Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Saul Alinsky, Reconsidered

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My friend Duane loves it when people attribute political ruthlessness and dishonesty to Machiavelli. The Prince is one of those books that all the literati think they understand but never bothered to read; Machiavelli’s actual writings were much more pragmatic, with a strong ethical undercurrent, than the popular misconceptions would credit.

Apparently, the same phenomenon holds for Saul Alinsky. As a red-meat-eating, cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking, dyed-in-the-wool Republican, I’ve listened to the anti-Alinsky propaganda for years. You know the type: Obama is an Alinskyite, and we all know those Alinskyites are pinko commie bastards who want a Soviet-style Revolution that elevates the brain-washed union workers and tears down the mighty citadel of Capital.

But … not so much, it seems, if you look at what the man actually says.

A few days ago, I purchased Rules for Radicals; I began reading it last night. I’m not too far in — I’ve covered the prologue and the first chapter, “The Purpose.” What I’ve read reveals a man and a mission that don’t quite mesh with the dehumanization of the mad activist as caricatured by the far right. Although I reserve the right to be horrified by the chapters yet to come, so far Alinsky seems far more reasonable — in principle, anyway — than the angry diatribes from Limbaugh and Hannity would have led me to believe.

A few salient points:

  • Alinsky, writing in 1971, seems to think the radical student movement with its violence and nihilism was a Very Bad Idea (here, we agree). He professes a deep respect for democratic institutions and the rule of law. Indeed, what I know of his history suggests that this isn’t merely lip service. Alinsky sometimes played dirty, but he generally didn’t advocate operating outside of the law.
  • He apparently has no love for communism, arguing strongly in favor of American patriotism and against the murderous collectivism of Russia, China and Cuba. For example, he thinks that the 1968 radicals were idiots for burning the American flag, because the alternative isn’t communitarian utopia but totalitarianism. Alinsky doesn’t appear to hold any illusions about the virtues of the very far left, which he argues becomes indistinguishable from the very far right.
  • He views the world dualistically; there are good/evil, rich/poor, etc., etc., dichotomies. Not much appreciation for shades of grey, except insofar as he points (correctly, I think) to the push/pull relationship of the middle class relative to the very rich and very poor. I’m not sure I like this framework — it seems dangerously simplistic — but it explains much about the why of some his theory. His whole intellectual apparatus appears colored by a contemporary Manichaeism.
  • He seems to respect one of Tocqueville’s core theses — that America works best when there’s a healthy mediating layer of civil society that buffers and guides the nation in its relationship between a single person and government. To the extent that his professed goal is to empower individuals to live happy, healthy and free lives, he recognizes that part of the radicals’ struggle is to keep those mediating institutions on the level.

Don’t misunderstand; I’m not an Alinskyite and will not become one. As much as Alinsky claims to be non-ideological, only the Progressive Left seems attracted to his modus vivendi, and as long as the sort of “radical change” he articulates effectively works like a leftward-twisting ratchet, then Alinsky’s approach is functionally ideological — even, were one to be charitable about it, if the ideology is a manifestation of later misappropriation instead of being inherent to the system as he defined it.

More to the point: Radical change of any kind requires polarization to get people to accept strategies that fall outside the centrist norm. He apparently defines strategies to effect this polarization later in the book, but the general principle is this: You identify a problem; you mobilize support by presenting positive arguments while simultaneously isolating/demonizing your opposition; you keep it up until you can score a success at the ballot box; you declare victory and move on to the next target. This strategy requires the manipulation of voters through tactics both thuggish and outlandish. In the end, the idea unspoken premise is that the average voter is a dolt who needs to be “guided” to the preferred position of the activists at the ballot box, whence the activists derive their claim to moral authority.

I don’t favor the broad outlines of Alinsky’s approach, for three reasons:

  1. I don’t like activists. At all. Of any stripe. (Hey, I’m a conservative by dispositon.) Activists work outside the system to pressure people to engage in specific behaviors that they otherwise wouldn’t countenance: Think, for example, of the Occupy movement. If something needs to be changed, then change it. From the inside — Win elections. Write laws. Persuade voters to adopt them. Don’t play the outside pressure game to short-circuit the process. And for the record, I don’t even care much for “my” activists; you won’t see me standing at a Life Chain, for example.
  2. Alinsky’s formula for radical change, rooted as it is in a pseudo-Manichaeist worldview, requires a black-and-white split of virtue to remain tenable. Activists are good people; people who oppose the activists are bad people who must be shamed and punished for their bad attitudes. The political struggle therefore becomes one of good versus evil, with the opportunity for finding a middle way eroding with every passing epithet. Wonder why Congress is polarized? It’s practically a case study in Alinskyism at work. More to the point, solutions that hail from a distinct ideology are rarely a good idea; better that people of varying perspectives gather around a complex problem and negotiate a solution than to push for an all-or-nothing resolution.
  3. The politics of shame-and-conquer rewards the outrageous and the audacious, but the virtuous and the commonsensical may thereby suffer. When voters — many of whom may lack a deep understanding of the situation — cast their ballot for the best “show,” politics descends to the level of ancient Greek juries. You know the kind: The person who won the case earned favor through theatrics rather than from having more solid legal grounds for victory. Like OJ Simpson, but I digress. The political becomes the personal, and voters are manipulated to vote for people rather than for objective, well-thought policy. This is a part of why the hard Left is much more invested in the politics of personal demonization than the hard Right. Case in point: The Matthew Shepard murder in 1989 and the James Byrd Jr. murder in 1998. Very bad people tortured and killed innocent men because of race (Byrd) or sexual orientation (Shepard). These were horrific crimes, and the perpetrators deserved severe punishment. But for the hard Left, punishment wasn’t enough; with a cast of heroes in villains conveniently supplied by each murder, radical activists pushed for bias-crime legislation to make “hate crimes” more legally offensive than other crimes. Such a position was opportunistic; lost in the torrent of outrage against the criminals was any meaningful defense of the First Amendment and the silliness of criminalizing bad opinions. But those who defended freedom of thought — even odious thought — were themselves demonized as closet racists, sexists or homophobes. In the Alinsky world, discrediting your opponents is fair game no matter how reprehensible the tactic as long as you advance the chance of a political victory.

The above notwithstanding, the more of Alinsky I read, the more I simultaneously see his theory at work in various strands of contemporary Progressive Left politics, and the more sympathetic I am to Alinsky as a political thinker. I will never be a disciple of his, but engaging his thought directly — instead of the caricature presented in the conservative media — gives me a deeper respect for the man as a noble adversary rather than a demonic bomb-thrower.

And if his tactics can be unleashed on the Progressive Left, so much the better.

Computers & Technology, Personal, Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Short Reflections on Recent Items of Note

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The best defense against cynicism remains a wild-eyed sense of wonder that things really can get more screwed up than they need to be.

  1. Oh, you silly Michigan Republicans. Yes, I voted in the primary. Yes, I voted for Mitt Romney. Yes, I want to see Romney prevail in the delegate count. No, I don’t want Saul Anuzis to put his thumb on the scale. Give Santorum his stupid delegate and be done with it. Intentions aside, retroactively “interpreting” the rules to favor a favored candidate smacks of dishonesty even if such interpretation is valid and squeaky clean. The appearance of impropriety is what matters, not the actuality of impropriety.
  2. Speaking of the primary — time for Gingrich to exit stage right and Paul to exit stage kooky. This has turned into a two-man race. Actually, a one-man race, but Santorum hasn’t figured this out yet and he deserves time to internalize it. I’ll admit that Santorum surprised me a bit; I didn’t think his dogged insistence on fighting the culture wars of the ’90s would resonate with primary voters as much as it has, especially when serious matters — like national security and the economy — deserve pride of place this cycle. I think the Romney likability factor plays into it a bit. What are the odds Huntsman and Pawlenty regret pulling the ejection handle so quickly?
  3. The ongoing drama over Israel’s potential response to an Iranian nuclear weapon highlights the Obama team’s lack of seriousness about Iranian threats. Nuclear Iran presents an existential threat to Israel and will almost surely ignite a nuclear arms race in one of the most volatile regions on the planet. We need more than bluster to win the long-term peace. Although I certainly don’t want a war with Iran, I also don’t want a nuclear Iran. If the latter goal cannot be achieved peaceably — and the Persian running down of the clock suggests it won’t be — then other action must be contemplated.
  4. After the Holocaust, the West said, “Never again.” After half-assing it in Bosnia, we said we really meant it — next time. Then we looked the other way in Darfur and Chechnya and Tibet. And now we look the other way in Syria — because we pretend that enfeebled Russia’s protection of its sole remaining Mediterranean client remains geopolitically significant. Genocide continues, and we whine that the politics of weakness at the U.N. means that we have no more effective alternative than to lodge diplomatic protests while thousands die at the hands of a cruel despot. The technical term for this pseudolegal equivocation is “moral depravity.” On our part, as well as Assad’s.
  5. I’m not all that worried about $5 gas. I am worried that $5 gas means that politicians across the ideological spectrum will put on their silly hats and promote short-term policies that make no long-term sense simply to pander to voters who don’t grasp the complexities of energy policy.
  6. Have we reached a tipping point? The ongoing privacy black eyes from Google and Facebook may well prove decisive in finally getting politicians to draft consumer-friendly data protection laws. About damn time.

Life’s been good on the personal front, too:

  1. A few weeks ago, columnist Florence King of National Review penned her last “Bent Pin” column. I had been a fan of hers since I was a teenager; she used to write “The Misanthrope’s Corner,” then semi-retired, then came back. Now she’s permanently retired from regular columns and will now occasionally submit reviews. Having been duly saddened by her new retirement, I wrote her a letter. To my great delight, she replied with a lovely handwritten card. I think I’ll frame it.
  2. ‘Tis been lovely on the social front. Yesterday, Tony and I went to Battle Creek, to the Firekeepers casino. The original plan was to go to the smoke shop in Battle Creek, but we were delayed too much in Lansing so we detoured to the casino instead and partook of some light gambling and heaving dining. Last weekend, Tony and Jen came to town to celebrate Jen’s 30th birthday. Also attending: her brother Joe, and her friends Heidi and Pete. Tony/Joe/Jen/Jason started with dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, then we met Pete and Heidi and trudged off to Mixology at Six One Six for cocktails; we eventually ended up at Cygnus 27 for even more cocktails before the evening met its natural conclusion. And last Thursday I enjoyed cigars and Scotch with Rick and Sondra at Grand River Cigar. All these events provided a strong measure of fun and connectedness.
  3. Celebrated another writer’s event on Friday. These gatherings are more social than productive but it’s still nice to connect with fellow scribes. And I got to learn about Charlie the Unicorn.
  4. My truck was victimized by a local ne’er-do-well. Someone broke into the back window and rifled through the contents of the truck cab. As far as I can tell, the only things taken were less than $2 in coin plus my spare copies of my license, proof of insurance and registration. I filed a police report anyway. And that evening, I saw my neighbor — a G.R. police officer — but he already had been informed by the detective who reviewed my report.
  5. I’ve been kept full-to-brimming with contract work over the last six weeks. One of my clients invited me into a special project that has consumed a large amount of time. Happily, they’re paying above-market rates for the work I’m doing. Plus, I received a fabulous referral for some Web marketing work for a law firm in southern Michigan; contract negotiations begin next week. It’s a rare treat to make money faster than you can spend it. However, much of this work may well fund a late-summer trip to Italy. Stay tuned.

All for now.

Politics & Culture

It Goes to 11: Ideology and the Increase in Ad Hominem Political Discourse

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A wise man will study the opinions from all sides of a question to improve his knowledge of the underlying dispute. Whether this scribe counts among the wise is open to debate, but modeling the behaviors of the wise is surely a start, on the theory that a journey of a thousand steps begins by letting a hundred flowers bloom.  As such, although I’m a center-right conservative, I frequently read the perspectives of libertarians, liberals, socialists, anarchists, reactionaries, centrists — the rich range of contemporary political discourse. I’ve found this engagement has helped me to better define my own arguments while occasionally giving me an opportunity to correct various distortions or elisions that “my” side may perpetrate, sometimes accidentally and sometimes not.  I’ve even changed opinions on some things (e.g., civil unions) based on reasoned argumentation posed from outside my tribal echo chamber.

Alas, over the last few years, it seems that the investment in this process pays ever smaller dividends.

What fascinates are two simultaneous trends, both fueled by bloggers.

First, within the conservative movement, the mainstreaming of a handful of influential bloggers has led to a sharpening of the knives — with blades directed inward. The folks at Red State are perhaps the most top-of-mind, but they’re not the only ones. Divorced from the need to actually win elections, they content themselves to play the kingmaker, with ideological purity and loyalty to a self-defined “conservative base” serving as the paramount virtues.  That folks like Erick Erickson and the activists at Heritage Action believe they’re empowered to define what constitutes authentic conservatism (i.e., “what Mitt Romney isn’t”) is bad enough; that more established and more prudent voices haven’t mounted a healthy defense of a more robust and well-rounded definition of contemporary conservatism smacks of kowtowing to the barbarians at the gate without even bothering to pour flaming oil o’er the rampart to see if the ruffians will scatter.

Second, within the progressive movement, it seems like snark and invective increasingly substitute for coherent argument. Once upon a time — those far-away days of the second term of the Bush administration — I’d read the headlines from FireDogLake or Talking Points Memo; although I rarely agreed, at least on balance I’d encounter well-formed opinions to make the effort worthwhile. Nowadays, vulgar epithets reign supreme and simply asserting that someone is a Very Bad Person is considered the “QED” part of the argument. Contemporary progressive bloggers — with notable exceptions like Hamsher, Kaus and Mitchell — usually engage in more spleen-venting than discourse, and bumper-sticker sloganeering constitutes the breadth and depth of most progressive writing nowadays. Even local bloggers get in on the act; Michigan Liberal refuses to refer to Gov. Rick Snyder as anything but “benevolent overlord Rick Michigan.”

And don’t get me started on the libertarians; reading Reason sometimes enlightens, sometimes infuriates, with clear fact-based reasoning in one piece and smug condescension dripping from the next. The ultimate political box of chocolates.

So. Picture American ideology as a spectrum. It’s not black-or-white, or even a tri-color bar. Instead, it’s a sliding scale of opinion animated by value judgments that date to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Inasmuch as some would like to identify a laundry list of personal policy preferences and ascribe them as the only authentic form of whatever -ism they favor, the average person doesn’t break into a clear, pure ideological archetype. Except, of course, for politicians who vote according to their ideology, but that’s more a matter of cynicism than belief.

In the current environment, some conservative bloggers are looking more and more like mafioso enforcers, whereas progressive bloggers are looking more and more like spoiled six-year-olds simultaneously deprived of a favorite toy and effective parenting.

Is it any wonder that people feel like contemporary political discourse is more polarized?

The parallel to institutional Catholicism is astonishing. Over the years, bishops largely stopped exercising the role of moral authority, delegating those functions to those with an agenda more politically tactical than ecclesiologically strategic. The bishops wasted their moral capital, to the point that even Barack Obama thought he could roll the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops over the recent contraception flap.

In like manner, mainline political leaders either ignored the problem of hyper-aggressive activists or pandered to them. Very few have actually stood up to them in a meaningful fashion, despite that they don’t really represent even their respective bases.  Where’s WFB’s successor when we need him? Or the next Daniel Patrick Moynihan?

Instead, we have weak political leaders who respond more readily to a small sliver of their home ideology’s activist base than to the demands of responsible governance.

I’m not sure that America is substantially more polarized, recent statistics notwithstanding. I think people are more willing to fit themselves into certain canned ideological categories, but much like with ethics, no one really fits well into a single bucket. The difference is that it’s easier in the Age of the Internet for self-appointed commissars of purity to purge their ideological segment of the kulaks than for political leaders to stand up to the bullying.

Just like with the bishops in the 1960s and 1970s, but I digress.

The TL;DR version: If you’re tired of increasing ideological polarization, look no further than the unchecked ad hominems flowing from those who’ve been most successful at seizing the megaphone. Until political leaders step up and actually lead, we can look forward to more of the same.

Politics & Culture

You Go To The Polls With the Candidates You Have

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Don Rumsfeld: “You go to war with the army you have.” Alas, the GOP will go to the polls with the candidates it has — but the Party of Lincoln seems to have opted to bring knives to a tank fight.

On a federal level, the nomination battles continue, although the Keystone Kops routine of these incessant televised debates benefits no one as strongly as Barack Obama. Where else can he get hundreds of hours of sound bites of various Republicans drawing blood from whoever will be the eventual nominee?

Depending on the day of the week, phase of the moon and polling outfit under contract, Mitt Romney is either the obvious front-runner or a distant second behind Newt Gingrich. Ron Paul, the Republican version of Crazy Uncle Lester, won’t go away no matter how plain the writing on the wall. Rick Santorum heckles from the wings, having performed well in Iowa but without any sort of dollars or infrastructure to perform well anywhere else in the country. Newt Gingrich seems to be in full-frontal Looney Tunes mode; one day he attacks, the next day he retracts, the day after he’s boldly reorganizing the floor plan of the House chamber to accommodate the new Congressmen from America’s pending lunar state.

Meanwhile, the pundits wage a battle for the soul of the conservative movement. Some — most prominently Erick Erickson of RedState — define conservatism as being whatever Mitt Romney’s not, irrespective of what Romney’s for. The Majarushie, Rush Limbaugh, seems almost as scattershot about the candidates as a Rick Perry debate answer. Mark Steyn is so consumed by the debt bomb that he may not have noticed that New Hampshire had a primary. George Will, Charles Krauthammer and Peggy Noonan speak as voices of reason, but in a season when National Review and The Weekly Standard are reviled as centrist organs of some nefarious “Republican Establishment,” it’s not clear that what passes for reason nowadays even deserves a voice — let alone three. Ask any two prominent public conservatives for an opinion and you’ll wind up with seven conflicting answers.

The real lesson here is that there’s a dangerously wide gulf between boots-on-the-ground activists (often, prominent bloggers) and elected officials. The former often insist on purity at all costs. The latter, frequently demonized as “establishment types,” worry more about electability and skill at governance even if you have to suck up a bad logroll at times. Conservatives used to grudgingly obey the WFB dictum that you support the most conservative candidate electable. Today, the rabid wing of the conservative movement values symbolic purity over substantive success. Look no further than the way groups like RedState and Heritage Action have targeted U.S. Rep. Fred Upton for extinction. Upton is a genuinely decent and honorable man (I met him several times while an officer in the College Republicans at Western Michigan University) who has assembled a solid career of center-right policy wins. But because he didn’t pinky swear to someone’s pledge or have a hissy fit about light bulbs, he’s persona non grata. Never mind that if Upton were to be successfully primaried, the seat would likely fall into the Democratic column. Kalamazoo and its environs aren’t exactly staunch Republican territory (MI-06 went +8 for Obama). But hey, apparently it’s better to purge the kulaks even if it kicks the GOP back into minority status.

Speaking of Michigan — Pete Hoekstra still appears to be the leading nominee to challenge Sen. Debbie Stabbenow, although the powers-that-be that usually meddle in state Republican politics have resurrected an old ally to oppose the Holland-area native. Why? Probably because Hoekstra, when he first won his seat in Congress, launched a surprise and successful primary challenge against an obviously corrupt but very well-connected Congressman, and that man’s allies still bear a grudge. Hoekstra would make an outstanding addition to the U.S. Senate — his even-handedness as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee remains particularly laudable.

“Tis the silly season of national politics. Everyone’s jockeying for influence, and the knives of partisanship slice with ruthless abandon. This year, the conservative movement seems fractured in ways I don’t recall in my lifetime. The basic problem remains the question of ideological purity, and the degree to which we’ll accept a strong and electable candidate (for any race, in any jurisdiction) in the face of a less-qualified but more ideologically driven competitor.

The stakes are high. Let’s hope that in the end, the GOP can rally around its troops and win the battle instead of fracking each other and leaving no one left to man the barricades against the Obama blitz.

Politics & Culture

Surviving the Apocalypse

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We’ve seen the doomsday scenarios played out in countless novels and big-budget films: Some calamity strikes, civilization collapses, and only a few stragglers are left to survive against the odds. Their humanity and ingenuity is put to the test, but in the end, our heroes carry the day and lead us to hope that Earth 2.0 will be wiser and kinder than its ill-fated predecessor.

If a real doomsday arrives, though, the results will be less kind. Picture it: Famine. War. Rape. Disease. Wanton murder. Illiteracy. Prostitution.

What might a future look like? What must stout-hearted people do to survive, if the prophecies of those pesky Mayans prove accurate?

Assume a total global catastrophe, like a horrific virus or nuclear event or solar flare that kills 95 percent of the population and eradicates effective government. In the first few days, the struggle is simply to survive the event itself — steering clear of infected people, seeking protection from radioactive fallout, etc. Long-distance communication may well cease; electricity and water probably would stop flowing and gasoline becomes worth its weight in gold. Families would try to connect and people would seek supplies necessary for their short-term survival, even if acquiring them meant looting and pillaging or even killing.

As reality sets in over the next few weeks, though, a few things would likely happen:

  • The elderly and infirm would die.
  • Small children would be at elevated risk, especially if their parents died.
  • More and more aggressive, Type A folks would seek to dominate the supply chain around them, forming the nexus of small chieftains that would rule over areas not already divided along tribal lines.
  • Society would fragment along ethnic/tribal/familial lines in areas where those traditions still carry weight. People would have to increasingly make tough choices to survive, in the “If you want bread, give me your 15-year-old daughter for the night” vein.

In the unfolding months and years, a pseudo-medieval system of the strong controlling the weak would prevail. Most durable resources like transport, weapons and tools become prized objects, typically looted from “before the fall.” Odds are likely that a patchwork of communities would arise across the world. In places where a strong local community exists — think Africa and the Middle East — existing authority structures may well endure. In places like Europe, North America, Russia and China, civilization would fragment along much more strongly Hobbesian lines; picture survivalists with guns offering protection in return for labor, obedience and access to nubile young girls.

But what happens a century later? What happens when the tools break and there’s nothing left to loot? What happens when the bullets and gasoline run out? What happens when the antibiotics and canned food are gone? When the doctors are all dead?

In the Middle Ages, Europe adapted to climate and disease with “more of the same” — a feudal, agrarian society may not have a lot of excess resources, but it could subsist in all but the most horrific of conditions. If modern-day North America collapsed, would enough people remain with the skills necessary to re-create even a feudal level of society? Would we regress from high-tech to agriculture to hunter-gatherer mode? And even if we did farm for a while, who among us could mine or smelt iron or even copper so that we could replace our tools as they wear out and break? Who has sufficient woodworking knowledge to build large structures or sailing vessels? What would happen to literacy? If top-down oppression became the dominant mode of small-unit political organization, how would cooperative villages with a healthy division of labor spring up?

Tough questions. The best a person could do in the early days after the apocalypse is simply survive. After that, all bets are off.

So what prompts this blog post? Merely this: Social fragmentation and happy-go-lucky utopianism remain the hallmark of today’s left-wing ideologies. When push comes to shove, and Occupy fetishists have the chance to live the “we are family” mode of Rousseau-inspired communitarianism, will a post-capitalist, post-apocalyptic world be happier and more free? Or will it look like Europe in the Dark Ages?

Think about what it would be like to survive the apocalypse. Think about what your ideology says about human nature. Then try to reconcile the cognitive dissonance.

Politics & Culture

Tax Rates — The Next Civil Rights Battle?

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Amid the drama of the Occupy movement, with its anti-corporate sloganeering, and the push by Democrats in Washington to reduce the deficit through tax hikes, conservatives seem to be waging a rearguard action. Prominent Republicans (the “Young Guns” of the House, notably excepted) appear to be mostly accepting of Democratic arguments at face value, without bothering to dig into the premises behind those arguments. The game seems like a tit-for-tat struggle over talking points for which the Dems, by virtue of their ethics-laden rhetorical style, enjoy a natural advantage. Who, after all, wants to be seen as taking away goodies away from voters?

The problem is that the Democrats, by and large, simply aren’t serious yet about the discontinuity between their policies and the health of the country; they either refuse to acknowledge, or fail to understand, the cliff up to which their entitlement programs have pushed the federal treasury. It was smart politics a century or even a generation ago to promise more Social Security, more Medicare, more union benefits. More, more, more. Yet it’s increasingly obvious that America has reached a point — brilliantly observed and meticulously calculated by the likes of National Review‘s Kevin Williamson and Mark Steyn — where the old rules simply don’t work anymore.

To be fair to the Democrats, it’s not exactly easy to pivot when your party’s playbook has transformed from a path of short-term electoral success to a program of long-term national suicide; witness the GOP struggle to define a coherent foreign policy in the aftermath of the Soviet dissolution. The wrenching change that accompanies a material shift in the country’s fortunes rarely ends well for ideologues who anchor their political edifice to yesterday’s reality — think, for example, of the unceremonious death of the Whig Party before the Civil War and the implosion of the Republicans during the early New Deal years. We can hold out hope that the Party of Jefferson will find a bold leader who will reorient the left toward a saner worldview. It’s possible … but then, so is failure.

Yet although there are hints that some Democrats have wisened to the new economic reality (think James Carville or Doug Schoen), the rank-and-file of the party seems caught in the cross hairs of a struggle between centrist-leaning New Democrats and hard-left Progressive Democrats. The failure of the so-called Supercommittee to find meaningful deficit reduction seems to boil down to one point: Republicans wanted to cut spending without increasing taxes. Democrats wanted to make wealthy people pay higher taxes so as to reduce the spending cuts to programs that they favor.

This leads to a curious impasse, with the Dems forging a curious end-run around it through the politics of group discreditation.

American history is replete with examples of scapegoating. When hard-working Protestants were priced out of the labor market in the nineteenth century, Irish Catholic immigrants bore the blame — and the wrath of government, through immigration restrictions and laws that made it harder for Catholics to integrate into mainstream society. When Detroit suffered the first massive wave of layoffs in the 1980s, people blamed Japan and Japanese. During the national paranoia after the Soviet bomb and Sputnik, the rump of U.S. communism was persecuted without mercy. In the 2000s, it became fashionable to blame Mexican illegals and NAFTA for “taking good jobs” from white Americans (despite that white Americans steadfastly refused to take those jobs). After Pearl Harbor, FDR ordered Japanese Americans rounded up and put in prison camps; after the Civil War, wounded Southern pride exacted its pound of flesh from freed blacks, setting up generations of segregation and lynchings.

And so on, and so on. Easier to blame than to reform.

America overcame institutional scapegoating largely though a deeper commitment to ensuring civil rights for all citizens. Anti-Catholic bias is mostly gone. Racism has largely been eradicated from government. Everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. Although some problems remain — why does anyone care if a Mormon is elected president? And why is Mexican immigration still such a hot potato? — the default position in polite society remains one of neutrality and toleration of our differences.

Curious, then, that the response of the Most Elevated Disciples of Toleration, the Democratic left, seems to play the scapegoating game again with reckless abandon. Economy in the tank? Blame “millionaires and billionaires” who’ve gamed the system by speculating off of unsustainable bubbles that left the working family’s 401(k) plans empty. Can’t find a job? Blame “large corporations” for sending jobs overseas. Cutting back on bloated local spending? It’s because “the rich” aren’t paying their “fair share.”

Is there any problem in today’s America that doesn’t spring from the wealthy? One would think the rhetoric of socking it to the Rich Parasite would have fallen away after Auschwitz and Treblinka and Birkenau, but apparently it’s still okay as long as you substitute “millionaires and billionaires” for “Jews.”

Blame substitutes for reform, because reform would make the Democrats face the unpleasant reality that a not-insubstantial share of today’s economic crisis results from generations of DNC-sanctioned policy preferences. Easier ignore the facts and point fingers than to accept responsibility for giving birth to Leviathan.

Housing bubble? Look at the irrational federal expansion of the Community Reinvestment Act that mandated banks to make housing loans based on sociopolitical rather than economic factors. Death of heavy industry? Most of this comes from generous union contracts, making domestic labor significantly more costly than foreign labor. Infrastructure decay? It costs much more in time and regulatory compliance just to get an clean environmental impact statement — making such projects unattractive and inherently risky. Medicare at risk? The doc fix doesn’t help, leaving fewer and fewer providers willing to pick up federally insured patients.

America has a lot of problems. Insufficient taxation of the wealthy isn’t among them. Consider:

  • For tax year 2009, the top 1 percent of wage earners paid 36.7 percent of all federal income taxes. The top 10 percent of wage earners — those with a federal adjusted gross income of just $112k or higher — paid 70.5 percent of all federal income taxes. By comparison, the bottom 50 percent of wage earners paid 2.3 percent of all federal income taxes.
  • Taxing income at 50 percent for earners in the $1 million to $10 million category would raise enough revenue to reduce the deficit a mere 8 percent (and the debt, just 1 percent). Taxing at 100 percent for all people earning $10 million or more would generate a 12 percent deficit reduction and a 2 percent debt reduction. Guess what? That’s a drop in the bucket.

So. Even if we granted every progressive’s wet dream and taxed the wealthy at 100 percent levels, we won’t have enough revenue to solve America’s financial problems. Not even close.

Demonizing the wealthy isn’t about economics, it’s about politics. It’s about redirecting blame from bad policy to allegedly bad people. It’s easier to lambaste successful Americans for “not paying their fair share” — and why isn’t 70 percent of revenue among the top 10 percent of earners fair enough? — than it is to admit that a socioeconomic model based on wealth redistribution eventually proves unsustainable.

Conservatives need to fight back against this demonization of the successful by turning economic success into a civil right. Just as it’s not fair to scapegoat Jews or Catholics or blacks or gays or Mexicans for our problems, it’s also not fair to scapegoat the wealthy. The counter-argument must self-consciously adopt the language of civil rights activism if it’ll stick against Democrats who relish class warfare as much as children relish candy.

The rich didn’t make America’s economic problems; bad policy did. If we want to play the blame game, lets start with generations of politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, who treated America’s wallet like a no-limit credit card with a bill date of February 30. And instead of merely pointing fingers, let’s put in place policies that promote economic growth and reduce the influence of burdensome regulations pushing down on small businesses across the fruited plain.

America faces a difficult economic future. Present spending is unsustainable and no amount of tax increases will fix it. The only solution comes from significant spending restraint and entitlement reform. If we continue to let the Democrats blame the wealthy, we will turn these important reforms into an unnecessarily ideological hot potato that means we’ll see ruthless ideological warfare in the back seat as Uncle Sam drives off the cliff.

The unhappy ending is avoidable. The question is — will we stop the unnecessary and distracting class warfare and actually address the problem, or will we let envious scapegoating continue to block meaningful reform?

Perhaps a bit of good old-fashioned civil rights talk can help the body politic get the scapegoat off the altar long enough for our leaders to institute real and meaningful reform.

Politics & Culture

Liberate Wall Street! Or, Thoughts re: #Occupy Shenanigans

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The phenomenon that is “Occupy Wall Street” boggles the mind. The inchoate protests across the country that have no rhyme, reason or focus — other than to “just protest” — marks either the canary in social discontent’s coal mine, or Thermidor for the progressive Left. Regardless, watching people protest with no coherent message, animated only by their desire to benefit from taxpayer largesse, proves instructive.

Two points.

First, the Occupy movement, despite its small size and dazzling parade of clowns, represents the same type of discontent from the Left as the Tea Party marked for the Right. The Tea Party said: “I don’t want to pay for other people’s bailouts.” The Occupy movement says: “You paid for everyone else’s bailout, now where’s mine?”

It’s easy — too easy, for some conservative pundits — to let ridicule substitute for engagement in their approach to the Occupy phenomenon. The “where’s mine?” attitude on full flower in New York is easy to dismiss as naive or to caricature as the whinings of people too stupid to realize that a master’s degree in Medieval French Feminist Literature has relatively little market power. The dismissals are on-point, to be sure, but they miss the point at the same time. The protesters are demanding personal bailouts. It’s not caricature if it’s fact, and the fact is, student loan debt (most significantly) has fanned this particular flame of discontent, and those left with more debt than they can pay back really do feel like they’ve been sold a bill of goods. Deriding it without acknowledging that people genuinely believe they deserve a personal bailout risks missing the forest for the face-pierced trees, and acting like personal bailouts are unreasonable despite our history with all sorts of public bailouts (not to mention welfare policy) constitutes willful blindness of a point that many consider to be valid in principle if not always in practice.

Second, the emergence of the Occupy movement and its sycophantic support among mainstream Democrats from Obama on down, unmasks in a creative new way the far Left agenda.  The general public so far seems less than amused. Conservatives and even some moderates snicker at some of the demands that have leaked from the “General Assembly” in New York — including immediate debt forgiveness for everyone, everywhere — but in truth, they are doing everyone a form of service. They are showing the country where the real Left pole lies. Elected Democrats shy away from this pole even though they’re beholden to it, much as elected Republicans have their own love-hate relationship with the far Right. Yet the challenge from the Left is that the old divisions (centrist, liberal, progressive, socialist, communist, anarchist) are eroding just as the internal divisions eroded within the Right in the last generation. People point to today’s monolithic Republican Party with much less internal ideological diversity as being a bad thing, yet this outcome is the end result of a process beginning with Watergate and continuing through the GWB years — and it’s only now beginning in earnest within the Left. Just as moderate Republicans are an endangered species, so also are the moderate Democrats: Just look at how the Blue Dogs were wiped off the map in 2010.

This means that in the coming years, the folks to the left side of the center almost surely will undergo the wrenching sea-change in ideology that will pull Democrats further to the fringe and impose a more rigid political and ideological template on rank-and-file politicians. The Republicans moved further Right in the 1990s and 2000s; the Democrats will move further Left in the 2010s and 2020s.

A NoLabelist third-party conglomeration of moderates is unlikely to prevail; the system revolves around a two-party duopoly, and in any case, not many beyond the ranks of self-appointed public intellectuals feel the call to rally to the cause of moderation. Instead, the independents will trend Right or tune out altogether.

It’s not hard to envision this moment — the Occupy movement, the weakness of the Obama administration, the ongoing failures of Keynesian stimulus, “leading from behind,” the backlash against Obamacare — as the point where another generational change begins. A change where the aspirations of the progressives decisively lose favor with the broad Middle America, and Democrats seem poised to devolve into decades of bitter internecine wars of ideology. Whatever the outcome for the Democrats, the progressive movement looks like its on the verge of collapse, at least as a serious contender for mindshare among educated citizens.

The progressives want to Occupy Wall Street. Fine. Yet it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if the net result is that we’re now witnessing the first wave of the liberation of Wall Street from the powers of regulation and redistribution that are only now shedding the pretext of moderation and allowing their full ideology to flower.

America is a center-right nation. Always has been. When the progressives could cloak their ambitions under the veneer of moderation, Democrats have been successful. Just look at Bill Clinton. It takes a real crisis of public confidence mixed with effective blame assignment toward the Right to elect a true left-wing president — FDR, LBJ, BHO. Under ordinary circumstances (think McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, William Jennings Bryan, or even TR’s Bull Mooses) the further to the left they drift, the less likely the odds they’ll be elected.

Market economies work. That so many graduates with useless degrees are unemployed sort of proves the point. As long as the Right presents a solid pro-market strategy that leaves reasonable room for helping out the less fortunate, conservatives will win election after election. A pro-growth agenda that holds people responsible for the choices they make while providing a safety net to help those whose choices were constrained by circumstance will lift more boats than a soak-the-rich, give-to-the-poor Robin Hood fantasy that seems to animate the Left lately.

And as far as the freak shows in Zucotti Park — laugh, if you must. But beneath the unwashed hippie facade lies a discontent that could fizzle. Or explode. Conservatives would be well-advised to keep eyes wide open while they chuckle at the spectacle, lest they find themselves being tomorrow’s lion fodder.

Politics & Culture

Michigan Politics: Post-Primary Edition

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The results of Michigan’s August primary are in, and the situation is … interesting.

Governor

The results from the AP:

Republican primary
5,715 of 5,732 precincts – 99 percent

Rick Snyder 379,245 – 36 percent ¶
Pete Hoekstra 278,584 – 27 percent ¶
Mike Cox 238,858 – 23 percent ¶
Mike Bouchard 126,807 – 12 percent ¶
Tom George 16,911 – 2 percent ¶

For the governor’s race, businessman and political neophyte Rick Snyder handily trounced the rest of the pack. Snyder’s candidacy is a curious one: A self-described “one tough nerd,” he was the president and COO of Gateway Computers and enjoys an admirable record as a business leader. Arguably, Snyder won because Hoekstra and Cox split the dedicated conservative/establishment vote. Regardless, the nerd gets his chance to pick up the party mantle.

From a purely political perspective, Snyder’s election is thrilling. He is not a hard-right Republican, and this is a good thing. I firmly believe that one of the most significant handicaps for the Michigan GOP is its slavish devotion to its country-club grandees — folks like the DeVos and Yob families, whose pocketbooks ensure compliance but whose social sensibilities are out-of-touch with a state that cares more about economic performance than contrived social mores. The Michigan GOP, like the Kent County GOP, is heavily influenced by the Ada-style country-club elitism that, despite its charms, is simply inconsistent with the culture of a state that remains “Reagan Democrat.” Perhaps Snyder’s candidacy will break open the state party to diverse voices and new faces.

Policy-wise, Snyder is growing on me. I had been an early Hoekstra supporter, and since I discounted Snyder’s potential, I paid him less heed than I should have. Snyder presents a solid pro-business plan for the state. He advocates policies that advance economic growth and more efficient state governance. You see much less by way of unnecessary grandstanding over touchstone cultural-conservative issues from him, and this is good. With Obama-style progressive Virg Bernero — darling of organized labor — as the Democratic nominee, keeping the argument solidly economic in this climate will likely work to Snyder’s benefit.

I dived a bit deeper into just one of Snyder’s points in his 10-point plan, giving a thorough reading into his healthcare white paper. I must admit — Snyder gets it right. Promoting medical homes for high-risk patients, emphasizing lifestyle modification to reduce the long-term cost of chronic illness, and managing Medicaid reimbursement rates will go a long way to fixing what ails Michigan’s creaky health care system. If Snyder can get MDCH to stop doing stupid things like simultaneously replacing both of its Medicaid eligibility systems with software solutions proven to fail in other states, we might be on to something.

Net result: I can stand up for Rick Snyder.

Congressional Races

CD2: Bill Huizenga barely squeaked out a primary win against Jay Riemersma. This is the seat vacated this cycle by U.S. Rep. Peter Hoekstra, who stepped down to run for governor. Although this is a deep-red district, and Huizenga is running as a red-meat Republican, the primary race was surprisingly competitive.

CD3: Justin Amash, a 30-year-old state legislator, took this race with 40 percent of the vote. Amash beat veteran county lawmaker Steve Heacock and state Sen. Bill Hardiman, who took 28 and 26 percent, respectively. The seat is vacant this cycle because U.S. Rep. Vern Ehlers is retiring. Amash benefited from the grown-up candidates splitting the serious vote, while the enthusiastic youngsters who listened to the vague promises and ultra-hard-right nostrums from the Amash campaign carried the day. Of course, it helps when the DeVos family bankrolls his federal race just as his parents bankrolled his state race. Among dedicated watchers of West Michigan politics, informal consensus is that Amash is something of a blank slate, like a Manchurian candidate sponsored by the Club for Growth; he is vague on specific policy and remains relatively unpolished, echoing hard-right pieties but lacking in the gravitas to be a major player in Washington. This fall will be fun: Amash will stand against Democrat Pat Miles. Miles, a local lawyer, is a bit more of a practical, middle-of-the-road Dem. In a district long-held by quiet moderates like Ehlers, Paul Henry, and Jerry Ford, it is an open question whether a firebrand conservative with relatively limited experience can persuasively carry the district. Conventional wisdom is that he wins in 2010 but will be vulnerable as his district trends slowly leftward thanks to changing demographics.

CD6: U.S. Rep. Fred Upton beat back a primary challenger, but the margin was surprisingly narrow; he won 57-43 despite his incumbency and absurd spending gap over his competitor.

CD7: Former U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg gets a rematch against the Democrat who displaced him in 2008, current U.S. Rep. Mark Schauer.

Analysis

The 2010 election cycle will be one for the history books — the spotlight will be on Congressional races, where the results will be largely viewed as a referendum on the Obama presidency and the stewardship of the Pelosi/Reid Congress. Pundits will therefore look to various competitive House and Senate races to the exclusion of most other campaigns — even to governorships, which are crucial this cycle because of decennial redistricting.

If the election were held today, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball suggests the GOP picks up 7 Senate seats, 32 House seats, and 6-7 governorships.

However, the real question for the GOP isn’t whether the House or Senate will be retaken or how many governorships it possesses. Rather, the party must focus on its message and its candidates. For every solid conservative with good credentials and a coherent program, there are candidates who have won primary challenges based solely on a populist message. These candidates may not be the best choice for the job — see “Amash,” above — but they won either because better candidates split the serious vote, or because voter anger propelled the “fresh voice” to victory.

For West Michigan, the election season will be competitive even though the certain races are foregone conclusions. We will see Huizenga and Amash in Congress, most likely. And barring poor performance or suprises this autumn, Rick Snyder will probably move into the governor’s mansion.

So yes, let’s focus on the elections. But the elections are going to change our political culture in ways it hasn’t been touched in a very long time, and this is the part of the equation that is the most interesting of all.

Let the election season begin!

Politics & Culture

Several Rejoinders

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A few news stories of late have caught my eye.  Herewith a few comments:

  1. Former Democratic press secretary Terry Michael penned “Lies of the Ethics Industry,” published at reason.com on April 30. Michael’s money quote: “Four groups now work to convince us we have the worst government money can buy: (1) an ethics industry spawned in Washington by Watergate, which features nonprofits lobbying for regulation of speech they don’t like; (2) journalists who collude with ethics purveyors, writing cheap-and-easy stories fitting a corruption narrative they create; (3) politicians, especially Democratic Progressive Era throwbacks, who think evil-doing can be stopped with new and better rules and who pander to the ethics industry, the media, and (ironically) to citizens convinced that Democrats are just as sleazy as Republicans; and (4) citizens, frustrated by the budget-busting consequences of the free lunches we accept from politicians.” The bigger point Michael makes, and with which I happen to agree, is that the old journalistic adage to “follow the money” is as lazy as it is cynical. The confluence of money and policy is not, ipso facto, a negative event that threatens Joe Sixpack or undermines American freedom. Money is a tool, and fetishizing the role of money as a chiefly nefarious motive for action is less a statement of fact than an admission to an overweening cynicism that makes every politician a crook and renders every campaign dollar a cut to Democracy’s carotid.
  2. Peter Luke, a columnist and analyst covering Michigan politics, recently penned a defense of Michigan’s new bans against texting-while-driving and smoking in a bar or restaurant.  Luke’s conclusion: “Just about everyone has a cell phone with a keyboard and those of a certain age think there’s nothing wrong with using it anywhere. Just like a smoker who would never light up in the office thinks nothing of doing so after work in the bar down the street. Distilled to their essence, the smoking and texting laws are a simple two-sentence response: You can’t. Not anymore.” Well, OK.  His argument is that both texting-while-driving and smoking in bars generate negative externalities that some other citizens may occasionally bear — the fender-bender from inattentive driving, or tobacco scent on a sweater. The problem, though, is that the proper role of governmental regulation is not to preserve citizens from potential negative consequences. If I happen to be fiddling with my radio while driving, and I cause an accident, then I’m liable for my inattentiveness. I’d rather see a penalty for careless driving, such that contributors to carelessness are recognized in a citation, than to categorically assert that a lawful action is unlawful in a specific context merely because some people are occasionally negligent. Likewise with smoking: If I prefer not to be subject to a smoke-filled bar, then I will find a bar that has no smoke. Why must people who enjoy a cigar or cigarette while drinking be punished because non-smokers believe themselves entitled to go anywhere, anytime, and not encounter smoke?
  3. Victor Davis Hanson, writing in National Review, penned a nice essay on the use of euphemism and dysphemism by the Obama administration. In a nutshell: The lecturer-in-chief has a penchant for using positive locutions for things he favors (e.g., “undocumented workers” instead of “illegal immigrants”) and negative ones for things he disdains (e.g., referring to principled opposition as “phony smoke and mirrors”).  Words mean things. Amen, brother.

All for now.

Politics & Culture, Social Media, Marketing & Privacy

"Remember November" — the RGA Gets It

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The new advertising campaign from the Republican Governors Assocation, called Remember November, astonishes me for one simple reason: At long, long, long last, it appears that some in the Republican Party finally get it.
The two major Web ads released so far have been breathtakingly good; they feel like a movie trailer, and I actually had an emotional response to them. The juxtaposition of imagery, background music and iconic imagery is both powerful and well-done.  It’s not often I’m impressed by political marketing, but Remember November does make my head nod in respectful appreciation.
A few comments on the RN campaign:

  • The mix of “V-for-Victory” and Guy Hawkes imagery is powerful, even for those whose knowledge of English history is a wee bit deficient. I suspect that the suggestiveness — the provocativeness — of the ads was a deliberate, first-rate example of call-and-response.  By giving the Left something to get upset about in eminently predictable fashion, the RGA is in a position to anticipate the blowback and thereby control the message.  This is smart.
  • The effort by the RGA is an implicit repudiation, I think, of the debacle that is Michael Steele’s RNC.  Kudos to the RGA for having the balls to get in the game and avoid the RNC’s shameful dithering.
  • The above point notwithstanding, it’s curious that the RGA is mounting a significant campaign that isn’t specifically geared toward gubernatorial races, and it’s simultaneously heartening that the campaign’s message is an unambiguous call-to-arms against big-gummint liberalism.
  • RN represents the first stirrings that some on the Right are willing to embrace modes of communication that resonate outside the typical country-club market that so much Republican advertising seems to favor.  RN is a shot in the arm for countless YAF and College Republican groups, who finally can point to an official party message that can appeal to younger voters. In 2006 and 2008, the Dems had the “cool” factor in spades, which may be one reason that so many college students — who profess a liberalism whose implications so few can clearly articulate — gravitated to Obama. Like it or not, a trendy countercultural message resonates with students much more strongly than a litany of policy points will.
  • The campaign seems to get that the most salient sociopolitical issue in the U.S. in 2010 isn’t health care or the environment or Afghanistan, but rather the proper relationship between government and the people.  The litany of talking points against the Democrats in Washington has been so oft recounted that another exposition merely belabors the point.  America is a center-right country, and the antics of the Obama regime seems to have re-awakened a long-dormant disaffection with government overreach and incompetence at all levels.  How this disaffection plays out at the ballot box this fall will be a talking point for pundits for a generation.

So.  I’m going to Remember November.  Will you?