presumably will win most of them). Thirteen out of the fourteen states where housing values have declined the least, McCain leads.

Now, do we suppose that when The One takes office, and is confronted with the hordes angry at what they see (with some justification) as $700 Bn of free government money for Wall Street, he is somehow not going to try to dole out some largesse to his supporters? I doubt it. The piggy bank ought to be empty for such maneuvers, but somehow I doubt that it really is. The point is, such things cost more than money. They accumulate cottage industries built around the preservation of inefficiencies. But the way out is for people who see opportunities and materialize them.

The Way Out, pt III

Somewhere in my personal list of useless conservatives, Austin Bramwell has a place of honor. So I was somewhat surprised to find that I actually agree with most of his latest effort for the American Conservative. His point is that various conservative intellectuals don't need the conservative movement to thrive. In fact many of them will do better if they are not regarded as being attached to it. (Though, let's also acknowledge that policy implementation and electoral coalitions do require the conservative movement, but we'll leave that for another day.)

In any case, Bramwell mentions an interesting group of scholars, many of which wouldn't be identified as conservative to most people anyway. It's funny that Bramwell cites them as failures of the conservative movement, in particular the failure of the conservative movement to produce and nurture such people. Of course the unspoken assumption behind this is that the such people in some way "ought" to belong to conservative movement. And the only reason why Bramwell assumes this in the first place is that we all take for granted that the liberal establishment essentially been brain dead for thirty years or so and so any public intellectual with a modicum of creativity or who has broken through the ossification of the modern academy is assumed to be conservative by default.

It's very likely we'll need some ideas that we've never thought of before to get out of the straits that we're in. If Sen Barack Obama continues to be a rubberstamp for the liberal Democratic establishment, we'll never get them.

Contra Ross Douthat

As is sometimes typical for pundits backing a loser, Ross tries to blame the campaign for the failures of the candidate. In this case I think it's exactly backwards. I think the McCain campaign has actually been fairly effective. It has taken substantial disadvantages in money and overall environment, and has still managed to be fairly competitive, even to the point of setting the agenda for a significant part of the campaign. Really, the only thing I fault the campaign for is conceding Michigan, and that's probably a money issue anyway.

If he loses there is one overriding reason why. His response to the economic crisis has been weak. It's been weak in substance, and weak in the perception that Sen McCain has the intelligence and energy to get to the bottom of it all and sort it out for the benefit of the country. Frankly, Obama's substance has been equally weak if not worse, but he has been able to project the aura of a person whose elevator is going all the way to the top floor and McCain hasn't.

The Way Out, pt II

Or another example, take energy. Obviously for most people the important fact about energy is that the price of oil has declined from nearly $150/bbl to $65/bbl. That seemed likely really good news at the time until the world's attention was taken over by the stability crisis in our major financial institutions.

In any case, it should be clear that we need to increase our capability for producing energy, oil and otherwise. But it's interesting to look at this through the prism of the upcoming recession. As consumer spending decreases, it's very likely that the economy as a whole will require fewer cell phones and mortgage brokers. But we will still need access to more energy, both for our own economy and to help the process of industrialization in China, India, and other countries in the same situation. Therefore we should regard our hard-earned expertise in energy production as an important foothold in working our way out of our economic problems.

Unfortunately, I don't see this as likely under President Obama. In particular, it would require the repudiation of the global warming agenda which doesn't strike me as being remotely plausible given that such a large percentage of Obama's base favors it. The are other issues as well that tend to mitigate against any kind of industrial-scale energy production; nuclear, oil, natural gas, coal, electric grid infrastructure. Essentially, the Democratic party has Luddite mentality on the whole issue for thirty years. Maybe President Obama is going to change that, but we haven't seen any signs of that yet.

The Way Out

As this election season nears the end, my anxiety over the prospect of President Barack Obama isn't so much that if he becomes President this or that bad thing will happen. It's more that given what we know of his inclinations and the path he has taken so far, a hypothetical President Obama (and the things that go with that) is likely to deprive us of the opportunity to work our way out of the fixes that we're in, or will be soon enough.

I was talking with a friend of mine the other day and he asked me a question. I forget what it was exactly but I remember the answer had to do with Griggs v. Duke Power Company, a court case almost forty years old now. It's an important case, though hardly a household topic of conversation. It essentially means that a company cannot give standardized tests as a significant part of a job application process unless they can show that minority groups score as white males on the test (which it can't, because they don't) or demonstrate that the knowledge tested for is crucial to the performance of the job sought (which is beyond the capabilities of most companies).

This leads to a crucial defect of affirmative action. Beyond contentious issues of fairness or diversity and so on, there's a little known reality that the impact of affirmative action goes way beyond its intended beneficiaries or its "losers". Take a canonical case where there are ten white guys and one black guy applying for four job openings or slots in medical school or what have you. Most of controversy is usually about whether the black guy gets one of the jobs and the criteria involved for deciding one way or the other. But, as a matter of simple math at least three (and maybe four) of the new hires are going to be white guys. So in order to be successful the HR department or the admissions committee has to make intelligent choices between which white guys make the cut. But the straightforward ways of sorting them out disparately impact minority groups and in many cases are effectively illegal.

Which brings me to this (hat tip to Rod Dreher). Our professor friend pulls the curtain back on some of the lazier aspects of undergraduate education, and university life in general for that matter. Even though the perspective of the faculty is new for me, the overall gist is well-known to most intelligent Americans. Why then, as the value of the bachelor's degree is being depreciated, why do so many young Americans continue to devote years of their lives to getting it? Obviously because to do most things prospective employers (and graduate schools) require it. For people looking at a glance, a 22-year-old BA is thought generally accepted to be ready adult responsibilities and an 18-year-old with a high school diploma isn't. Even if the newly minted college graduate didn't do anything particularly compelling while he was there, he has a few years more maturity and has shown the ability to jump through hoops to accomplish an objective, and in many circumstances that's enough.

The important thing to notice in all this, is that this state of affairs is the result of many smaller things that have built up over time to the point where it is taken to be "the way things are". But it is not an inevitable fact of nature. One of these things is Griggs. Probably not person in ten who has been affected by Griggs has ever heard of it.

Now, as far as this presidential race goes, Griggs is completely uncontroversial. As far as I know, neither candidate has said anything about it, and both sides have been pretty quiet about affirmative action in general. Everybody has adapted to that particular status quo.

But now we are in moment of severe economic uncertainty, with the possibility that "the way things are" that we have taken for granted in many ways are in fact up for change. It very well happen that we'll see a different model for "typical" late adolescence than we're used to. For the sake of saving public expenditure, and reducing young people's debt, more of them might try to start their career path at 19 or 20 instead of 23 or 25. This won't happen because of some mandate from Washington, but it will require some changes to make possible. And it's the nature of those changes (overruling Griggs in some way, relaxing child labor laws, less public spending on education), that I think it's beyond hope to expect from President Obama.

McCain hasn't exactly campaigned on this platform, there's no reason to, we're all used to the way things are. But as it becomes clear "the way things are" aren't working for us any more, I hope we can adapt in good ways instead of bad ones.

Before The Election

I might write the what I see to the positive consequences of a hypothetical McCain win (and there aren't that many). But the one obvious one that springs to mind is that in many many cases it would piss off the right people. Here is Erica Jong going through her quadrennial anxiety spasms. For God's sake, move to Canada already and get it over with.

Crisis

I suspect, without any real evidence, that the McCain boomlet over the last few days has run its course, and that Barack Obama will be the next POTUS. I think this not because anything in particular has happened since yesterday, but because essentially nothing has. The polls are where they are, and I think they're more or less accurate. Though I still do expect a break toward McCain of about 3% from undecideds and weak Obama supporters on Election Day, it won't be enough, and Obama will win with a popular vote majority of 0-5%. (The usual caveats apply. In particular, 3 three days is a long time in a situation like this, and I reserve the right to change my mind.)

In any case, let's say I'm right, or stipulate that Obama is going to win in some scenario. What should center-right America do, in the next three days and the next three months before President Obama takes office?

Well, for starters let's try to get a straight story on the current economic crisis. And to acknowledge that it is in fact a crisis. And for the various interventions and bailouts that have occurred or are going to occur, they are done in the context of a crisis and with the intention of ameliorating the crisis. In an ideal world this ought to go without saying, but for all the uproar and debate in the genesis of the Paulson plans and their journey through Congress, it's not at all obvious to me that everybody expects this will happen.

People might not care about this now, but I suspect they should very soon. My gut feeling is that economically speaking, the crisis stage is going to be over soon but a severe cookie-cutter type recession is just starting. And God willing, we'll work our way out of this recession just like we've worked our way out of prior ones. But if this is in fact the case, the various bailouts aren't going to help and will probably make things worse. In fact, the best scholars of the Great Depression (in particular Amity Shlaes) think that New Deal did not end the Depression but instead prolonged it.

Moreover there's a simpler point to be made to anyone who's still listening. Most of our federal money is spent on programs that were started in the attempt to address a crisis. (Defense is an exception: that money is spent before the crisis). We (as mainstream conservatives) are willing to spend money to address a crisis, but we need to insist that when the crisis is over the money flow stops. Otherwise, the federal government doesn't have any money left over to pay for its response to the next crisis. That ought to be especially clear now, where the combination of ballooning entitlements, the bailouts, and the Iraq War have left the government straining near the end of its ability to borrow money, as enormous as that is. And right now, we have the chance to empahsize this while George W. Bush is President so that we have the opportunity to hold Barack Obama to it later.

Intellectualism

The other thing underlying the substantial support for Obama among people who ought to know better is the yearning to elevate the level of public discourse after eight years of George W. Bush's public torture of the English language. I have a particle of sympathy for this, except that many of them are inflating their hopes for Barack Obama on that score way above any kind of rational expectation. He speaks well from a prepared text, but beyond Hamlet-style hand-wringing over an uncertain racial identity, there's very little interesting thought there.

Beyond that, I'd recommend _Intellectuals_, a fascinating study of the private lives of prominent intellectuals by Paul Johnson that's about twenty years old now. We need smart people obviously, but it's very dangerous to other parties to hand them privileges them on that account. It encourages a very weird sort of moral hazard for them to shade their personas in order to maintain those privileges.

Obamacons

For a while now, we've seen the phenomenon of various "conservatives" or prominent people who for some reason ought to be aligned with the Republican Presidential candidate supporting Obama. Off the top of my head, there's Doug Kmiec, Wick Allison, Christopher Buckley, Jeffrey Hart, Kenneth Adelman, Colin Powell and several formerly rightish libertarians. On top of that, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and Quin Hillyer have been publicly critical of the selection of Sarah Palin while still supporting the Republican ticket on balance.

And just now I've figured out why, and figured out why I've never been strongly tempted to be one of them. Essentially, for most or all of the people above, there is strong resentment against, say, Sean Hannity and the sort of media figure he represents, and Sarah Palin and who she represents. So these, above all else, want to repudiate the Hannity-Palin axis. This is most depressing in the case of Anne Applebaum, a very thoughtful woman whose reasoning on behalf of Obama is specious to the point of embarrassment.

I can see why some people don't like Sean Hannity very much, though I personally don't watch much of Fox News. But for all our current problems, Sarah Palin and the people who support her are about as blameless as it's humanly possible to be, and represent a substantial part of our hope in America.

The Identity Politics Election

Every election is about identity politics to some extent, but this one, at the Presidential level at least, has turned on identity politics more than any other that I can recall, in the United States at least. The demographic polarization of this election is unusually stark. It's the cognitive elite and the various ethic minorities versus Middle America.

John McCain has ran a decent campaign in some ways, but his ability to articulate a forward-looking message has been abysmal. Given all that, and the desire of a large number of Americans for a clean sweep of Republicans, it's a near miracle that John McCain has any chance at all. But he does have a chance, and I have a sneaking suspicion that McCain is doing better than the polls would indicate. The problem is, even if he is, he is still a long way from winning.

But, if somehow he does pull it off, one of the few things we can genuinely look forward to is an improvement in race relations in a very bassackwards way. The Left will have to rethink its strategy of bulldozing over the mind of Middle America, and will have to work to engage it instead.

The Fat Lady

Last week I wrote that the McCain campaign isn't quite dead but is on life support. I stand by that. If anything, they look better now than they did then. So what has to happen for McCain to pull this out?

The bad news is, Barack Obama is clearly a plausible President to anyone who's paying attention. But he's not quite an inevitable one, and it's crucial for McCain that Obama doesn't become until he's actually elected. There are a huge number of weak Obama supporters who will vote for Obama just out of intertia if appears that the election is functionally over. Similarly, the lesser committed McCain supporters will probably just stay home.

To keep this from happening, McCain needs some poll movement in his favor. Optimally sometime between now and Friday he needs at least one major national poll showing him in the lead (by any amount, even 1%). It would be even better if there were two. This way a significant number of voters will have to reconsider exactly who they want to be the next President of the United States. As it is, we've seen several polls showing Obama leading by 2-4%. My gut feeling is that isn't quite good enough, but we've got a couple of days yet before the weekend.

Then assuming that happens, McCain needs to have a plurality of these leaners and undecideds to break for him on Monday and Tuesday of next week. Maybe it's just wishful thinking but I actually expect this to happen.

Finally he needs to have the right states break in his favor to win the Electoral College. Remember, the whole business about winning the EC while losing the popular vote only works if the candidates are within say 2% of each other. I think it's beyond hope to think McCain will beat Obama by more than that so he'll need to have some luck in picking up votes in the right places.

Even if McCain is losing, he is definitely not out of the picture, but he needs help from the polls tomorrow and the next day.

Strange New Respect

Strange New Respect is the name usually given to some conservative who "shows maturity" by moving away from his previously-held troglodyte views. In that vein, I hope my new overlords will show me some mercy when the Change We've Been Waiting For finally arrives.

Mostly though, I'm talking about strange new respect in the literal sense, taking a look at what the other team has done right. The first thing is Bill Clinton's handling of the economy in the first two years. Like the rest of the world I've been thinking of our economic troubles over the last few months or so, and I reread parts of _The Agenda_, by Bob Woodward. He definitely wanted to fund the usual dogooder giveaways. But out of necessity, he "cut" the rate of increase in government programs and let the economy catch up the to the size of the state it was supporting. It seems that many if not most people who support Barack Obama are expecting him to do the same thing. Maybe they're right, but frankly I'm not nearly as confident as they are.

The other item is the Howard Dean campaign in 2003-2004. The crash and burn was widely ridiculed among those of us on the Right, but this one especially has had very substantial long-lasting impact. The Dean campaign successfully disciplined the Democratic political establishment to accept the authority of the Democratic base. The substance doesn't matter so much to me because as far as I'm concerned there's not very much worthwhile from either one. But on our side, it's not so much that the Republican political class has ran off the rails as opposed to the reality that the conservative pundit class and the Republican base have utterly failed to enforce accountability on it, and that reality continues to this day.

I was reminded of this when I see that a Federal jury has just convicted Sen Ted Stevens. Maybe he's not even really guilty of anything except the quasi-crimes prosecutors like to use to get rid of inconvenient people. Nonetheless, it doesn't speak very well of us that the Department of Justice is doing our dirty work for us.

The Anti-Honeymoon

I suspect part of the reason that so many prominent conservatives have gone for Obama is the weariness of having to keep one's own house in order while at the same time assuming some measure of responsibility for government. If I vote this election, I'll vote for McCain but truth be told I'm wavering on just how much I hope he wins. I am fairly secure on this, though. If McCain wins, I hope he gets an anti-honeymoon. I for one would like to see some Republican bigshots announce their total commitment to opposing McCain's immigration policy before he even gets the chance to announce it.

The New Alinskyites

One of the undercurrents of this campaign is Sen. Barack Obama's work history as a community organizer. From what's been written about it, he actually accomplished little or nothing. But it is important nonetheless as it the key data point to be able to pigeonhole Sen. Obama, for both ends of the spectrum. The Right can say, "Oh look, he was pinko rabble rouser, the horror!" The Left will give him street cred for the same reason.

But to me the most interesting aspect of the whole thing is how the career of Saul Alinsky fits into all this. Alinsky is considered to be the godfather of community organizing, including DCP and the Gamaliel Foundation where Barack Obama cut his teeth. As much as Obama's period as a community organizer has been a rhetorical flashpoint for the campaign, there's been very little attention to Obama's failure to accomplish anything as one. And in the process, Obama rejected the defining feature of the Alinsky model, the nature of leadership. As John Judis wrote in The New Republic,

"As a result, the job of an organizer is to discover what citizens think is in their self-interest and then help them fight for it. Alinsky also instructed that the organizer himself should not become a public leader, but should operate behind the scenes to encourage "natural" or "native" leaders among the people he is organizing. That is, the goal of an organizer is never to create a movement based on his own charisma. ("We're trying to build an organization with staying power, not a movement based on instant power and charisma," Ernesto Cortes Jr., a prominent Alinsky disciple, explained in 1988.)"

He took a turn into politics instead, an endeavor that by its very nature requires charismatic leaders and smooth-talkers. How very convenient, like so many other things about the young Obama.

But if Obama is not a true disciple of Alinsky then who is? Well, I suspect that we'll find out that it will be Joe the Plumber and the more or less apolitical conservative base. The complement to Alinsky's view of leadership was his view of "consciousness raising." People in general best learn the value of abstract principle in the struggle for their own interests. I suspect this is going to come home to bourgeois America in ways that we haven't seen for at least a couple of decades.

The right to own guns, the right to politically incorrect speech, the right to take exception to the establishment's line on the usual hot-button issues, they are all going to come under tremendous pressure. They will also be defended, but not just by blandly invoking words on a piece of paper, but also by force and through repeated clashes against authority.

It's very possible that American will be entering a period of substantial social unrest no matter what happends. But, in contrast to some others I see more of it if Obama wins than if he loses.

The Other McCain

Blogger Robert Stacy McCain (no relation) has extensively taken up the subject of the Pundit Wars, both in his own blog and the group blog of the American Spectator.

His angle is mostly a generational one, that this is a symptom of the reality that the Right has too many callow 20-somethings, Ross Douthat in particular. I don't buy it. Ross is one of the fresher voices on the Right, and if the Right suffers from too many Ann Coulter wannabes, Ross isn't one of them.

McCain's bigger point is correct, though I personally like to think of it terms of sovereignty. Ultimately, the people in flyover country are sovereign and if the United States has any future will remain so. Others can and do speak on their behalf in Washington and elsewhere. But even if that is sometimes useful, it's not always necessary. The point of Sarah Palin is to illustrate that they can speak for themselves.

The people who don't like it just have to deal. Some of the complaints of some of the pundits may even be legit. Frankly I don't care very much if they are. They should have worked harder against the GOP political class when they had the chance.

Cocooning

The Pundit Wars are a multifaceted thing, and Ross Douthat has been near the center of most of the controversies. Here and here he defends the need for the GOP (and the Right in general) to have associated elites. I'm sympathetic to his conclusion but I think his reasoning is specious. The Right needs to have elites for the obvious (to me, at least) reason that there are important circumstances where knowledge or expertise is not widespread amongst the grassroots and somebody with that expertise has to be in position to make decisions or communicate the state of the game. Ross' concern with the conservative cocoon is well-placed, I think, but doesn't imply what he thinks it does. In fact, it's way more plausible to say that it's the nature of the cocoon is that various members of the conservative elite talk to each other and no one else, which belies the theory that the elite will stop us from putting ourselves in a cocoon.

The Economy, Stupid

Most of the drama of the Pundit Wars has centered on Sarah Palin, but to some extent that's a proxy for the inability of the GOP and the Right in general to compete in the debate over the economy. What a farce! In his heart of hearts, everybody knows (or ought to know) that the Republicans are the party of prosperity whereas the Democrats are one or two steps away from the Politburo for the sake of social acceptability.

So now, we are in the major of a huge economic crisis, and we have a Presidential candidate whose supposed strength is the ability to handle crises. What is our response? Hope it goes away so we can talk about Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko.

Finally, it's interesting to see how the recriminations against McCain's poor standing at the polls have been directed at the right wing pundit class. It's as if everybody already knows there's no hope of any accountability from the GOP political class.

The Pundit Wars

With a slight uptick in John McCain's fortunes, I'm willing to concede that the prospects of his becoming President aren't completely dead but are merely on life support.

Much more interesting is the various sniping amongst people who are generally considered right-wing pundits of one stripe or another. I for one don't buy the theory "Let's wait till after the election for this sort of thing." First of all, McCain's prospects aren't worth that much. Second of all, it's precisely "this sort of thing" that has been long over due on the Right for say, two or three years at least (longer if you're particularly cranky).

And finally the subject is much more entertaining, unlike the McCain campaign which almost hurts my head just to think about (and even allowing for the possibility that he has some chance of winning).

I'm John McCain and I Approved This Recession

We've all heard the dreary economic news over the last few weeks. Credit is collapsing, bailouts may not be working, inflation is a problem and so on. But of all those and any others, the one I'm the most worried about is the economic illiteracy of the American people.

John McCain isn't the worst of the lot of course, but he's still pretty bad. This is why he's running behind in the polls, and likely to lose if things don't change in a hurry. And here's another thing. I think it's fair to say that neither candidate has a real good grasp of the immediate crisis in our economy. That being the case, why are they running? Can't there be anything else except winning the status game?