Friends know how much, historically, I have been a politics junkie.  As a lifelong Republican with a political-science degree, I have tracked the goings-on in Lansing, Washington, and across the Big Blue Marble with a mixture of hope and optimism.

No longer.

My disillusionment started in early 2006.  I began to feel that the GOP Congress could do nothing without the approval of K Street, and the Bush team brought executive incompetence to a level not seen since the days of Carter and Buchanan.  Big words from a person who actually cried with joy at the 1994 sweep, and who resigned from a newspaper job after forcing a Bush endorsement — the paper’s first GOP presidential endorsement in 75 years! — in 2004.  But it’s true:  I find little praiseworthy in the GOP in the District of Columbia, and even less for the GOP in Lansing.

The problems of the Congressional GOP in the last days of its majority were myriad:  Too much spending, too little reform, too little oversight, too little attentiveness to real problems.  Instead, the Congress felt like a big rubber stamp for special interests.  And the president?  He seems to value loyalty over competence to such an extreme degree that we ended up with “Brownie’s Katrina” and the ongoing wheel-spinning in the otherwise winnable Iraq war.

Of course, it’s not that I think the Democrats are any better.  They’re not.  In fact, I think they’re a hell of a lot worse; they seem to have taken a vacation from seriousness over these last few years, putting up the hardest-left candidates they can and fighting unnecessary and divisive culture wars at home while live-fire wars overseas get short shrift.  No, the Dems are hardly an improvement.

My political ennui is not a function of disappointment in the loyal opposition; rather, it’s that my own team seems to have imploded with no clear path to redemption.  McCain as the new standard-bearer?  Losing safe seats in special elections?  It seems like that today’s GOP is doing its damndest to emulate John Major’s Tories.

So, we stand at the beginning of a two-person presidential race.  Will it be Obama?  Will it be McCain?  I don’t know — and frankly, I don’t much care. 

The GOP’s liberal, Rockefeller wing got its nominee, and the conservative base is somewhat less than amused.  With the Democrats nominating a person who is likely their least viable nominee in American political history, the GOP responded by nominating a person who seems to revel in giving his base the middle finger.  Cute.  It’s as if the RNC is taking a page from the strategy manual of the Michigan GOP — the state party adept at seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. 

But then, the GOP and the conservative movement have split a bit.  This is not a bad thing; my earlier, not-very-qualified support of both has since waned.  The party’s platform has ossified into incoherence, and the movement’s emphasis on the same old cultural issues is wearing thin.

So, to steal Lenin’s phrase:  What is to be done?   Herewith my plan for what’d I’d love to see on the political stage:

1. The GOP needs to be the party of fiscal responsibility.  This starts with ending — no ifs, ands, or buts — the practice of earmarks.  It means an end to pork-barrel spending.  It means an end to programs and subsidies that exist merely because they were in the prior-year’s federal budget.  It means support for low taxes that encourage capital growth and entrepreneurial economic activity.
2. The GOP should block — or even roll back — the entitlement mentality, through the fostering of an ownership society.  No socialized medicine, no growth of benefits programs, and a greater willingness to grant waivers to states to experiment with alternative means of providing the “social safety net.”  Bush was right, after his re-election, to emphasize an ownership society; he abandoned that rhetoric too quickly.  A financial stake in the public health leads to better decision-making than in trusting that the bread-and-circus crowd will act with sufficient foresight.
3. The GOP needs a coherent foreign policy.  Either we do or we do not engage in nation-building, for example.  And if we are going to thumb our noses at much of what happens at Turtle Bay, then let’s be consistent in it.
4. The GOP and the conservative movement should moderate some very old dogmas about the social space.  The old evangelical consensus about the environment and gay rights are proving problematic.  Instead of fighting the federalization of these issues, the default response of conservatives is to thrust the head into the sand.  Even if one has issues with the science behind global warming, for example, the smart money is to find a good, market-friendly solution instead of denying the science and letting the Left unilaterally impose its statist, bureaucratic solution.  Same with gay marriage.  It’s gonna happen, so find a way to ensure that the least harm is done to the Constitution instead of passing DOMA after DOMA.
5. The GOP needs to bring back a meaningful federalism.  States matter.  States allow us to experiment with different approaches to social problems without being stuck with a single, monolithic, less-than-ideal approach negotiated on K Street.

I remain less than convinced that John McCain will be the apostle of reform that I think the Republican Party needs to resuscitate itself.  So, I look forward to an election that will witness more hard-left members of Congress get appointed, and which may well end with an Obama victory. 

And I don’t much care at this point.

I have never felt small.  Nor, for that matter, have I ever felt tall.  I stand 5’10”, and am a normal-sized adult human male.

Lately, however, I’ve just felt short.  At the hospital, I work in a building in the middle of a construction zone, and judging by the men I sometimes encounter on the elevator, it seems like there’s a minimum height requirement of 7’1″ to be employed in the construction industry.

OK, so perhaps the manual trades attract bigger, more testosterone-saturated men.  But what explains the fact that many eighth-grade boys tower over me?

For the last few weeks, I’ve served as the worship coordinator for the diocesan Confirmation Masses at the cathedral.  Our bishop wants to personally confirm each young person in the diocese, and he does them in small clumps of parishes at scheduled Masses at St. Andrew’s.  As a worship coordinator, I direct the flow of candidates and sponsors from the staging area to the cathedra.

I’ve been astonished at how many of the male candidates — typically, boys in the seventh to ninth grades — are significantly taller than I am.  At the last Mass, of perhaps 45 boys being confirmed, two-thirds were taller than me by at least two inches.

And don’t get me started on physique.  Most of those boys could out-power me with probably little difficulty. 

Have I simply not noticed this before?  Or (perhaps as a function of better nutrition and disease prevention) are young people healthier and therefore getting taller and more “built”?

Today’s million-dollar question:  Is there anything significant in people openly bragging about their disordered behaviors?

I thought about this in the context of last weekend’s "spring fling."  Several of the partygoers were open and unashamed of their substance-abuse problems, and had no qualms whatsoever in disclosing this to strangers.  A few of them are alcoholics; a few have had problems with drugs ranging from marijuana to cocaine.  Yet in the disclosures was a hint of a challenge.  Was it pride?  A dare to confront?  Not sure.

What I do know is that I was surprised at the way that "addict" status was borne as a badge of honor.  It was almost like a certificate of authenticity; if you haven’t developed the libertarian-style relativism that comes from snorting cocaine from public toilets, then you really don’t have much street cred.

So, I asked Steph (one of my lovely baristas) about her experiences — she is young and social and appears to have her head screwed on straight.  She said she knows people who are similarly situated; most addicts in her peer group (I think she’s 21) just don’t talk about it.  Jen (another lovely barista, who has an academic background in counseling) suggested that this phenomenon isn’t exactly obscure.

I don’t mean to sound like I’m generalizing; I’m not.  I have insufficient data to claim that there is a groundswell of pro-addict sentiment bubbling from below.  But I do know that there is something significant in the fact that several strangers felt the need to proudly disclose a history of substance abuse, with the clear expectation that even if I didn’t find it objectionable, I certainly wouldn’t say a negative word about it.

A link in a USG post to an article at Cracked.com, titled “Seven reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable,” contains some interesting germs of truth.  The general points of the essay include:

1. We don’t have enough annoying strangers in our lives.
2. We don’t have enough annoying friends, either.
3. Texting is a shitty way to communicate.
4. Online company only makes us lonelier.
5. We don’t get criticized enough.
6. We’re victims of the Outrage Machine.
7. We feel worthless, because we actually are worth less.

Interesting.

The gist of the rant is that contemporary youth culture is so disconnected from meaningful, direct, physical relationships that people’s social competence is deteriorating markedly. 

The lack of “annoying strangers” strips us of the ability to build up a tolerance for routine inconvenience — why risk a toddler kicking your seat in a movie theater when you can rent the nearly new release from Netflix and watch it at home?  Thus, we become hypersensitive to irritation, which reinforces the tendency to withdraw.

The lack of “annoying friends” is the flip side to the coin.  The wired generation’s ability to find “friends” in a virtual environment, most of whom are marked by their commonality, means they have less of an imperative to deal with incompatible people.  They are losing the ability to cooperate with people with opposing tastes and conflicting personalities.  As the writer put it: 

“It turns out, apparently, that after you get over that first irritation, after you shed your shell of ‘they listen to different music because they wouldn’t understand mine’ superiority, there’s a sort of comfort in needing other people and being needed on a level beyond common interests. It turns out humans are social animals after all. And that ability to suffer fools, to tolerate annoyance, that’s literally the one single thing that allows you to function in a world populated by other people who aren’t you. Otherwise, you turn emo.”

Of course, when you are isolated from irritation and have only like-minded friends, you can rely on electronic communication and usually get away with it.  Yet the statistic (which, I’m told, comes from “them”) is that people misunderstand 40 percent of e-mail content.  When your social circle is heavily dependent on electronic communication, like e-mails and IMs and text messages, how much is getting lost in translation?

That brings the writer to his fourth point — online company reinforces a person’s loneliness and isolation.  Why?  Because studies suggest (he asserts) that 93 percent of meaning is captured in body language and tone of voice.  Only seven percent is captured in words.  Thus, communication in this mode is not a two-way exchange of ideas and personalities, it’s rather a mere skeleton upon which we hang our own assumptions and prejudices; we supply our own emotional content to online communication instead of relying on the content provided by one’s interlocutor.

And what’s a logical consequence of having few friends, and relying on non-personal communication?  We don’t have deeply meaningful relationships that provide us with genuine, self-improving criticism.  The original author’s comments are worth re-posting at length:

“Tragically, there are now a whole lot of people who never have those conversations. The interventions, the brutal honesty, the, ‘you know, everybody’s pissed off because of what you said last night, but nobody wants to say anything because they’re afraid of you,’ sort of conversations. Those horrible, awkward, wrenchingly uncomfortable sessions that you can only have with someone who sees right to the center of you.

“E-mail and texting are awesome tools for avoiding that level of honesty. With text, you can respond when you feel like it. You can measure your words. You can pick and choose which questions to answer. The person on the other end can’t see your face, can’t see you get nervous, can’t detect when you’re lying. You have almost total control and as a result that other person never sees past your armor, never sees you at your worst, never knows the embarrassing little things about yourself that you can’t control. Gone are the common quirks, humiliations and vulnerabilities that real friendships are built on.”

Without meaningful criticism, we have no gut-check to help us to put things into proper context.  In the larger social sense, our increasing disconnection on an interpersonal level is mirrored on a social level; merely from a mass-media perspective, there is no uniform presentation of fact and interpretation, so that our perception of the world is not grounded in shared understanding.  The original poster focused on larger issues:  “There effectively is no ‘mass media’ any more so, where before we disagreed because we saw the same news and interpreted it differently, now we disagree because we’re seeing completely different freaking news. When we can’t even agree on the basic facts, the differences become irreconcilable. That constant feeling of being at bitter odds with the rest of the world brings with it a tension that just builds and builds.” 

Although this is probably true in its way, I think it applies even more strongly on a granular level.  The “outrage machine” is the natural consequence of not being challenged to see the world from a diversity of perspective.  When we have few meaningful friendships, when our communication is colored by the self-imposed template of ego implied by electronic discourse, when we self-select our friends based on our own preferences — what do you expect?  Anything that diverges from base desire is not only inconvenient, it is also bad.  Those things which we dislike, because our ability to manage irritation has atrophied, are elevated to a moral level totally disproportionate to the subject-matter.  Hence the phenomenon of college students who cannot locate Iraq on a map to within 1,000 miles, but are capable of deeply felt bumper-sticker vitriol against Bush/Cheney for being “capitalist warmongers.”

The seventh point — that “we feel worthless, because we actually are worth less” — emphasizes the social disconnect attendant to living in a wired world.  Although we get to minimize our irritation by self-selecting compatible friends, those friends are doing the same things to us.  Our interpersonal bonds are tenuous, and we are usually quite OK with that.  But the original poster suggests (with merit) that humans are hard-wired “to need to do things for people” — its what makes the whole being-a-social-species thing work.  When you have no one to do for, you have fewer opportunities to do those esteem-building things that make you likeable or give you social worth.   Yet we need the feeling of worth.  What to do?  Hence the popularity of emo.

In fairness, Cracked.com is not exactly a locus of deep intellectual thought.  Yet I read the post and was quite intrigued by it.  I am reminded of a comment I once heard, to the extent that humans have had the fermented grape for more than 3,000 years, and we still haven’t quite mastered its impact on the social environment.  The Internet has been popular for perhaps a decade or so, and it’s a much, much bigger deal than alcohol.  What does this mean for the human species?

It worries me, in a vague sense, that humans have built a civilization that is beyond the competence of its members to comprehend holistically.  Even as recently as a half-century ago, it was possible for an educated person to grasp the rhythms of society — its infrastructures, its mass movements, its dominating discourses.  But today?  Fragmentation rules; we’re more connected than ever, but this connection is technical and not interpersonal.  The core question, then, is whether (or to what degree) the instinctive human social needs will be met in a world more connected yet more atomized than ever.  How will we adapt?  What will our culture look like a century hence?

This is the turning point in human evolution.  We have reached the point where the systems and the structures that have shaped our development for millennia cannot keep pace with the speed of technological innovation. 

Do we advance — perhaps beyond our little blue marble, three rocks from the sun?  Do we have a neo-Luddite revolution?  Do the machines take over?  Do we find an accommodation that works in the long run?

This is a fascinating time to be alive.

A friend who shall remain nameless sent to me today a link to a YouTube video of some commie folk singer who doesn’t much like capitalism.

You know the drill:  For reasons that are never quite made explicit, capitalism is cold, heartless — nay, even immoral.  Why?  That’s never articulated with any semblance of reason; it’s merely asserted with the breathless self-assurance of those who are immovably convinced of their own wisdom and rectitude.

Nevertheless, I shall attempt to reconstruct the hard-left claim against capitalism with an eye toward rebutting it, whilst manfully avoiding the tendency to slip into strawman-ism.

The criticisms of capitalism are several:

1. Some people succeed; others fail.  This is true.  The question is, why is this problematic?  And why does the fact that individuals can win or lose mean that the game itself is unfair?
2. Capitalism doesn’t have a safety mechanism for dealing with failure.  Failure is necessary to limit the spread of inappropriate risk.  When the effects of failure are mitigated, there is a greater incentive toward engaging in risky behavior — the subprime lending situation is a case in point.  And so is the crisis in the family arising from state welfare benefits.  When the risk/reward calculation skews in favor of "reward," people are more likely to take the risks necessary to obtain that reward, even when they’re not well-positioned to succeed.  This is Psych 101.  And when the state intervenes to protect people from the consequences of risk, then we don’t really have capitalism anymore, we have a form of state socialism, however weak it may be.  Failure is necessary to preserve the value of appropriate risk, and to guard against overreaching for a reward.
3. The profit motive leads to immoral behavior — especially greed.  Perhaps.  But the personal moral response to economic incentives is not a reason to condemn an economic system; if it were, then socialism, communism, anarchism — all of it! — is off the table, because these systems facilitate responses by citizens that could similarly be characterized as immoral (envy, chief among them).  But ethics aside, the profit motive leads to hard decisions that can lead some people to pain, as when jobs move overseas or plants close.  My desire to make an extra $10,000 to take a diving trip in the Marquesas might prompt me to close a business and fire five employees.  Is this bad?  Some argue that it is, but it’s not clear why I as an employer have an affirmative duty to ignore my own self-interest for the sake of another person’s convenience.  Capitalism isn’t about beneficence or about enlightened self-denial for the sake of others; capitalism is about the most efficient use and distribution of scarce resources.  All things being equal, nothing is more effective at efficiently allocating goods and services than the profit motive, and the profit motive is animated by the desire for personal gain.  Hence the risk/reward situation.  If I choose to quit my job and start my own company, I run the risk of complete ruin, but I could be highly successful.  If I’m highly successful, and I choose to fire an employee to improve my profit margin, am I a monster?  Or am I merely enjoying the fruits of my earlier labors? 
4. People are often exploited in a purely capitalist system.  Rubbish!  Everyone makes choices.  Sometimes, people don’t have the wherewithal to make wise decisions — decisions that are strategically prudent.  Today’s high school grads who head straight into a factory or construction job are an excellent case in point.  We know that manufacturing is not the cash cow for workers that once it was, yet many choose to forego college or additional vocational training and instead head to the job site with a hard hat and a lunch pail.  They have every right to do this.  They also have every right to collect the relatively modest paychecks they’ll be earning.  But wait, there’s more — they even have the right to face economic insecurity on account of their freely contracted employment decisions, and they’re also free to better themselves and move to another industry or geographic region if they’re not satisfied with their present remuneration or working conditions.  The idea that workers have no choice in a capitalist system is a work of fiction as fanciful as Dickens and as wrongheaded as Malthus.  No one is exploited in a free capitalist system without their consent.

So, the question becomes, is capitalism not just "not bad," but can it be intrinsically good?  Let’s see:

• Capitalism promotes merit.
• Capitalist systems reduce waste.
• The desire for profit means the economy tends to grow with real wealth, thus providing opportunities for workers who choose not to put themselves at risk in the capital markets.

It’s easy to be avant garde and decry capitalism and its alleged excesses.  But what’s better than capitalism as an economic system?  When a cogent counter-system is proposed, I will be willing to listen.  Until then, the self-important diatribes against capitalism will not find my ear to be especially sympathetic.