Twilight of the old party system?

Belmont Club » That’s the Way You Do It

The situation in which Britain finds itself is so dire that the Governor of the Bank of England told an American economist that whichever party won the current general election it would be “out of power for a whole generation because of how tough the fiscal austerity will have to be.” David Cameron may find, immediately after taking control of the ship of state that he has been promoted to the captaincy of the Titanic.

That makes me feel a bit better about watching the UK election results tomorrow.

In the meantime, you might be interested in Adam K's analysis of how, in an America where the political center has all but been abandoned, politics is becoming a fight in which each of the two major parties seeks to destroy its rival in order to institute some new kind of political center and debate on new terms. However, the more a party is expressly aware of and publicly vocal about its desire to destroy the other party, the less successful it can be. Adam thus looks for the political issues that, if fought seriously, may nonetheless have the pragmatic effect of destroying the "criminal cult" that is today's Democratic Party.

America, where art thou?

The greatest problem with Obama may be that he is more interested in a certain image of himself and of his politics than with many aspects of human reality out there in America and the world that he little knows yet hopes to move with endless campaign speeches. In the weeks he has been in office, wealth built up over generations of hard work is being destroyed with frightening speed, and Obama seems disconnected, not talking about how he is going to help instill confidence to help stem the flow in the markets but rather about how he is going to spend money the nation doesn't yet have to save the nation. And yet he shows little interest in insuring his "stimulus" or bailout spending will actually create economically productive industries that can continue in future without constant inflows of government debt-financed money. John Hawkins at Pajamas Media » Overcoming the Recession: An Interview with Thomas Sowell asks economist Sowell

JH: Now, we’ve heard people say that this is a uniquely bad economic situation — that it could be as bad as the Depression, etc. However, looking at GDP and job loss numbers, it doesn’t look as bad as, say, the recession in the early 80s. So how bad is this really and if you were advising the president, what would you tell him to do?

Thomas Sowell: Resign.

[...]
because he is determined to interfere in the market. How did we get out of the recession in the early 80s? Reagan did nothing. The economy adjusted and we’ve had 20 years of growth, low inflation, and low unemployment.
[...]
JH: Now, I’d like you to elaborate on something you wrote in National Review back in 2007:

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

Thomas Sowell: That’s true, unfortunately. I just noticed this morning that … I am getting more and more emails from people who are simply despairing. They are saying that we may have reached the point of no return. We have had dumbed down education for enough generations that people don’t even realize that it’s dumbed down education. We have propaganda against all the institutions of this society, literally from the elementary school to the universities. You can’t raise a whole generation of people who don’t know how to think but are taught to resent anything that they don’t understand, and expect that you are going to survive in the long run.

I though this was a good way of putting our real problem, the ethical problem that is, ultimately, the real driver of history including its economic phenomena. Americans and Canadians today are often taught to resent, and not to understand the economic or political systems of which they are part so that they might freely and humbly make a realistic contribution to renewing these systems. Survival demands not only personal self-understanding, but knowledge that personal self-understanding is empty if it is not distilled from a greater human self-understanding. If you don't know how human ethical systems are generated in history, you can't know much about anything, including yourself. And who today is educated to have a good grasp of history, perhaps the most difficult of intellectual disciplines?

This leads to my second observation on today's posts at Pajamas Media. In one - Pajamas Media » Could Americans’ Discontent Turn Violent? - there are over a 100 comments from people who seem to think violent civil unrest is quite likely in America in the near future. One commenter, MikeD offers some observations on the thread, including these:

7. This comment thread would never have happened at any other time during the last 100 years–whether there was an internet or not. That indicates a revolutionary change in thinking, if nothing else.

8. America and Americans today are very different than other peoples in other places in other times. Historical parallels from our own past, Europe or any other culture/time do not apply.

Now I think that's an interesting question for further discussion: is he really right that the current unrest is of a scope and scale that no real parallel can be found in the last 100 years of conservative anger at the rise of "progressive" government in America? As for his second point, that historical parallels do not apply, I think this may only be correct if the question is will, how or when will the present system fall apart. By the nature of history, that sort of question is indeed unpredictable and ultimately not worth investing a lot of time and energy in worrying about. If there is something that you can save, find a way to save it, but it can only really be saved over time if you have some way to reinvest it. Where historical parallels do apply is when you start investing time and energy in asking how the system can be renewed. People not educated in history and some kind of anthropological/religious/ethical self-understanding of how we humans make history, will have a very hard time finding the courage or knowledge for how to work themselves out of a mess.

Thomas Sowell has two quick answers for how to move forward, but these are questions on which we need all to do a lot more talking: in economics, let disrupted markets find their bottom without a constant government intervention that makes business and individual investment decisions about the real value of present assets and future economic prospects into a crap shoot dependent on knowing which way the political winds will be blowing through Obama's ears, the day after tomorrow, or maybe the day after that. But having the patience and wisdom to let millions of people collectively make decisions through market interactions, instead of letting the wise man in Washington lead us, can only happen when and if there is a respect for individual and business freedom within the political sphere. While there is a lot of interaction back and forth between politics and economics, the bottom line, which becomes visible in crises like the present, is that ultimately the economic market is limited or framed by the political market, and not vice versa as dogmatic Marxists like to argue in giving an implicit license to politicians like Obama to take revenge on what they see as the usually ascendant economic forces, in the name of the people. But Obama is no David vs. Goliath. The people, or in other words, politics, with the violent potential to keep any market open or closed, are/is always ultimately sovereign as they always have been, at least in a latent or implicit state; pointing out the supremacy of politics over economics is only the starting point for hoping we can do something creative with a little self-knowledge about how the freest societies have been built up in the past and can hope to renew themselves and grow in future.

Such an observation should not be a license for political hubris at the top but a recognition that it is only the political and economic interactions and conversations of people far away from the centres of media attention that can ultimately determine whether a nation and economy gets up off its feet and finds it worthwhile working through massive problems again, or whether stagnation will grip the land and bring trouble into the streets. If Obama is only talking to those who resent the American system, he can really achieve nothing. Vague promises of change tied to interventionist policies premised on some reworking of the New Deal might get people collecting government pay cheques, until the ability of government to borrow or tax slowly diminishes those cheques (as the value of the government buck diminishes through inflation) but it cannot really get them working again in building what only free people learning from their own mistakes in pursuit of their own dreams and realities can do. Don't try to save the people from their mistakes. Don't let them starve or freeze, but make sure you leave room for the personal salvation that can only come, not from Daddy Obama promising to buy you a new tv or status symbol, but from actually learning what it means to belong to human history and the freedom that is implicit in the sharing of language, and hence politics. A president who talks but doesn't listen denies that freedom and denies reality in favor of some fantasy vision of a Gnostic leader, with special insight, redeeming a fallen world.

Old Man Obama

While Gnosticism can, at times, have its creative side, when it comes to truly understanding the shared human source of our creativity, there's nothing new under the Gnostic Sun, not the least the desire of anxious youth to avoid facing certain humbling existential and human questions, preferring to think of themselves instead in the figure of a Sun King, as John Lennon once creatively imagined.

The power of Barack Obama's rhetoric, its ability to appear profound while saying little but "unite", "change", clearly appeals to the would-be uniters, the sun kings of latter days, as is now becoming all too apparent. One could snicker that Obama is simply telling the most guiltily race-conscious people in America that he is going to somehow free them from their guilt by constantly reminding them of the need for "change" and "unity". It's like the priest who keeps promising the forlorn that the Kingdom of God will appear on earth any day now.

But there is a larger point to be made: what Obama represents is a form of rhetoric that has for ages appealed to the young (and young-at-heart), including many happily race-conscious generations. In politics, there is always a divide, somewhere, and always a place for magicians who promise to overcome this hard reality. It's not that there aren't moments in political life when we can indeed overcome divisions; but these moments are always only temporary, as every new consensus gives way to new forms of difference: a consensus is something exchanged by people who have to be different to be engaged in human exchange, people who can never just all become the same thing and then freeze history in place. We are beings free to love and to resent any consensus; we can have no consensus, no shared new sign or idea, that is not already in the process of being exchanged, changed, eroded, reformed, etc. To be human is to exchange differences about what is only ultimately, i.e. originally, the same.

Joseph Knippenberg, writing about Dennis Hale's thoughts on the need for us to recognize the inevitability of division in politics sums up the question succinctly:

Hale makes the entirely commonsensical and grown-up point that choosing means dividing. Unity requires the overcoming or suppression of politics. Obama promises to build the kingdom on earth, which amounts to the overcoming of politics. But people who promise that usually end up trying to suppress politics.

If Obama were serious about unity, he'd be Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, or Mussolini. I credit him with not being altogether serious. He's merely, as Jonah G. would say, a liberal fascist.

I admit to rather liking that moniker, but at the end of the day, one has to face the reality that calling liberal fascists by their proper name is not a way to win them over to reality, as the outrage over Goldberg's book suggests.

As I say, it's not that unity is never possible; it's not that we can't all agree to change; it's just that if we are all to agree on change it has to be over a real promise that is truly open-ended, open to a further exchange of differences, open to new, if yet undeveloped, divisions. And if Obama presumes to represent such a promise, he needs to make clear how he can set up a new political dynamic, a new form of exchange, by bringing new ideas and realities into play in a way that widely raises excitement that a new game, a new challenge, is about to be unboxed and no one yet can know who will learn to master this game, since all players have reason to hope. That's a consensus: the start of an exciting game.

Since my colleagues here at Covenant Zone are frequently discussing how one can appeal to young people, this post began with the idea that I would put up some thoughtful comments from Knippenberg's colleague at NoLeftTurns, Julie Ponzi:

John McCain will not get the same kind of youth support that Barack Obama gets. Indeed, he ought not want to inspire that kind of reflexive, unthinking and insipid prostration.

But all young people are not twits. There is plenty to be tilled from the fertile garden of thinking and emerging-in-intelligence youth. John McCain can start by reminding us that he, too, was once young. He can talk about character in a way that inspires rather than chastises. His story is an inspiring one. He has not used it to as much good effect as he might--partly, I think, out of a sense of modesty and partly out of a (sensible) desire not to bring up the whole Vietnam debate and, thereby, hearken back to the debates of the 1960s (yet again). There is some danger in this, I admit. But the debate that Obama wants to engage is, for all his youth and inexperience, a very old one. This can be demonstrated. The truth is that Obama is nothing new under the sun. And he can be made to look very foolish for thinking that he is. Young people are always insecure about the possibility that they look foolish. Don't offend them by telling them that they are foolish--but point things out that lead them to this conclusion on their own.

There are things a septuagenarian can do to inspire young people. Two of them are NOT pandering to or ignoring them. Appeal to their minds and give them credit for having minds and then, perhaps, you may win their hearts. Such a strategy would do more than win McCain and the Republicans young voters. It would go a long way toward winning him all kinds of voters in general. For, in this need to have respect for our minds and in the desire not to appear as fools, we're all very young at heart.