Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Fatigue
Is it November yet?
This is the first presidential election cycle where I’ve been actively avoiding the news. I read a few blogs and get a “good enough” perspective on what is going on from there. I’d like to say I won’t be paying attention on election night, but that’s just not true. I always vow to stay away and I always fail. I get too emotionally invested in this sort of thing.
I realized not too long ago that my perspective on elections has changed since the last election cycle, and it took me a bit to figure out exactly what it was that changed. Then I realized – it was Nock and his writings. Every time I hear anything from the media about the election, a couple of Nock’s phrases repeat over and over in my head…
…just a bunch of people rooting for sports teams…
…it’s nothing but boob-bumping…
Nock was very cynical about democracy. He felt that the people certainly had a right to have a say in their government, but just because they had that right didn’t mean that they had the wisdom to use that right effectively. In fact, what he saw around him was people viewing politics as just another competition, with people lining up to mindlessly root for one side or the other, and the majority of the political process dedicated to banal stunts that might influence this mindless herd of people.
I’m not quite that cynical about democracy. I think many people make rational decisions about which side to support, though I’m sorry to see that the values of our nation has a whole have slipped to the point that centrism is where it is today.
What drives me nuts is that the candidates and the media seem to play hard to the idiot demographic though. Yes, Obama misspoke, probably due to suffering from intense fatigue. Can we get back to talking about how he is a commie? Yes, McCain has a bunch of houses and hates poor people. Perhaps we can talk about why he still believes in global warming now?
No, instead we get inundated with stupid inconsequential stuff. Every single day. Even news outlets that should know better get caught up in it. National Review in particular is a magazine that I read for its ideas. Every once in awhile they get caught up in politics rather than ideas, and during election season, it shifts almost all the way to pure politics. I don’t care about the speculation surrounding McCain’s VP choice. Let me know who it is once he’s picked, and I’ll decide whether or not I can stomach it enough to pull the lever. (Don’t pick Leiberman. Please.)
Perhaps the American people aren’t that interested in ideas, and both the media and the candidates are reacting to that. Or perhaps some fraction on either side is interested in ideas, but there are enough people that are not that a pandering campaign can bring a candidate to a majority. Or perhaps the only voters who are actually undecided are the ones that are most easily influenced by a circus.
Regardless of the reason, I can’t take it anymore. Wake me up when it’s time to pull the lever.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Special
I’ve been doing some reading, and I’ve come to a stunning conclusion. NASA has been lying to us for decades. There is life on Mars. Not just life, but human life.
With a little skill at computer photo manipulation, one can undo the false colorization and other attempts at hiding detail NASA has used in their photos taken by the Mars rovers to obscure the truth about Mars. Not only are there people, but also buildings, vehicles, and frighteningly enough, evidence of a major US military presence.
It is my belief that we are waging a significant war on Mars right now, and that this entire military campaign is being hidden from the population of the United States. Someone in our government is after something on Mars, but they don’t trust the population enough to let us in on the secret. Clearly this is a plot that needs to be exposed as soon as possible. The people deserve to know what their sons are dying for.
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I’ve been doing some reading, and I’ve come to a stunning conclusion. There are only a handful of people in the world that truly grasp the core ideals of Western civilization to the point of being able to effectively pass this information down to future generations.
It’s all detailed here, in an essay by Albert Jay Nock. In it, he draws a distinction between the masses and the remnant. According to Nock:
The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct… The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.
That is, the Remnant the few members of our society that are civilized, upstanding, moral, knowledgeable in the arts, sciences, and humanities, capable of recognizing and cultivating beauty, etc. The masses are… everyone else.
It is my belief that no matter what happens to the rest of society, this Remnant forms the backbone of a civilized society. Upon the onset of decadence in a society, these people are shoved into the background, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not. It is at this point that the quiet civilizing force that allows a culture to be both good and great goes into hiding, while the rest of the society decays in large part due to the absence of the influence of the Remnant. Then, the Remnant quietly try to survive to lend their civilizing force to whatever society rises from the ashes of the previous one.
The Remnant walk among us. They are not tattooed or branded or otherwise identifiable by sight. We can only identify them by meeting them and learning of their character and knowledge first-hand. We should do our best to help them in any way they can, and try ourselves to live up to the standards that come so naturally to them.
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A couple of weeks ago I was introduced to a forum of people that generally fit the stereotypical conspiracy theorist mold. Among the more bizarre people I ran across was someone that was using desktop photo manipulation software to “undo” the false coloring and “stretching” of images taken by the Mars rovers. It was clear to her, after these distortions were removed, that not only was there life on Mars, but there was a breathable atmosphere, a thriving civilization, and US military units.
Where she saw men in fedoras, everyone else saw piles of rocks.
There were a couple of people that gave her ideas some thought, but most ended up ridiculing her. It was decided that she was either a spectacularly tenacious troll, or mentally ill. Judging by what I read, my suspicion was that she was paranoid schizophrenic.
This person claimed to have special knowledge, knowledge that only she was sufficiently capable to unearth and bring to the attention of the world.
What bothered me about the whole thing was this: how is that so different from Nock? Nock claims knowledge of a special class of vitally important people that move in society largely unnoticed by the community at large. They typically chose to live in the background, and their influence on the society as a whole is subtle.
Not only that, but Nock claims that this hidden class of people is better than everyone else. Nock claims special knowledge of special people, people on whom the very survival of our civilization depends.
When I first read this, my reaction was split. The audacious arrogance of it all hit me first, followed by a gut feeling that Nock is absolutely right.
Some of you may be familiar with Nock and the spirit in which his words are intended. Nock writes and presents his ideas in a very factual manner, without intending them to be arrogant or showy. He presents the world as he sees it, without concern for the reaction of the reader to those ideas. Nock did not see himself as one of the Remnant, so he certainly wasn’t writing in an attempt to put himself on a pedestal. Nor do I think he was writing to give people an opportunity to declare themselves Remnant and pat themselves on the back. Rather, I think he was writing to encourage people to look inward and find ways to improve themselves, to work more towards living and being that ideal called the Remnant. One of Nock’s platitudes is that one cannot improve the world, one can only improve one’s self. However, one might work toward improving the world by encouraging others to improve themselves. Rather than singling out individuals for praise, I suspect this was his intent – to describe what he saw as the ideal human state, and even though few reach that state, many can be encouraged to improve themselves and strive toward that ideal.
I have been very reluctant to discuss some of Nock’s writings in public, his idea of the Remnant in particular, because of how his claim to special knowledge comes across to people. Those of us who prefer moral honorable behavior, and who value learning, knowledge, and understanding of our culture, already come across as strange to much of the populace. Now to push forth a theory that people like us, maybe even we ourselves, are the rock upon which civilization depends?
That comes across not only as astoundingly arrogant, but also cultish and kooky. Maybe not quite as bad as the fedoras on Mars lady, but close.
Is it possible to verify Nock’s assertion?
Typically any claims, bizarre ones in particular, are tested via the scientific method. The fedoras on Mars assertion is rather shallow, in that the lady’s claims to see things in the photographs was obviously false unless one has a spectacularly overactive imagination. But even so, we have cameras and rovers on Mars – those rock formations could be investigated close up. She claimed that NASA covered up evidence of human habitation by doctoring pictures. Raw data from these pictures can be found and analyzed. Some of this was done, all in vain, because the woman was not interested in a scientific analysis of her claims. However, this is a good example of the algorithms we instinctively go through to prove an assertion right or wrong.
Nock’s assertion about the Remnant does not lend itself nearly as well to such testing. Can we identify someone definitively as Remnant? Can we even make a definitive list of what characteristics such a person would have, in sufficient detail as to make identification possible? Can we provide concrete support for the claim that embodiment of this list of characteristics makes a person somehow better or more valuable than someone else?
I think the answer is no, because the crux of the argument lies on a personal value judgment. If one is interested in good outcomes for one’s self and one’s fellow man, one is led to have a moral code. No one is forced down this path, and this choice can not be proven to be better in the same sense that those rocks can be proven not to be a man in a fedora. To most of us, the good outcomes of morality are clear evidence of its superiority over the bad outcomes of nihilism. But nihilism is easy and self-indulgent, and thus many are drawn to it. When they ask for proof that your way is better, a very different value judgment way back in step one can make it impossible.
However, once one has moved past that step and accepted that good personal and societal outcomes are inherently better than bad outcomes, I think the rest of Nock’s argument follows. Western civilization is the culmination of thousands of years of trial and error, in many different ways. In terms of cultural habits that drive personal interaction. In terms of what we expect of our neighbors, from cleanliness to politeness. In terms of political systems that encourage freedom and discourage systematic oppression. In terms of economic systems that give everyone an opportunity to succeed, and with time, provide everyone who cares to take part a way to provide for their own basic needs. Knowledge of and belief in the superiority of these governmental and economic structures requires not just a grounding in western morality, but also in history and the other social sciences. Many can simply understand that system X means I have freedom and food, and system Y means I starve and get daily beatings. But do people understand why personal behaviors A, B, and C are intimately tied into the success of system X, while behaviors D, E, and F break down system X and move it inexorably toward system Y? Most, even those that understand the superiority of X over Y do not.
That, I believe, is where the Remnant comes in - as a societal storehouse of the knowledge necessary to build a prosperous and functional society. Even if the current society were to break down, the Remnant would go on, as their knowledge of what is good and right goes beyond mere knowledge into the very core of their beings and behavior. They and their knowledge will always be there to draw upon, if ever society has need to call upon them.
Nock’s claim of special knowledge of special people can come across as nutty in a similar way as the fedoras on Mars lady to those whose value system diverges from ours at step one. Unfortunately, it seems that as our culture coarsens more and more, those who value the ideals embodied in the Remnant become increasingly marginalized. Ideas like the existence of the Remnant get swatted down simply because our new definition of democracy has been socialized - it is a culture in which no one is better than anyone else, and anyone claiming special knowledge or special status is some combination of kooky and dangerous.
For that reason, I don’t go out of my way to shout Nock’s ideas from the rooftops. But it comforts me to know these people are out there, and I take great joy in occasionally meeting one personally. In the meantime, I do my best to bring their ideals and knowledge into my own life, for my own enrichment as much as for that of society as a whole. If I can raise children that carry on those ideals to future generations, I will consider my life to have been a success.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Epilogue)
I thought about the voices of all the people I’d met on the campaign trail. ... It wasn’t just the struggles of these men and women that had moved me. Rather, it was their determination, their self-reliance, a relentless optimism in the face of hardship. It brought to mind a phrase that my pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., had once used in a sermon.
The audacity of hope.
That was the best of the American spirit, I thought – having the audacity to believe that despite all evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict; the gall to believe that despite personal setbacks, the loss of a job or an illness in the family or a childhood mired in poverty, we had some control – and therefore responsibility – over our own fate.
It was that audacity, I thought, that joined us as one people. It was that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family’s story to the larger American story, and my own story to those of the voters I sought to represent.
I initially took on the exercise of reading this book, though perhaps burden is a more appropriate word than exercise, to better know my enemy. It took me a little longer to articulate exactly what my goal was – to understand the man and his beliefs, rather than just assume he is a caricature of the typical progressive. It is easy to demonize one’s opponents without really understanding them – you just stick them in a pre-made box and attack the box. Frequently in that case, one’s attacks come across as cliched and petty-sounding, only marginally suitable for a real thoughtful critique.
I learned something.
I learned that in this case, at least, the caricature isn’t a caricature. It’s real.
With very few exceptions, Obama is the party-line progressive of the last 100 years, repackaged in a youthful, charismatic, minority box, ready for immediate consumption by today’s modern, hip, Democratic voter. There’s rhetoric galore about getting along, about meeting people’s needs, about subsidizing people’s lifestyle choices – all things that are great if you live in San Francisco or Boulder or some politically and culturally homogeneous place where people actually want all of the stuff that he’s selling.
For the rest of us though, it seems that the options presented to us are to get with the program, or get out of the way and hand over our wallets. I don’t want the culture he’s selling, no matter how many times he pretends that it’s a culture of community and fellowship. It’s coerced community and forced fellowship, with his cult of personality and a big fat welfare state as it’s centerpiece.
I don’t want the economy that he’s selling either. He’s very clear that corporations exist to employ people, and their rights in and of themselves are minimal. Bluntly, it seems that there is nothing that cannot be taken away from a corporation, no limit on what the accommodations they can be forced to make. You make too much money? We confiscate it and redistribute that wealth. You have inflexible working hours? We force you to negotiate new working hours with each and every employee (no kidding, reference to this was made in passing in the epilogue.) This is part and parcel of the fixed-pie economy method of thinking – corporations exist to hand out jobs and nothing more. Any second-order effect on the economy, like prices going up in response to mandated inefficiencies, is to be ignored.
At night, the [Lincoln Memorial] is lit but often empty. Standing between marble columns, I read the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. I look out over the Reflecting Pool, imaging the crowd stilled by Dr. King’s mighty cadence, and then beyond that, to the floodlit obelisk and shining Capitol dome.
And in that place, I think about America and those who built it. This nation’s founders, who somehow rose above petty ambitions and narrow calculations to imagine a nation unfurling across a continent. And those like Lincoln and King, who ultimately laid down their lives in the service of perfecting an imperfect union. And all the faceless, nameless men and women, slaves and soldiers and tailors and butchers, constructing lives for themselves and their children and their grandchildren, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, to fill in the landscape of our collective dreams.
It is that process I wish to be a part of.
My heart is filled with love for this country.
What grabs me the most in this whole thing is how Obama can love this country, without understanding it, even a little. Those Founders didn’t just imagine a nation unfurling across a continent, they imagined a stable and free government in which people could govern themselves in self-determination without fear of oppression and interference. All of this, and I mean all of it, seems to have gone right over Obama’s head, in favor of his view that the Founders set up a system by which the working man can bang his fists on the table and demand a larger piece of pie.
That’s not America. And that’s not a vision of America to be proud of. That’s greed, thuggery, and no matter how you dress it up, that’s democracy subverted into bullying. But it seems that as long as you give people a sense of community in their bullying, it suddenly becomes acceptable. Everyone else is doing it, ya know?
I, too, wish for a change in the culture. I want people to work together, to join forces in helping the less fortunate, to push for higher personal and public standards. But I want them to do it voluntarily, to make the choice to live better lives and to demand better from others. One cannot impose community or cooperation from above – that’s effectively fascism.
I think it would be excessive to say that Obama is the worst thing to happen to this country. I don’t think his platform differs all that significantly from any of the last few Democratic presidential nominees. He’s right in the mainstream, as far as Democratic thought is concerned.
But that progressive ideology is something that must be fought tooth and nail every step of the way. Those of us on the right who understand what such things do to our culture, our moral fiber as a people, know that we can’t take much more of what progressivism has already brought us. There are those who would see us be more like Europe… and there are those who understand and appreciate the uniqueness that America is in the world.
It seems that most people who say that there is no difference between the candidates are those who have an unattainable ideal in mind for what this country should be. We aren’t going there, like it or not. What we do have, today, right in front of us, are two candidates – the progressive liberal and the moderate. I can’t say where the moderate will take us, and I’m as skeptical as the rest of you about him.
However, I now know exactly where the liberal wants to take us, and it is to a place of substantially greater taxes, greater control of your children, greater control of your health care choices, greater control of your diet, justices on the highest court of the land that feel no compulsion to respect the rule of law, etc. I, for one, cannot sit idly by and pretend there are no differences between the candidates.
Nothing in this book changed my mind about who I would vote for. But it did cement my reasons for doing so. I love my country too, but unlike Obama, I love it for the freedom and stability that it provides. Not just for the coffers that can be plundered and handed out to loyal voters.
Please vote for McCain in November. The future of our nation depends on each and every one of us doing the right thing on election day, even when it hurts our principles to do so.
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapter 9)
Chapter 9 is titled “Family”.
As someone who long ago decided, along with my wife, that only once of us would work outside the home so that the other could raise the children and homeschool, I find Obama’s talk about the hardship of raising kids in a two-working-parent household to be disingenuous and obnoxious. On one meager salary, my wife and I bought a small house and lived acceptably well. Now, it’s a crisis because people can’t send their kids to top schools and have ballet lessons unless both parents are working, and of course, the government needs to help.
Cry me a river.
It’s a manufactured crisis, because people want it all. They want big nice houses and choice communities, they want two nice cars, big TVs, etc etc etc. It’s hard to have all of this stuff on one income, so people choose to have both spouses work. Then they complain that they are stressed and sleep-deprived, and the kids suffer for it.
This is NOT a crisis, except among people with incomes well below the middle class range. This is a choice people make, a choice with consequences that people want to escape. Populist Obama, of course, is very happy to promise people assistance in escaping these consequences.
The solution, of course, is “high-quality affordable day care for every family that needs it.” Federal and state day care tax credits, subsidies to middle-class and low-income people, and improved licensing and training for day-care workers. And since we’ve already got the schools as a pseudo-day-care system, he proposes longer school days, summer school, and more after school programs. Cap it all off with paid parental leave laws, requiring employers to give people paid time off for parental duties.
What all of this amounts to is forcing someone like me, a father in a single income household, to pay taxes that end up subsidizing the lifestyle choices of others, in greater governmental support of day care and schools that I don’t use. Perhaps a large tax credit for homeschooling would be an appropriate offset, but fat chance you’ll see that anywhere in his agenda.
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If there’s one thing that social conservatives have been right about, it’s that our modern culture sometimes fails to fully appreciate the extraordinary emotional and financial contributions – the sacrifices and just plain hard work – of the stay-at-home mom. Where social conservatives have been wrong is in insisting that this traditional role is innate – the best or only model of motherhood. I want my daughters to have a choice as to what’s best for them and their families.
I can’t even begin to describe how irritating I find this passage.
When people make choices about how to run their families and their lives, they typically need information from others to weigh the pros and cons of their choices. It is usually somewhat difficult for people to experiment with family arrangements to determine what works best for them. Therefore, people rely on observation of others, as well as tradition and societal wisdom to figure out how to structure their lives.
I agree completely with Obama in wanting my daughters to have choices. However, unlike Obama, they will be taught early on that choices have consequences, and that not all choices are equal. Obama wants women to be able to do whatever they want, with the government filling in the gaps to raise their kids via schools and daycare. His message to women is that no matter how thin you spread yourself, no matter how many tasks you take on, the government will be behind you helping to take up your slack.
That is an awful message to send, one that hurts families and hurts children. Children need parents, not daycare workers. There is absolutely no question in my mind that a stay-at-home mom is the best situation for raising children, and in the interests of promoting guilt-free choice for women, Obama is content to blow away all evidence that this is the case and all value judgments about how women choose to live their lives.
I understand completely that compromises need to be made, that some women would prefer to work, that sometimes for financial reasons women have to work. That’s fine, I’m not going to throw stones at women with jobs. People make their choices, and they accept the consequences.
What I can’t stand is a culture that pretends that there are no consequences, or at least no consequences that can’t be effectively mitigated by a federal program. It’s a big feminist lie – one designed to give women the freedom, even the compulsion, to buck their instincts without guilt, to the detriment of themselves, their families, and society as a
whole.
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapter 8)
Chapter 8 is titled “The World Beyond Our Borders”.
This chapter is fascinating simply as a presentation of how liberals look at foreign policy. It’s not often that you see it all in one place. The chapter starts with a brief summary of American history.
An interesting lesson learned about the liberal perspective - our alliances won the Cold War. Not our military strength or our economic prowess. This is so perverse I don’t even know what to say. Our alliances were necessary but not sufficient components of our victory. If they were as important as Obama thinks they are, why didn’t the Cold War end the day NATO was formed?
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I have to give Obama some credit here.
...at times, in arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview. I didn’t understand why, for example, progressives should be less concerned about oppression behind the Iron Curtain than they were about brutality in Chile. I couldn’t be persuaded that US multinationals and international terms of trade were single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to steal from their people. I might have arguments with the size of Reagan’s military buildup, but given the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, staying ahead of the Soviets militarily seemed a sensible thing to do. Pride in our country, respect for our armed services, a healthy appreciation for the dangers beyond our borders, an insistence that there was no easy equivalence between East and West – in all this I had no quarrel with Reagan. And when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his due, even if I never gave him my vote.
If he’s telling the truth, that’s a surprisingly mature view coming from someone on the left. On the other hand, I’m skeptical that this is the outright truth and that it hasn’t been sanitized a bit.
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As expected, a good chunk of this chapter is dedicated to Iraq. The book was written in 2006, so some of the material in here is outdated and mostly irrelevant, other than to note that his stance is and always has been that our presence in Iraq is illegitimate, and that we should leave no matter what. His consistency to a fault is interesting, especially now that we know he wouldn’t even in hindsight have supported an effective policy (the surge) if he knew it was going to be effective. He’s not one to let practicality get in the way of ideology, apparently.
Then he goes on to talk about foreign policy in more general terms. There are the typical cliched criticisms - “Why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma? Why intervene in Bosnia and not Darfur?” - followed by the statement that we have no coherent foreign policy, and we need one. It seems to me that for someone to reach the conclusion that we have no coherent foreign policy, one must engage in a fair bit of willful blindness. Regardless, Obama first states that he has no “grand strategy in my hip pocket”, but of course, he has some suggestions.
First, we must recognize that isolationism is the wrong approach. Excellent start.
Second, we must recognize that the world has changed – that the major threats to our security come not from “great powers”, but from states on the margins of the civilized world. We need to maintain our ability to “play the role of the world’s reluctant sheriff”, and yet, our military is too large and should be cut. He doesn’t say by how much. In addition, we need to reconfigure the military to be less “fancy hardware” and more troops. In my mind, more fancy hardware means less dead American troops. While I can nitpick here, particularly on the military cuts, I generally agree with the philosophy of his statements.
Third, “the United States, like all sovereign nations, has the unilateral right to defend itself against attack,” up to and including a preemptive strike against an imminent threat. Merely stating this is virtually meaningless though, as conservatives and liberals are typically going to have widely varying concepts of what an imminent threat is, what constitutes an attack on our nation, as well as what constitutes an appropriate response.
Fourth, any international use of force beyond self-defense should be a multilateral action, with “hard diplomatic work ... obtaining most of the world’s support for our actions.” Then, paradoxically, he states that the UN Security Council should not have a veto over our actions. So in essence – he’s willing to buck the veto of Russia or China, but only if the rest of the world gets on board. Given the limp-wristed response of Europe to pretty much everything lately, requiring their consent for action is de facto deciding to voluntarily tie our own hands. Which, to much of Obama’s base, is exactly the idea.
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I have to give him a lot of credit for this, though the devil is in the details:
I believe critics are wrong to think that the world’s poor will benefit by rejecting the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy.
Absolutely true. He states that he recognizes that the American system has flaws, but he also recognizes that local movements like Hugo Chavez’s socialism or Sharia theocracy are not the way to alleviate people’s suffering. That’s a stunningly mature observation, and I didn’t expect it of him.
However, he also says that democracy cannot be delivered by the barrel of a gun, and that the only way to true reform is via a home-grown movement. This is rather naive, given the obvious counterexamples of Germany, Japan, and dare I say it – Iraq.
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Oh, the irony:
I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history…
Surely not, or his candidacy would not have gotten this far in the first place.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapters 6 and 7)
Chapter 6 is titled “Faith”.
I got my wish – a fluff chapter.
The first third can be summarized as “I’m a Christian.” Congratulations. My gut feeling is that he is Christian only because it is convenient to be so, but that’s just a gut feeling.
The middle third - we need religious people to act on their own outside of government… as long as they work toward progressive goals.
I agree completely with the first part, though I wouldn’t restrict it to religious people. The good functioning of our nation and our government requires a moral and upright citizenry that will do the right thing with the freedom they have, regardless of whether those actions are motivated by religion or something else. However, that’s only part of what Obama is talking about. One specific example he uses is mega-churches organizing fund-raising and lobbying campaigns to prevent cuts in anti-poverty programs. There is something fundamentally disturbing to me about that.
Churches running soup kitchens and food pantries? Great.
Churches organizing campaigns to prevent failed wealth transfer programs from being cut, thus becoming just another nucleation point for people that want to live off the backs of others? Not so great.
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The last third is about the separation of church and state. Though unsurprisingly he’s got the establishment clause all wrong, and he goes into quite a bit of detail about it, he is not a fanatic on the issue. He does not support removal of references to God from all public venues, and he does not support preventing religious groups from using public facilities like schools for meetings. He does however imply that local communities should not be allowed to choose a religious curriculum if they so choose.
Other tidbits:
He’s opposed to gay marriage, though it appears that it is more of a practical opposition rather than a principled one - “...in the absence of any meaningful consensus, the heightened focus on marriage was a distraction from other, attainable measures to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians.”
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Chapter 7 is titled “Race”.
This chapter appears to be fluff as well. Racism is bad, mmmmkay. Yeah, that didn’t need to take 30 pages.
It starts to get disturbing when he asserts that since 30% of the people employed in my office park are not black, there is clear evidence of pervasive racism. I don’t understand how he can say that, and two paragraphs later talk about the “lack of emphasis on educational achievement” in the black community. I will not contend that racism is completely gone in America – that’s obviously false. But to claim that salary inequality and lack of minorities getting hard science PhDs is evidence of racism, while acknowledging the very real and severe cultural problems that play a leading role in keeping the black community down, is just strange.
Even worse – he thinks forcing private companies to hire minorities on a quota basis is a perfectly acceptable solution to the problem.
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Then there is a big chunk on immigration. Typically, there were lots of words and little to say. The gist of it seems to be that immigrants are not a threat, we should welcome them, our borders should not be completely open, he’s sympathetic to the threat that a glut of low-wage workers pose to the unions, and increased economic inequality caused by a massive influx of immigrants is to be avoided at all costs. Lots of middle of the road non-committal rhetoric, but that last part I find just odd. America has a long history of taking in immigrants and giving them opportunities to build wealth that don’t exist elsewhere. This so-called increasing economic inequality is merely an artifact of a constant stream of people entering the economic spectrum at the low end and working their way up. Longitudinal studies of individuals have proven that increasing economic inequality is a myth.
Let’s assume for a moment that Obama’s assertion is true – that we need to avoid bringing in a perpetual “servant underclass”. How would he suggest we avoid this? Welfare for the newly arrived? Some other economic handout? Immediate access to our welfare state for newly arrived immigrants is a recipe for disaster, and most European countries as well as Australia and New Zealand have recognized that. Obama doesn’t say what he wants to do. Really, we should do what we’ve always done – get government out of the way and give people the economic freedom to lift themselves up. THAT is the core of American values, and THAT is why people come here.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapter 5)
This chapter is titled “Opportunity.”
Yay. A sixty page chapter on class warfare. That’s one-sixth of the book, right there.
I had to resist the urge to Fisk the whole thing. I’m sure it would be a bizarre mixture of enraging and fun, but really, we’ve heard most of this, and the rebuttals, before. On the other hand, this is where he starts to get very specific about his policy proposals, and I can’t help but respond a little.
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The chapter begins with a nice long passage giving the liberal version of the Great Depression and events since then. A point-by-point rebuttal would be a distraction, so filling this spot with the usual liberal tripe and the usual reality-based counterpoints is an exercise that will be left to the reader. The only interesting parts here are an admission that Reagan did some necessary trimming of the Federal government, though the valiant opposition of the Democrats prevented him from going too far. Then after getting slapped around on the health care issue, Clinton went to on further Reagan’s legacy with welfare reform, balancing the budget, etc.
I have to admit, I’d never heard quite that spin put on it before – Clinton carrying Reagan’s legacy to it’s natural conclusion.
Then of course, Bush comes along and screws it all up with “even lower taxes, even fewer regulations, and an even smaller safety net.” I don’t even have any idea what he’s referring to when talking about a smaller safety net under Bush.
The overarching theme of the whole discussion is that “we don’t have to choose between an oppressive, government-run economy and a chaotic unforgiving capitalism.” The idea is that through proper government management of the economy, people don’t have to be affected by economic upheavals in the ways they have in the past. Government can make those upheavals less severe, and help people to weather them when they do happen.
The problem is – his rhetoric both in the book and on the campaign trail seem to point to isolationism as a solution to preventing economic upheaval. He points out very bluntly that globalism has changed our economy dramatically, and those mean CEOs looking out for profits rather than for communities won’t let people unionize and prevent their jobs from being cut.
Now, I sympathize with those who are forced to change their way of life because of economic changes. I understand – it sucks. But lets think about this for a minute. If the kind of government intervention he’s talking about results in actively preventing companies from becoming more efficient and competing in the global marketplace (or worse, cutting off that global marketplace via isolationist policies), that hurts everyone, including the people the policies are intended to help.
Look at farmers. Something like 1% of the population is involved in agriculture today. Not all that long ago, that number was 50% or more. If someone like Obama had come along and said “we can’t let our farmers be displaced because of changing economic conditions”, we’re basically looking at three different possibilities. One, we can force farmers to maintain primitive farming practices so that more people can be employed. Everyone loses, since productivity is wasted by decree. Two, we can subsidize farmers to give them further incentive to stay in the profession when there is no other economic reason to do so. Everyone but the farmers lose, since this is a raw wealth transfer program. And here too, productivity is wasted. Three, we can isolate ourselves from global trade, so as to prevent our products from being undercut by more efficient overseas companies. Everyone but the farmers lose, since everyone is paying more for the products of the farmers. In essence, this is the same as case two, since external fiat allows farmers to sell their products for more than the true market price, while everyone else is forced to buy those products for more than the market price. It’s wealth transfer without the government as a direct intermediary.
The exact same options are available in every other sector. Forced inefficiency, subsidization, or isolation. Unions, which Obama wholeheartedly supports, push for any and sometimes all of these policies, knowing very well that they are screwing over the rest of the population for their own benefit. Adopting these policies to ease the pain of people being displaced by a changing economy makes as little sense as forcing farmers to continue working with horses rather than tractors – sure, more of them would be employed as farmers, but they would be poorer and so would the rest of us.
Is it really worth hurting everyone in rather substantial ways to ease the pain of the few? In some cases, yes. In the case of a changing economy, where the economy is going to continue to evolve no matter how much we try to protect people from it, our choices are to evolve and adapt, or drag our feet, hurt everyone in the process, and inevitably reach the same point anyway. However, it makes for great campaign fodder in a rural town when a manufacturing plant closes. People don’t want to have to learn something new. Yeah, too bad. Stuff happens, and except in extreme circumstances, people are not entitled to harm everyone else for their own benefit. Yet, that is the crux of Obama’s populist message to the masses.
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Obama’s proposals for government’s place in the economy is that it should be making investments in three sectors – education, science and technology, and energy independence.
He begins talking about education via an anecdote about his 2005 visit to Thornton Township High School, a mostly black school in the south suburbs of Chicago. He says the kids took a poll to decide what issues were most important to them. The top of the list? The school district was short of funds, so everyone was sent home at 1:30 every day, depriving them of the opportunity for “science lab and foreign language courses.” Of course, this is evidence of the poor people of America being screwed, and it is evidence that we need to throw more money at education.
This story smells fishy to me. Aren’t school districts required to meet minimum hours in a classroom in order for kids to graduate? If they are actually cutting below those hours, foreign language courses and science lab are not the biggest worry these kids have. If they are not cutting below those hours, what the heck are they doing with their time? Something doesn’t smell right. I googled around a bit, but nothing clarified this anecdote.
Obama’s specific fixes for elementary and secondary education:
A more challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math
Longer school hours and school years
Early childhood education for every kid
Performance based assessments of students
Recruiting and training of “transformative principals and more effective teachers”
Simpler certification processes for non-teachers to become teachers
Pairing new recruit teachers with experienced mentors
Higher teacher pay paired with additional accountability
I’m not going to pick this apart. We all know what the problems with the educational system are. Some of his ideas are good, the simpler certification processes, for example. But that, without fixing the fundamental flaws of the system, is virtually meaningless. Obama’s fix for education is the same one we’ve heard for years – more money, more control, more of the same.
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I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear - the main thing wrong with education at the college level is that we don’t give people enough money to go.
Other specific higher education proposals:
Double federal funding of basic research in the next 5 years
Train 100,000 new engineers and scientists in the next 4 years
Provide new research grants to “the most outstanding early-career researchers in the country”
I spent a couple years at one of the top research universities in the country. I spent a few months at a NASA installation. One thing I can tell you for sure – more money is not what they need. Not when it costs $80 in overhead for me to order $2 worth of bolts. Seriously.
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The energy part was some blah blah blah about alternative energy sources. Typical liberal stuff: spend money, a miracle occurs, puppies and rainbows result. Yawn.
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Obama on Free Trade:
I ended up voting against [the Central American Free Trade Agreement], which passed the senate by a vote of 55 to 45. My vote gave me no satisfaction, but I felt it was the only way to register a protest against what I considered to be the White House’s inattention to the losers from free trade. Like Bob Rubin, I am optimistic about the long-term prospects for the US economy and the ability of US workers to compete in a free trade environment – but only if we distribute the costs and benefits of globalization more fairly across the population.
Translation:
He’s in favor of free trade, as long as US workers are insulated from any hardship that may result. Meaning, he’s not really in favor of free trade at all.
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I’m not going to go into detail, but suffice it to say that Obama has completely bought into the fixed-pie theory of economics. Meaning that if I have a bigger slice of pie, yours in necessarily smaller. We don’t grow wealth, we can only distribute it more equitably. Not a surprise, but it makes this extremely frustrating to read.
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Minimum wage: raise it. He even explicitly acknowledges that it will cause jobs to be lost. And in the very next sentence states “when the minimum wage hasn’t been changed in nine years… such arguments carry less force.” Huh?
Other proposals:
More unemployment insurance
Wage insurance, which pays if you are forced to take a job that pays less than your old one
“Flexible education accounts that workers can use to retrain” - I have no idea what that means
Last but not least, strengthen unions because “since the 1980s, unions have been steadily losing ground”. Good. Let’s continue that trend, and maybe the auto and airline industries will have a chance to recover and survive.
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There are some words in here about Social Security, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what he actually intends to do. I think we are going to “start with a commitment to preserve Social Security’s essential character and shore up it’s solvency”, and then use the word “globalization” several times.
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And now, my personal pet peeve, health care. I’m going to try to gloss over this, so as to avoid the near inevitable fit of rage.
Obama’s health care plan, or at least “one example of what a serious health-care reform plan would look like”, from his perspective:
1) “We have the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM) determine what a basic, high-quality health-care plan should look like and how much it should cost.” Along with this, we “make sure patients control their diets or take their medicines regularly… and save the system a great deal of money.”
Wow. He didn’t even wait to step two to get into the authoritarian stuff. Step one is fridge raids.
2) We set up public insurance pools in every state that people can buy in to. Private insurers now have to compete with this public plan, but even the private plans would be required to “meet the criteria for high quality and cost controls set forth by the IOM.”
If you want to get some idea of how absolutely horrible this idea is, take a look at Florida where they are doing this RIGHT NOW with homeowners insurance. National Review had a couple articles about it recently, I think. (I think I may have even written a post about it, once upon a time.) The people running public insurance plans have every incentive to use them for populist purposes rather than actually running a tight ship. Who do you think people are going to listen to – the mean old actuary telling them that using their insurance policy like an ATM is going to make their rates go up, or that empathetic politician who feels their economic pain?
3) Everyone who touches Medicare and Medicaid claims will be required to have electronic claims, electronic records, and up-to-date patient reporting systems. This is going to save us 10% off the top, “with some experts pointing to even greater savings.”
Let’s just say that I know something about this, and “some experts” are full of crap.
4) With this 10% savings, we provide a subsidy to low-income families so they can join the state insurance pools, and then mandate coverage for all uninsured kids.
Voila! It’s like magic. Health care for everyone!
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Obama’s tax policy:
Raise taxes on dividends and capital gains
Leave the estate tax in place
Repeal the Bush tax cuts
Increase the amount and scope of the Earned Income Tax Credit, because 40% of the population not paying taxes just isn’t enough.
I won’t even dignify this with a response.
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Phew. Made it through that chapter alive. I’m hoping the rest of the book is fluff. I don’t know if my blood pressure could take another economics and policy chapter.
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapter 4)
Chapter 4 is titled “Politics”.
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I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the term “special interests,” which lumps together ExxonMobil and bricklayers, the pharmaceutical lobby and the parents of special-ed kids. Most political scientists would probably disagree with me, but to my mind, there’s a difference between a corporate lobby whose clout is based on money alone, and a group of like-minded individuals – whether they be textile workers, gun aficionados, veterans, or family farmers – coming together to promote their interests; between those who use their economic power to magnify their political influence far beyond what their numbers might justify, and those who are simply seeking to pool their votes to sway their representatives. The former subvert the very idea of democracy. The latter are its essence.
It is good to see that he has no illusions about being a populist.
I agree with him to a significant extent. Big corporations do have a large negative influence on policy, in that they are self-serving and they use government for rent seeking purposes. However, it must be noted that they do so with the tacit consent of the people, since the people have chosen a regulatory bureaucracy that drives these shenanigans.
The difference is in thinking that big rich companies influencing politics are inherently bad, while teeming masses of bricklayers and textile workers are the “essence” of democracy. Sure they are, up to the point where candidates start exploiting the greed and ignorance of these masses with socialist rhetoric. Then they become just one more rent-seeking group, albeit one with the voting power to actually make their policies stick.
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The rest of the chapter is mostly filler. He brings up JFK’s comments about legislators always making someone mad no matter how they vote, throws in a non-sequitur slam on the Bush tax cuts and shady accounting practices, and ends saying that it would take a truly courageous legislator to stand up to his friends and suggest making structural changes to “strengthen the link between voters and their representatives.” Here’s his list of proposed changes:
Non-partisan districting – sure, if such a thing is even possible
Same-day registration – maybe with proper safeguards
Weekend elections – fine
Public financing of campaigns – I admit, I giggled for several minutes at this point
Free television and radio time – no
Along with unspecified changes in the House and Senate to “empower legislators in the minority, increase transparency in the process, and encourage more probing reporting.” What - the filibuster isn’t enough?
Yes, it would definitely take courage to stick to these principles. Funny how once you’re running for president, all of that talk of courage and principle goes right out the window.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapter 3)
Short version, for the front page:
The man’s ideal Supreme Court justice is BREYER.
Vote McCain! PLEASE!
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My first thought after looking at the title of the chapter, but without reading any of it: Oh crap. And I thought the chapter on values was tedious.
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Robert Byrd – Obama’s example of a stalwart defender of the Constitution. Excuse me while I go dry heave for a few minutes.
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I was going to do a big quote from the book here and comment on it, but after thinking about it, I don’t think there is that much to say. So in summary:
Scalia is a strict constructionist. In contrast, Breyer believes we must take “context, history, and the practical outcomes of a decision into account.” In Breyer’s view, the Founders “have told us how to think but are no longer around to tell us what to think” (italics in original).
Obama says he understands conservatives’ respect for the Founders, but Breyer is right. His three reasons are:
1) The Founders could not have anticipated modern technology, therefore the Constitution as written doesn’t really have anything to say about freedom of speech “in the context of the Internet”. So we have to make that part up as we go along.
2) Our understanding of various Constitutional provisions has evolved over time. Due process and equal protection are specifically mentioned.
3) The Founders disagreed among themselves, so it is impossible for a judge two hundred years later to truly divine their intent.
He mentions that there is a faction that believes that because there was so much disagreement among the Founders themselves, they actually had no clear intent, so searching for that intent is a futile and meaningless exercise. He throws us a bone and rejects that argument, but only because:
Maybe I am too steeped in the myth of the founding to reject it entirely. Maybe like those who reject Darwin in favor of intelligent design, I prefer to assume that someone’s at the wheel.
The implication is that if he were to approach it in a completely rational fashion, he would be forced to conclude that the founding of this country was completely devoid of meaning. There is nothing special about our way of life, nothing important in the Constitution - the Republic we have is simply a random choice selected from an infinite set of equivalent choices. Fundamentally, the man admits that he has no understanding at all of what this country is and what makes great. And he wants to be president.
According to Obama, this is the sum total of what the Constitution is for:
What the framework of our Constitution can do is organize the way by which we argue about our future. All of its elaborate machinery – its separation of powers and checks and balances and federalist principles and Bill of Rights – are designed to force us into a conversation, a “deliberative democracy” in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others if their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent. Because power in our government is so diffuse, the process of making law in America compels us to entertain the possibility that we are not always right and to sometimes change our minds; it challenges us to examine our motives and our interests constantly, and suggests that both our individual and collective judgments are at once legitimate and highly fallible.
Yes, that is what the portion of the Constitution relating to the structure of the government is for – to set up a democratic republic. The rest of it are rules to follow so that the members of that democratic republic don’t have to repeat grave mistakes that have been made before, again and again.
To be a constitutional law professor teaching at the University of Chicago… to be a presidential candidate… and miss that glaring and vital point?
I’m speechless.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Audacity, Hope, Etc. (Chapter 2)
Chapter 2 is entitled “Values”.
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It’s never the “Bush tax cuts”, it’s always the “Bush tax cuts for the wealthy”. Even when that extra phrase adds nothing in context. Geez.
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He had some nice anecdotes about meeting Bush. He’s quite sure that Bush and his compatriots have good intentions, they just happen to be going about things in the wrong way. That seems to undercut his unity theme, unless of course, by unity he actually means for everyone to agree with him.
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In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how we draw the line when it comes to government action. That is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.
There’s that nasty stereotype again – conservatives loves their guns so they can shoot things, while liberals love books so they can be all enlightened and stuff. Spare me.
And again there is the implication that if we all just recognized that we are passionate about different things, we would get along better. I am well aware that people are passionate about socialism. I am also well aware that they are wrong, and that their policies, though well intentioned, are dangerous. I can not and do not respect the people that hold these opinions, unless they show sufficient doubt their beliefs that I think there may be a chance at reforming them. The mere state of having an opinion does not entitle one to respect. That opinion must also be grounded in logic and facts before it reaches that state.
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I can’t help but laugh when liberals claim to be more “sensitive to constitutional constraints”. What was that again, Mr. Gun Control? Commerce clause? What’s that? Something about all other powers being reserved to the states or the people?
Oh, you didn’t mean those parts of the Constitution. I understand now.
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This is one of the things that makes me a Democrat, I suppose – this idea that our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity, should express themselves not just in the church or the mosque or the synagogue; not just on the blocks where we live, in the places where we work, or within our own families; but also through our government. Like many conservatives, I believe in the power of culture to determine both individual successes and social cohesion, and I believe we ignore cultural factors at our peril. But I also believe that our government can play a role in shaping that culture for the better – or for the worse.
This is why the guy is sneaky. His paradigm is patently non-offensive, reasonable, and appealing. That is, until you get to the last part about government “shaping our culture”. We know very well what liberals mean when they want to “shape the culture” using the government, including the seemingly benign decisions to give people more freedom by letting them make their own moral decisions. Such as drugs, pornography, etc.
“Shape the culture” means destroy the culture and replace it with something else. Something progressive. Something deeply flawed and doomed to failure.
I run onto progressives all the time that point out the flaws in our current culture. Yes, I recognize those flaws too, I am not blind. The difference is that I don’t think we can tear down what we have and replace it with some utopian progressive vision. What we’ve got is pretty dang close to as good as it gets, all things considered.
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The chapter ends with a rousing couple pages about empathy.
I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society. After all, if they are like us, then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.
In other words, if you aren’t a liberal, you just don’t care. And you don’t care because those other people are Protestant/Catholic/black/brown/yellow/something-other-than-you, you mean horrible conservative. If only you would open up your heart and feel their pain, you’d be all over universal health care.
It’s the standard near-Godwin argument that I see trotted out all the time – there are no rational arguments against progressive policies, you are against progressive policies, therefore you are a bigot, or a classist, or whatever fits the argument of the moment. Only here, rather than directly denigrating the audience, the argument is delivered with a velvet glove and an appeal to change your ways.
You don’t want to be a bigot, do you?
Vote Obama!
