Back to Basics

The age of the encyclopedia salesman and the vacuum cleaner salesman peddling heavy bundles of books and snakelike cables door to door is done. But the age of the democracy salesman has taken its place.

No longer do bright young lads tote along everything there is to know about the letter E in one omnibus volume or demonstrate how the latest Suck-O-Zoom can get stains out of any carpet as an introduction to the wonders of free enterprise. Instead, if they haven’t been sidetracked by the siren lure of the dot com or the minimum wage job, they, like the late Christopher Stevens, jet off to foreign climes with FDR’s Four Freedoms under one arm and a local dictionary under the other to convince the natives that their lives will be freer, brighter and shinier with the Demo-O-Vote as the arbiter of their holy wars.

Like a lot of salesmen, the democracy salesman has never really stopped to wonder why any of his prospective customers should want to buy democracy for only twelve easy payments of bloody civil war? Born in a society where democracy has been idolized for the last century, where cleanliness and godliness may have gone by the wayside, but democracy is still one of those faded old virtues that the arbiters of the Living Constitution haven’t taken out back and put a bullet in its head in between elections and commercial breaks, they have never thought to consider that anyone might not want their democracy.

In an amoral society, democracy is one of the few things left to us by dead white men that is held to be a virtue, rather than a vice. It goes unquestioned because to most people it represents the power of the common man over his rulers, even if the common man no more rules his rulers than he did some two-hundred years ago. But democracy for the grandfathers of the salesmen goes deeper than fact. It represents a classless society where one man is as good as another and there are no lords or kings.

This however is not the effect of American democracy, it is rather the cause of American democracy, particularly in its Jacksonian flavor. And that old Scots-Irish flavor can be served locally, but it can’t be exported. The ballot box is not a society of rugged individualists, it is not a classless society where no one bends a knee before lords or the ascension of the common man. Those are features you can see in the showroom, but they don’t come with the device.

In our democracy salesmanship we never really troubled to ask ourselves why the Muslim world would want democracy and what it would do with it. Saddam Hussein bought 4000 Playstation game consoles, not because he was trying to train suicide bombers on copies of Sonic the Hedgehog, but because some of its components could be used in weapons. Those Muslim groups most interested in democracy were looking to weaponize it as well.

To the Muslim world, democracy did not mean individualism, it meant majority rule. Our democracy salesmen conceived of the Muslim world divided between the rule of its dictators and the will of its people.

It would be tempting to attribute the disaster spreading across the Middle East to a brief flirtation with democracy snake oil, but for the better part of the last century the political class of the United States could talk of nothing else. Nearly every war was fought was to spread democracy, protect democracy or worship at the altar of democracy.

For much of the 20th Century it was the working assumption of the sort of men who got up to give speeches in crowded halls that it was democracy that made America special. But it is not so much that democracy made America special, as America made democracy special and workable. And that is because democracy only works when government is limited. When government power isn’t limited, then democracy is just tyranny with a popular vote behind it.

In a poignant historical irony, American democracy went into a prolonged decline just as its political class was busy speechifying about the importance of exporting it abroad. Government authority was increasingly centralized and elections began to come down not to ideas, but to divided groups fighting it out in a zero sum struggle for total control of each other’s lives. American democracy has been exported to Iraq. And Iraqi democracy was exported to America.

With unlimited authority vested in the government, we no longer have elections to decide policy, but to determine whether an oppressive social and cultural agenda complete with a loss of civil rights will be forced on the rest of the country. And our last election was as polarized as an Iraqi election and with a similar outcome.

Democracy was never the solution for the Middle East; a region that is properly multicultural in the sense of being a collection of quarreling tribes, religious factions and ethnic groups. And all that democracy accomplished was to give the majority another tool for oppressing the minority. Instead of bloody revolts leading to dictatorships, there were bloody revolts leading to elections which then led to dictatorships. And only a fool or Thomas Friedman would consider the addition of this extra step to be any kind of improvement.

A multicultural society does not invalidate government by popular vote unless that society is also so split along tribal lines that elections are decided based on the rate at which races and religious groups make up that society. When demographics become valid predictors of political outcomes, then democracy becomes theocracy and ethnocracy. And the only alternative is to resort to reserved political offices for different groups in Beirut style.

There are two elements that make democracy livable. Limited government and national character. And the former depends on the latter. Dispense with the national character and you lose the limited government and democracy becomes a slow descent into tyranny, accompanied by the spectacle of hollow elections.

The Muslim world lacked either limited government or national character and so the democracy experiments there were doomed to become one type of horror show or another. The two dominant streams of political ideology in the region are Socialist and Islamist. The difference between the two is that the Socialists are mildly Islamist and the Islamists are mildly Socialist.

We face two conflicts in the present day and against the present day. Both conflicts are being fought against ideologies dislocated in time, longing urgently for the past and the future.

Islamism is a reactionary ideology preaching a perfect world to be gained by stepping back to the 7^th Century origins of its founding and seeks to recreate it by enslaving women and non-Muslims, making Mohammed’s false treaties with Christians and Jews, this time no longer in Arabia, but around the world, and then subjugating them to usher in an age of perfect peace.

Progressivism looks for its utopias not in the splendors of the past, but in the wonders of the future, its fanaticism fueled by the wonders of the emerging technologies of the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries fused with the delusion that these material technologies could be matched by social technologies of equal depth and effectiveness, bringing forth both a technocratic utopia of physical technology and social technology.

Utopianism is a matter of faith and perspective. One man’s utopia is another man’s nightmare. And like many matters of faith, those who cannot be convinced must often be compelled.

The Utopianist is dislocated, feels born out of his proper age and fervently at odds with the tenor of the time.

For the Muslim, this is a matter of pure culture, for Islamic civilizations were left behind in the great rush of forward momentum experienced by Western civilization within the past centuries. The modern world is a Western creature and though it boasts many comforts and achievements, the Muslims who inhabit it can never feel fully at home in it. Unable to dream of a great future, they dream instead of a wonderful past that will sweep away the alien complexities that they could rarely learn to live without, and replace it with the purity of the desert and the simplicity of the sword.

For the Westerner, the dislocation is also cultural, it is the clash between the mechanical accomplishments of the civilization that he lives in and the decay of the spiritual and aesthetic values of its culture. The artist and the sculptor despaired of matching the engineer in the last century. The cleric feels a trembling in his bones when he sees the visions spun by theoretical physicists. Rather than exceeding themselves, the bearers of the cultural traditions of the West have often chosen to diminish themselves, fleeing into ugliness and unbelief, defacing and distorting the traditions they bear, rather than rising to face the challenge of their civilization’s material accomplishments and subsuming their fears of inadequacy in the expansion of their heritage’s possibilities.

The sensitive soul of the middle class child bemoans the industrial revolution without realizing that the only reason that there is a middle class and that he isn’t toiling in the fields and she isn’t at the mercy of any passing knight is the very materialistic technological revolution that the sensitive soul bemoans. For centuries, the dislocated Westerner has physically or philosophically attempted to retreat to a pastoral Eden, to the garden and the field tended by the Noble Savage, erecting complex theories to promote a new simplicity.

A country and a people can be measured in its breath and its depth. A government can either choose breadth of control or depth of control—but it cannot have both.

Breadth of control allows for governing a large area, but with only limited control and influence over those who live there. Depth of control allows for extensive control over the lives of a population, but such control requires government infrastructure of equal depth that is difficult to sustain or project over a large territory. One is a mile wide and an inch deep. The other is a mile deep and an inch wide.

Governments that choose breadth of control are able to govern a large territory with a light touch, but breadth of control depends on a population that governs itself through a national identity rooted in an ethical, religious or tribal code. When a government attempts to replace this code with its own control, then it trades breadth of control for depth of control.

Depth of control can only be extended over a limited area. When governments invest in depth of control, then they tighten control over a handful of urban centers clotted with massive bureaucracies that carefully regulate the lives of its middle class while the rest of the country begins going its own way unknown to the ruling class. These decadent systems lose touch with the outskirts and with their own lower classes and remain unaware even as their empire crumbles.

Modern government is fixated on depth of control over people. It plots to control every aspect of their lives with the goal of creating a completely harmonious whole. Technology has fed the illusion that such control has become more feasible than ever allowing for the rise of truly scientific government. This illusion is destroying the nation-states of modern civilization by overburdening them with massive governments flailing for control and destroying their economies in order to achieve that control.

Bureaucracy is the sticking point of depth of control. Each level of control requires more staff to implement that control. The more aspects of private life that government seeks to make public, the more men and women sitting behind desks are needed to formulate the rules, promulgate them, process them and enforce them.

The nationalization of private life runs into the same problem of all nationalization and collectivization. Large operations tend toward greater degrees of inefficiency due to the diffusion of responsibility and accountability. Large systems respond to inefficiency by creating more redundant structures which only increase the inefficiency.

Bureaucracies cope with all problems by adding new layers of paperwork without recognizing that paperwork is itself the problem. The world outside comes to be modeled through paper so that rather than interacting with problems, the system interacts with a paperwork model of the real world that is detached from the real world and requires ever increasing resource of paperwork handlers to maintain.

There are two types of societies, production societies and rationing societies. The production society is concerned with taking more territory, exploiting that territory to the best of its ability and then discovering new techniques for producing even more. The rationing society is concerned with consolidating control over all existing resources and rationing them out to the people.

The production society values innovation because it is the only means of sustaining its forward momentum. If the production society ceases to be innovative, it will collapse and default to a rationing society. The rationing society however is threatened by innovation because innovation threatens its control over production.

Socialist or capitalist monopolies lead to rationing societies where production is restrained and innovation is discouraged. The difference between the two is that a capitalist monopoly can be overcome. A socialist monopoly however is insurmountable because it carries with it the full weight of the authorities and the ideology that is inculcated into every man, woman and child in the country.

We have become a rationing society. Our industries and our people are literally starving in the midst of plenty. Farmers are kept from farming, factories are kept from producing and businessmen are kept from creating new companies and jobs. This is done in the name of a variety of moral arguments, ranging from caring for the less fortunate to saving the planet. But rhetoric is only the lubricant of power. The real goal of power is always power. Consolidating production allows for total control through the moral argument of rationing, whether through resource redistribution or cap and trade.

The politicians of a rationing society may blather on endlessly about increasing production, but it’s so much noise, whether it’s a Soviet Five Year Plan or an Obama State of the Union Address. When they talk about innovation and production, what they mean is the planned production and innovation that they have decided should happen on their schedule. And that never works.

You can ration production, but that’s just another word for poverty. You can’t ration innovation, which is why the aggressive attempts to put low mileage cars on the road have failed. As the Soviet Union discovered, you can have rationing or innovation, but you can’t have both at the same time. The total control exerted by a monolithic entity, whether governmental or commercial, does not mix well with innovation.

The rationing society is a poverty generator because not only does it discourage growth, its rationing mechanisms impoverish existing production with massive overhead. The process of rationing existing production requires a bureaucracy for planning, collecting and distributing that production that begins at a ratio of the production and then increases without regard to the limitations of that production.

Paradoxically the rationing infrastructure increases in direct proportion to the falloff of production as lower production requires even greater rationing. This is what we are seeing now in the United States, in a weak economy, there is greater justification for the expansion of rationing mechanisms. And the worse the economy becomes, the bigger government will become to “compensate” for the problems of the economy.

In a production society, the role of government is to expand the territories of exploitation and to protect those territories.

Following up from my earlier entries, “London’s Daily Mail Features Wade Michael Page Pictured Before Huge Nazi Banner in Write-Up on Oak Creek Massacre,” and “The Oak Creek Massacre and Political Ideologies.”

I want to reiterate the point that the slain suspect Michael Wade Page was not a conservative, he was a Nazi. I think the problem people have is whether or not fascist or Nazi ideologies can be placed at the far-right of the political continuum. I mentioned Bob Belvedere’s post, for example, “Sikh Shooting: Don’t Buy The Leftist Lies.” And linked there is William Jacobson, who writes:

Needless to say, the MSM and left-blogosphere have concluded the shooter was a white supremacist/neo-Nazi based on tattoos and being a former member of what they describe as a “skinhead” band — which they then obscenely generalize to be “right-wing,” a way of trying to link him to the political right. This is the age-old tactic. If Page was a white supremacist/neo-Nazi/skinhead, then he stood against everything the political right stands for.

That’s not a problem, per se, to locate Page on the “far-right.” Conservatives routinely use the term “far-left” in referring to hardcore progressive radicals and neo-communists. The left-right ideological spectrum has been used that way for over 200 years, since the French National Assembly — after the toppling of the Ancien Régime — arrayed political factions from the radicals (on the left) to the reactionaries (on the right). While folks can question that seating arrangement as arbitrary and historically isolated (time-bound), nevertheless since then talk of modern political ideology has employed that left-right axis.

It’s way too simplistic, of course.  This chart below is at The Liberty Papers. This is just one example of how ideology is complicated by situating ideological adherents according to their relationship to political freedom. There are different examples we could use, although for simplification this graphic may serve for basic discussion, even though the placement of Adolf Hitler is too far to the left (since government did not own the means of production in Nazi Germany). The best chart I’ve used is found in Patrick O’Neil’s, Essentials of Comparative Politics, which uses this basic graphic but plugs in ideological labels, such as “socialist” and “fascist” into the template. [This section is updated with the strike through indicating the revision.]

Another complicating factor in analysis is an ideology’s orientation toward race and racial identity. Both Marxian socialism and Nazi millenarianism emphasize cleansing aspects to the social order. Marx was Jewish but despised religion as the “opiate of the people,” and he has often been cited as one of the founders of Europe’s historical anti-Semitism. But Italy’s fascists, while originating in leftist socialist-labor circles, later specifically identified Marxian socialists as the political enemy. As the Interwar Period wore on, Mussolini’s brand of fascism became increasingly identified with Hitler’s Germany. The key difference, however, was that the Nazis’ fundamental orientation was toward preserving the purity of the Medieval German “volk,” which was idealized as the perfect “Aryan” race, and thus the establishment of the Nazi Third Reich would restore a master race of pure-bred Germans to the center of Europe.

The Soviet Union, however, especially it its pre-Stalinist development, was in principle committed to ethnic assimilation under the banner of Marxist-Leninist ideology.

(This is a continuation of the Sixteenth Year of Obama Series – A Scientific Romance of the Year 2024. The first part can be found here under The Isle of Endless Education.)

The moonlight shone gently down on the solar-powered train resting on a bridge between two government islands. Inside, Marc and Julie, a young couple typical of the over educated upper class of the United States of North America and Europe, drowsed fitfully on the recycled plastic benches, their sleep interrupted by the whirring noises of nearby windmills generating power from the occasional breezes wafting between the islands.

When the morning came, the light-rail carriage began to move again at the highest permissible speed  for a non-government vehicle in the sixteenth year of Obama, known in the antiquated calendar as 2024. Within a few hours, they were within sight of the stolid granite buildings of the Isle of Freedom and the harbor and railway leading up to the compound. A man in a brown uniform wearing a Sam Browne belt and a gleaming silver badge met them at the dock. He ran a scanner over them, patted them down, asked them a number of leading questions and then finally, after determining that they were not smuggling forbidden commodities like cough syrup, rare woods, plastic bags, CFC- emitting asthma inhalers, gold coins, subversive literature and lawn darts, they were allowed past the guardhouse, and into the Isle of Freedom.

Glancing around, Julie could not help but notice that the Isle was ringed by barbed wire and tall guard towers brooding over the deserted harbor. “I wonder why the security is so heavy.”

Immediately a speaker mounted on a nearby elm tree sputtered to life. “Wait here.”

The young couple waited uneasily until eventually a golf cart rolled up. Inside perched a wizened man in a loud t-shirt bearing the slogan, “Power to the People.”

“Welcome,” he shouted to them, “welcome to the freest place on earth.”

They waited while he caught his breath, tossed aside a crumpled beer can, and gasped out, “This is wild, isn’t it!?”

It seemed safer to agree with him, so that was what Marc and Julie did.

Good morning, good evening and good afternoon,” the elfin man exclaimed, donning a pair of oversized sunglasses. “I’m the Director General of Freedom. But you can call me Steve. And did I hear you asking a question.”

“We didn’t mean any harm by it,” Julie said.

“Harm? Question?” The Director General of Freedom threw out his arms. “Here on the Isle of Freedom we absolutely encourage everyone to ask questions. It’s the essence of freedom. That’s why we made it mandatory for everyone to ask at least ten questions a day.”

The young couple said nothing, while he glared expectantly at them. “Well, you’re ten questions short, and it’s already eleven in the morning.”

“I just noticed how much security there is,” Julie said haltingly.

“That’s because freedom is very precious,” the Director General said. “More precious than gold. Everyone wants freedom, so we have to protect it from them. Do you know what the going price for freedom is outside these walls?”

“What kind of freedom?” Marc asked.

“Any kind of freedom,” the Director General said. “You name it, there’s a price on it.

The fundamental difference between a free society and a nanny state, is that in a free society, negative rights are maximized between the individual and the government, and the individual and other individuals. In a nanny state, positive rights are maximized between the individual and the government, and both positive and negative rights are maximized between the individual and other individuals.

What does that mean? A negative right in relation to the government is a freedom from compulsion. Freedom of Speech is a negative right that prevents government from interfering with speech. Similarly freedom of religion and the right to bear arms create negative spaces in religion and firearms which the government may not intrude upon.

When you hear talk of a right to health care or a right to housing by the government, those are positive rights, creating an obligation on the part of the government to carry out a course of action, e.g. free  housing or cheap health care.

This is an obligation or entitlement by the government to you. But since all government rights devolve to the people, what this really means is that we are collectively obligated to provide health care or housing. And that we are enjoyed from collectively using the mechanisms of government to interfere with speech, religion or firearms ownership.

On an individual basis, negative rights are freedoms that I have from you, and positive rights are obligations that I have to you. A negative right prevents you from trespassing on my property, on the other hand a positive right demands that I put up bilingual signs out of respect for your culture.

A society where negative rights are maximized, values individuality over social harmony. However a society where positive rights are maximized values social harmony over individual freedom.

The major shift in American life has been from a social contract based on negative rights to one based on positive rights. Negative rights have been in decline for some time, even some amendments in the Bill of Rights have been severely weakened– and most of the civil rights debates today are over positive rights.

This is the victory of the French Revolution over the American Revolution. The American Revolution was aimed at a change of government, not a social transformation. It saw repression in political terms, that once removed and backed by negative rights, would enable a free society to maintain itself. But the French Revolution aimed at a complete social transformation, not merely deposing a king, but creating a new revolutionary consensus.

The fundamental difference between the American Bill of Rights and the French Rights of Man ,is that the former is unconcerned with the society, and the latter makes its principles and even most of its negative rights contingent on social harmony.

Consider the difference between the Declaration of Independence’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” and the Declaration of the Rights of Man’s “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.

The debt ceiling debate is less about spending than it is about the purpose of government. Under the impact of an economic recession, the train of the Great Society is approaching the edge of the New Frontier. Both sides are still trying to work out a New Deal, but another cuts and spending formula is not the solution. What we need is a serious and earnest discussion about why we are compulsively spending money.

A cocaine addict who runs out of money doesn’t have a spending problem, he has a drug problem. Telling him to cut back on how much money he spends on cocaine, or to shop around for cheaper cocaine isn’t the solution. It’s not about how much he’s spending, but about why. The problem isn’t in the math, it’s in the mindset.

Our cocaine is social justice. Like most junkies who are willing to sell anything and everything to keep the supply coming, Obama’s position in the budget debate is take everything– especially the military, but leave the social justice and the big government that administers it on the table. And also like most junkies, he has an endless supply of self-righteous speeches denouncing the people who just want him to stop.

In the rush of words, he postures, conflates compromise with confrontation, threatens and urges everyone to work together. There is no consistent message, only egotistical aggression and defensive need. Strip away the verbiage and you come away with a chorus of, “Mine, My Way, Mine”.

With all addictions, it is important to look for the root cause. The psychological weakness that allows the chemical rush to take over and become the defining principle of life. In this case it is a basic split over the purpose of government.

These competing visions of government are rival philosophies with differing views on human nature. They cannot even agree on what the nature of “fair” is and that makes reconciling on a national agenda nearly impossible. Is fairness socially determined or self-determined. Is it the function of government to spread the wealth or to protect a system where wealth acquisition is accessible. Is the economy a function of individual choices or organizational mandates.

Government as the caretaker of the system and of Big Aunty who uses the system to make society fairer. Both claim populist allegiances but any system that sets out to remake society is doomed to an elitist and totalitarian nature. The only authentic populists are protesting in reaction to Big Aunty and her nanny state.

The functional state is clashing with the utopian state. The functionalists want to trim back the utopian programs of the state and pare it back down to its vital functions. But the utopians don’t even recognize the economy as something apart from the dictates of the state. Spending never has to be regulated, because it is only a micro-function of their system whose negative effects can be nullified through other programs. Or, “Why cut spending when you can just print more money.”

The economic solipsism of the left may be irresponsible lunacy, but it is part and parcel of their approach to everything. Their utopian state and its philosopher-czars are given the power to alter everything without a single ray of light allowed to penetrate the gloom of their dogma.

The most pervasive myth of the welfare state is the altruism of the public sector. In this mythology, the private sector is run by a bunch of greedy businessmen who get rich by making money off people’s misery. While the public sector is run by altruists who want nothing except to help those left behind by the private sector. Capitalists meet the Anti-Capitalists.

But actually it’s the public sector that does a much better job of making money off people’s misery. Some parts of the private sector do deliberately seek out ways to feed off poverty and keep their victims poor, most notably in the lending and financial services industry, but for the most part the private sector makes money off willing customers. How do you sell products and services to people who can’t afford them? Unless you trap them into a cycle of obligation, you can’t. And such cycles are finite. Eventually the people you’re feeding off have nothing more to give you. That’s not an ideal business model for corporations who generally look for ways to build life-long relationships. To make money selling products and services, you need repeat customers who can afford what you’re offering.

For the private sector to succeed, it needs a prosperous customer base. The public sector doesn’t. It just needs a collective ‘Them’ to pay the bills. The public sector makes its money from failure. Human suffering creates more demand for its services. The more people are out of work, can’t pay their bills and need help– the more the public sector grows.

The PayDay loan industry and Fannie Mae both preyed on minorities and the poor. But the latter’s business model was completely unsustainable and its greed was completely irresponsible. Yet all this was concealed under the veneer of altruism.

The public sector altruism myth is just that, a myth. It’s a destructive myth because of the basic conflict between its inner and outer goals.

The outer goal of a car company might be to sell more cars. Its inner goal is to sell enough cars that it can hire more workers and its executives can go to the Bahamas next month. There’s no major conflict between these two goals. Not unless everyone there decides to make bad cars and misrepresent them, and then use the money to expand the assembly line and go to the Bahamas anyway. There are businesses that work that way, but they don’t have much of a future. Sell people bad cars and you’ll lose customers. And then the only way you can stay in business is if the public sector begins subsidizing your company. A bad company is either a rolling scam that depends on luring in gullible new customers or a public sector charity case.

The outer goal of a welfare program might be to help its clients. But its inner goal is to get more funding so as to add jobs and so whoever is at the top can go to the Bahamas next month for a conference on global poverty.