Walter Russell Mead, discussing the symbiosis between the Democratic/government party and blacks, has perceptively noted the following truth:
middle class African Americans compared to whites tend to work disproportionately in public sector jobs or in private sector jobs like health care that are heavily subsidized by government transfers. A pension crisis for state or federal workers will hit African-American families harder, proportionately, than white ones; municipal layoffs and bankruptcies will have a disproportionate effect on both the African-Americans who depend on these services and those who are paid to provide them.
Let’s match Mead and raise him one by substituting “unmarried women” for “African-Americans” and “married couples” for “whites.” so that the passage reads:
middle class unmarried women compared to married couples tend to work disproportionately in public sector jobs or in private sector jobs like health care that are heavily subsidized by government transfers. A pension crisis for state or federal workers will hit unmarried women harder, proportionately, than married couples; municipal layoffs and bankruptcies will have a disproportionate effect on both the unmarried women who depend on these services and those who are paid to provide them.
The same federal government that emancipated blacks and gave black males the rights previously denied slaves later gave women those same rights. The civil rights revolution that first helped blacks toward equality in the 1950s and 1960s did the same for women a few years later (see chart). The same governments that practiced affirmative action to help blacks toward job equality then seamlessly did the same for women, helping create the current situation where blacks and women are in relation to other groups over-represented in government employment.
How could we not help women the same way we helped blacks? The one had to follow the other.
The problem for blacks, unmarried women, and others who rely on government employment and government pensions is the economy’s approaching shift away from inefficient government services and generous, union-backed government benefits. The problem for those who would take government benefits away is that people fight hardest to hold onto what they already have.
the political class continues to cause government to overpromise and underperform. This class blithely considers itself exempt from the tyranny of the bell-shaped curve - the fact that in most occupations a few people are excellent, a few are awful, and most are average.
The people who start our country’s fastest growing businesses do so at an average age of 40. Some never went to college, and top-tier entrepreneurs who have degrees also tend to have work experience — they learn about an industry before starting a firm in it. . . the personal qualities useful in building a company. . . are widely distributed through our society, not concentrated in young people at universities.
Land distribution in America has shaped our history. Settlers gained farms in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota under the 1785 Northwest Land Ordinance, which divided the territories of the area into equal parts of a grid. The policy carried over to the farm states and the West through the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave 160 acres to any settler who worked the land for five years. These policies extended the vision of our founders, who believed the Declaration of Independence America was built upon the backs of free farmers—men created equal, with the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
But there was another America, that of Southern plantations, Western ranches, and large California and Southwest hacienda land holdings built upon water rights. These large estates enshrined European feudalism inside America’s borders, characterized by giving a small group of wealthy landholders control over the lives of thousands of tenants. In all too many cases, the rich were white, the tenants non-white. In the South especially, the rich in politics used race--a fear of blacks--to corral poor whites to their side.
The industrial revolution worsened this picture, with capitalists based in the East and California railroad barons joining landlords inside the ruling class, and controlling millions of dispossessed tenants and immigrants working in urban factories. The progressive movement began with anti-bank Midwest prairie farmers, but then enlarged the attack to cover rich capitalists, East and West, allying itself with industrial labor unions, while leaving the South relatively undisturbed (progressives and Southerners were white and mostly Democrats who didn’t let race get between them). But after the federal government first tamed big business, it turned on Southern and other racists from the 1950s forward, as a government-based elite centered in the Northeast gained control of the nation.
Government expanded to counter anti-democratic landowners, capitalists, racists, and sexists. It grew and rules now in the name of the people, believing in its right to speak for the voiceless masses against big business, racists, and bigots of all stripes. Without the dark America of plantations, large ranches, haciendas, and rich capitalists, our new elite would never have gained power.
Contrast this government intervention justified by dark forces to the America of free farmers, or especially that of small business, with each owner able to pursue one’s own destiny. They aren’t victims in need of government help, and they don’t trade loss of control for government assistance. The symbiotic relationship of master and servant is foreign to them.
America has a history of elite rule and suppression of its people. But America also has a history of successfully opposing elite rule, and a history of thriving under a free enterprise economic system that allows for success, and for failure followed by success.
Today, we have too much government control. We chafe inside an inefficient internal empire. We need instead, in the words of Carl Schramm, “messy capitalism” with all its possible mistakes, if we are to grow the jobs our people so desperately want.
Obama greets China’s President Hu. Do we really see what’s coming?
In four years, the Chinese and Taiwanese economies, measured in Gross Domestic Product/ Purchasing Power Parity (GDP/PPP), combined will be the same size as the U.S. economy, but with a far higher growth rate, with a far more favorable trade balance, with far larger foreign currency reserves, and with a much larger population. These are facts, you know.
In the recent Program for International Student Assessment’s testing of 15 year olds, Shanghai students came in first in reading, math, and science. Americans were 17th in reading, 23rd in science, and 31st in math (65 countries tested).
Now people are buzzing about Yale law school professor and bestselling author Amy Chua’s new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, with its accompanying Wall Street Journal commentary. To most Westerners, Chua is a monster, not a mother. Chua stands by her results.
Henry Kissinger has made money off his role in bringing China to the forefront of U.S. consciousness. He once wrote that an intellectual block inhibits status quo powers like the U.S. from accepting that rising revolutionary powers—powers intent on replacing the existing order altogether—really mean to “smash the existing framework.” Kissinger maintains we are lulled by the seeming permanence of the system over which we preside, and can’t bring ourselves to believe that a rising challenger truly wants to demolish an international order we so much believe benefits everyone.
In August 2008, in the midst of much angst about the economy, I realized that three numbers defined not a spectacular stock market, not even an excellent one, but certainly a “healthy” one. Those numbers are a Dow at 12,000, an S&P 500 of 1,300, and a NASDAQ of 2,500. The three numbers total 15,800, so I measured how far the market was from “healthy” by calculating the distance between the current market and 15,800.
Well once my index was in place, we never did reach a “healthy” market. Far from it. By March 2009, the market had fallen almost 50% of the way from “healthy” to zero, nada, nothing. Terrible times. Full recovery seemed a long way off.
Could be that 22 months is a long time. But a healthy market made from a Dow at 11,787, an S&P 500 at 1,293, and a NASDAQ at 2,755 hitting numbers not seen since 2007—all adding up to a healthy 15,835 (see chart)—is where we are today. And it’s great news. Wall Street is back. Now for that follow-on job and housing recovery our country so badly needs.
The president’s poll ratings are back in positive territory, after having been upside down for 10 months. According to the “RealClear Politics” average, Obama’s job approval rating of 49% exceeds his 46% disapproval rating, putting his performance right side up once again. Also, historically, presidents with job approval ratings below 47% don’t get re-elected. Obama’s 49% approval rating is back in the re-elect range for the first time since last May.
It may be that politics gives a party one day to celebrate, then reality begins to turn on the winner. For two years leading up to November 2010, the country had one party to blame for our troubles—the party of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid. Democrats couldn’t perform, and blameless Republicans won big. Now Republicans are part of the problem, and a carping, negative part at that.
Also, the Obama voters who stayed home in 2010 will be back in 2012, voting in a presidential year, which stacks the deck for Obama the same way lower turnout helped Republicans in 2010.
Obama benefits from being “president of all of us” in the aftermath of the Tucson Massacre, and will benefit again from his State of the Union speech 11 days from now. Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders have their work cut out for them, if they are to block Obama’s re-election next year.
Republicans must find a way to sustain the entitlements that Americans have come to depend on — most notably Social Security and Medicare — without crippling the economy with increased levels of taxation. . . the Republican party — and only the Republican party — can save . . . entitlements without destroying the prospects for economic growth. The Democratic party can no longer be counted on to do this.
There is a growing realization that the mantle of good government has passed from Democratic hands, for the “government party” is owned by its unionized employees, not the people taxed to pay civil servants’ salaries and benefits. The Economist is on to union power, writing that:
unions have blocked reform at every turn. . . it is almost as hard to reward an outstanding teacher as it is to sack a useless one. . . union power is magnified not just by strikers’ ability to shut down monopolies that everyone needs without seeing their employer go bust, but also by their political clout over those employers.
The Economist is striving to save civil servants from themselves before it’s too late, telling government what it must do:
➢ [There is] a huge opportunity to redesign government by focusing on productivity and improving services, not just cutting costs.
➢ The immediate battle will be over benefits. . .Too many state workers can retire in their mid-50s on close to full pay. America’s states have as much as $5 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities. . . Sixty-five should be a minimum age for retirement for people who spend their lives in classrooms and offices; and new civil servants should be switched to defined-contribution pensions.
➢ [The] right to strike should be more tightly limited; and the rules governing political donations and even unionisation itself should be changed to “opt-in” ones, in which a member decides whether to give or join.
➢ Private-sector productivity has soared . . . because [companies] have the freedom to manage—to experiment, to expand successful innovations, to close down bad ones, to promote talented people. Across the public sector, unions have fought all this.
➢ Focusing on productivity should help politicians redefine the debate. . . to hire a new generation of workers with different contracts.
It must happen, and perhaps the Economist will help Democrats/government see the light. More likely, however, Republicans will be the ones to make changes by first breaking union power.
Michelle Rhee, the fired ex-superintendent of the very troubled Washington D.C. school system, is still committed to reforming public education.
She’s now head of “StudentsFirst,” which she calls “a national organization to defend and promote the interests of children in public education and to pursue an aggressive reform agenda to make American schools the best in the world.” According to Rhee, “StudentsFirst” signed up 100,000 people and collected $1 million in its first 48 hours, and aims at “a frontal attack on the educational status quo.”
Specifically, Rhee is pushing a three-part agenda:
1. Treat teachers like professionals. That means basing compensation, staffing decisions and professional development on teachers' effectiveness, not seniority. It means implementing a strong performance pay system for the best teachers, and discontinuing tenure for ineffective teachers. When budget problems require layoffs of school staff, honor quality over seniority.
2. Empower parents with information and choices. Remove barriers that limit available seats in high-quality schools, allowing the best charter schools to grow and serve more students. Give poor families publicly funded scholarships to attend private schools. Expand use of California's "parent trigger" law, which forces the restructuring of a poor performing school when more than 50% of the school’s parents sign a petition.
3. Ensure accountability for every dollar spent. Today, billions of dollars are wasted, for example, on paying for advanced degrees for teachers that have no measurable impact on student achievement. Also, to ensure states aren't draining their budgets with pension payouts, the current pensions structure must shift new employees from defined-benefit programs to portable, defined-contribution plans, with employees contributing to their own retirement.
If you want to join and contribute to “StudentsFirst,” sign up here.
Fuller Torrey is the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center and the author of The Insanity Offense: How America's Failure to Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens (W.W. Norton, 2008). He writes in the Wall Street Journal that tragedies similar to the Tucson massacre “are happening every day throughout the United States.” They happen because of
five decades of failed mental-health policies. During the 1960s, we began to empty the state mental hospitals but failed to put in place programs to ensure that the released patients received treatment after they left. By the 1980s, the results were evident—increasing numbers of seriously mentally ill persons among the homeless population and in the nation's jails and prisons. Over the past three decades, things have only gotten worse. A 2007 study by the U.S. Justice Department found that 56% of state prisoners, 45% of federal prisoners, and 64% of local jail inmates suffer from mental illnesses.
Torrey adds:
The solution to this situation is obvious—make sure individuals with serious mental illnesses are receiving treatment. The mistake [is] ignoring the treatment needs of the patients being released. Many such patients will take medication voluntarily if it is made available to them. [But o]thers are unaware they are sick and should be required by law to receive assisted outpatient treatment, including medication and counseling. . . If they do not comply with the court-ordered treatment plan, they can and should be involuntarily admitted to a hospital.
The Washington Post’s Steve Pearlstein is a D.C.-based media pooh-bah who seems much less relaxed than Doyle McManus is about the Republicans’ new power in Washington. In a column titled, “'Job-killing' regulation? 'Job-killing' spending? Let's kill this GOP canard,” Pearlstein sets out to strangle in the crib the Republican effort to link Obamacare, big government regulations, and big spending to job destruction:
Republicans these days [tell us] President Obama runs a "job-killing administration" with a "job-killing agenda" carried out by, you guessed it, a "job-killing bureaucracy." In the fevered Republican imagination, the entire federal government is a "job-killing machine" or - my personal favorite - a "job-killing beast."
Yeah. To my “fevered imagination,” that actually seems about right. But not to Pearlstein, who believes killing Obamacare is the most “effective way to reduce employment in the one sector that is actually adding jobs," that cutting “$100 billion this year from the government's domestic spending” means “the loss of close to a million jobs for government workers” (in Washington D.C., that especially hurts), and cutting regulations will “kill people rather than jobs.” (Ouch! Ouch!)
Pearlstein then wonders
how Republicans and their media posse would like it if Democrats started referring to "genocidal" deregulation or the "murderous" repeal of health-care reform. Or if Republican economic policies were likened to the infamous neutron bomb - they kill the workers but leave their jobs intact.
Finally, Pearlstein really goes over the top when he calls "job-killing" rhetoric “a throwback to the McCarthy era. . . the sort of economic fundamentalism better suited to Afghan politics than American.”
We get that Pearlstein likes the status quo, but believe his name calling means he has no constructive response to GOP plans. Bad pooh-bah.
By contrast Nick Schultz, writing in Forbes, puts forth two job-creating ideas:
The first idea is the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act, or the REINS Act [which] would require that any economically significant regulation--meaning any rule that would have an annual economic effect of $100 million or more--must be sent to Congress for approval.
The second idea comes from
Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, [who] proposes what he calls a regulatory "pay as you go" system. Sen. Warner's plan "would require federal agencies to identify and eliminate one existing regulation for each new regulation they want to add."
Schultz recommends combining the two ideas into a single bill that could earn bipartisan support.
All job creating ideas, from anywhere, are welcome. In the UK Telegraph, Jeremy Warner explains why the West’s structural imbalance vis a vis the East makes job creation here so difficult. China saves, the U.S. spends, and there is no real answer to the problem, short or long term. Faced with this reality, Warner wisely concludes:
Imbalances within economies are common place. . . The trick with global imbalances must surely be to limit their potential for damage, rather than the futile endeavour of trying to get rid of them altogether. It's plainly in no one's interests that an excess of developing economy savings is allowed to finance another credit bubble in the already over-indebted West.
CNBC’s Larry Kudlow is more hopeful than Warner, believing “there's an opportunity for both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to move in the direction of a supply-side economic growth model to reduce chronic unemployment and really get the economy moving again.” We know about the Republicans. What Kudlow is watching are signs the White House is becoming more business friendly, considering lower taxes on business and adding staff that better understands business needs.
Doyle McManus is a media pooh-bah. He sits in the nation’s capital and pontificates for readers of the Los Angeles Times about what really goes on in Washington D.C. His present concern is that folks not get too excited about what a Republican take-over of the U.S. House might mean for the president, Democrats, and their continued domination of national politics.
So his latest essay lays out Republican weaknesses, latent Democratic strengths, and traps that await the GOP newcomers to power:
➢ most voters — except for the "tea party" legions, of course — weren't . . . focused [on GOP] demands. . . The [actual] mandate is to deal with jobs. . .[Speaker] Boehner's [challenge] is . . . [k]eeping his 242 members (including 75 freshmen elected with tea party backing) focused on job creation . . .
Comment: McManus himself points out elsewhere that Republicans plan to make it as clear as they can that repealing Obamacare and cutting spending are both job creation strategies. The GOP knows voters care about jobs first and foremost.
➢ Despite the party's electoral victory, polls suggest that many of the swing voters who put the GOP over the top didn't sign up for the whole program. A Bloomberg poll last month found that . . . the Republican Party is still less popular than . . . Democrats.
Comment: McManus is scratching hard for facts here. Gallup has just reported that the share of voters identifying themselves as Democrats is at an all-time low of 31%, only 2% above the still-damaged Republican label. And when Gallup pushes independents to lean Democrat or Republican, Republicans are just 1% away from the parity with Democrats; parity they last achieved in 2002-3. Republicans are up from trailing Democrats by 12% just two years ago. Is McManus dishing his liberal readers false hope? You be the judge.
➢ Most Republican voters want to repeal the healthcare law, but polls show the public as a whole evenly divided; about half of Americans want to keep or expand the Obama plan.
Comment: As mentioned in this blog earlier, “polls” is actually a single exit poll that asked voters if they wanted to repeal Obamacare on the one hand, or keep or expand it on the other. Voters were not asked if they wanted to fix Obamacare, the most likely eventual outcome. Taking away that choice skewed poll results toward “keep.” McManus knows better, but uses a poorly-drafted poll to help his liberal readers stay happy.
➢ Boehner[‘s] biggest test will come in March, when the federal government is expected to bump up against the debt ceiling . . . Boehner[‘s] goal will be to use the debt ceiling to force Obama to cut spending without precipitating a federal government shutdown (a gambit that backfired on Gingrich in 1995) or, worse, a default that would be disastrous for financial markets. Comment: Republicans know (as McManus says they do) that the debt ceiling will have to rise. They also want to use the battle to extract spending concessions from Democrats. Is McManus predicting Republicans won’t force even a single concession? We’ll see soon enough. Even pooh-bahs are right sometimes.
A “Wikileaks” cable has provided a look at how China will be run after 2012. According to the UK’s Telegraph, future paramount leader Xi Jinping is "exceptionally ambitious," had "his eye on the prize" of becoming China's leader from "early adulthood," and made sure he’d get there by devoting himself to Marxist ideology in order to "become redder than the red."
The quoted U.S. embassy cable describes Xi as a true "elitist" who believes that "dedicated and committed Communist Party leadership is the key to enduring social stability and national strength.” Xi is “of average intelligence,” says the cable’s source, and blessed with a strong sense of entitlement, believing that “members of his generation are the 'legitimate heirs' to the revolutionary achievements of their parents and therefore 'deserve to rule China.'”
Xi, you see, is a “princeling” whose father ruled Guangdong in the late 1970’s (Xi is 57), and in fact set up China’s most successful export zone, Shenzhen. Xi himself was, really, a prince born and raised in Beijing. According to another cable,
the compounds in which Xi Jinping's generation grew up were "ironically the most precisely class-based mini-society ever constructed". Everything from which kindergarten or supermarket a leader could use to what car he could own was determined by Party rank. "The children of this revolutionary elite were told that they, too, would someday take their rightful place in the Chinese leadership."
Xi’s wife is a famous Chinese folk singer.
As China’s strength grows, it will inevitably bump up against India, Asia’s other population giant. Kevin Rafferty, writing in the Japan Times, points out the struggle is uneven:
➢ India is a difficult place to do business, according to the World Bank Group's annual report Doing Business 2011. India ranks 134th out of 183 economies, while China is 79th.
➢ China is an exporting giant that took over from Germany as the world's biggest exporter in 2009, with exports of $1.2 trillion, 9.6% of global exports and a trade surplus of almost $200 billion. India is in 21st place with only $136 billion exports in 2009, 1.3% of global exports and a trade deficit of $114 billion.
➢ Trade between China and India will top $60 billion for 2010, making China India's biggest trading partner. China has made big inroads into India's consumer markets. India has not had anything like the same success in selling to China. Iron ore alone makes up about half of India's exports, and the rest consist mostly of basic commodities. Beijing's surplus in trade with India will probably reach $24 billion in 2010.
James Piereson is president of the William E. Simon Foundation and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He has written an important essay that proclaims American conservativism to be the country’s most vibrant political philosophy; the very essence of American exceptionalism.
Piereson’s argument continues, in his own words, in Part II:
conservatives will have to craft a new governing consensus out of the loose strands of their movement—but . . . conservatism will continue to operate as a political force in the years and decades ahead because it has turned itself into a popular, even a populist, movement—something few thought possible when conservatism first took shape. . . Yet in a democratic polity such as exists in the United States, conservatism could not have thrived . . . without also channeling its ideas into a popular force.
Critics, from Richard Hofstadter in the 1950s to Sam Tanenhaus more recently, have denied that a popular conservatism can exist because, in their view, conservatism must sacrifice its distinctive elements in the process of winning a mass following. . . Edmund Burke’s ever-famous writings on the French Revolution [endorsed] governance by the talented, supported the status quo, and preferred prudence and realism as guides to political action over abstract theories and principles. American conservatism, on the other hand. . . has exploited popular appeals, attacked the status quo and “the establishment,” used terms like “the conservative revolution,” and, especially in foreign policy, proposed an “idealistic” rather than a “realistic” approach to dealing with foreign threats.
American conservatism [is anti-establishment] because it originated outside the political mainstream and. . . has never really functioned comfortably within it. . . As an opposition movement in a democratic system, American conservatives can only gain power by taking their case to the public in order to win converts to their cause and, incidentally, to discredit the . . . status quo.
Because it developed as a challenge to . . . the New Deal and its successive iterations, American conservatism embodies many of the features of an insurgent or oppositional group. Conservatives [describe] their enterprise as a “movement,” . . . an active and dedicated membership moving toward some definite destination. . . most conservatives still think of themselves as an embattled minority fighting a proud and insulated establishment.
Shut out of liberal institutions, such as elite-college faculties and the national press, along with mainline churches and even government itself, conservatives have set up their own . . . think tanks, radio and television networks, magazines, book publishers, citizen associations, charitable foundations, newspapers, and even a few colleges . . . conservatives attend meetings and conferences, form friendships and associations, and develop and exchange ideas without ever having to [contact] liberals. From these redoubts, they rally the public against the liberal establishment, often with impressive success and much to the alarm of liberal critics who . . . view them as dangerous radicals.
Conservatives have in this way created their own “nation” within the nation, replete with its own culture, institutions and prominent personalities. . . As a political insurgency, American conservatives also have naturally adopted the language of opposition, speaking of “revolution” . . . and attacking “elites,” “the establishment” and an “out-of-control government.”
The movement is distinguishable from a political party by its emphasis on principles and philosophy, its interest in recruiting only like-minded members and its focus upon large goals rather than incremental changes in policy. Because of this character, the conservative movement is not much interested in “the politics of compromise” or in accommodations with liberalism and liberal politics. Conservatism thus remains even now a movement of ideas and philosophy rather than . . . a collection or coalition of interests.
movements can continue intact in the face of persistent defeats until their goals have been reached or they have been absorbed into the mainstream operations of government. In fact. . . in opposition. . . principles can be advocated in pure form, [while] in power. . . those principles are inevitably adulterated by compromise.
Several years ago, [the Economist’s] John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. . . pointed out that the influence of the American conservative movement . . . provides the nation with its unique and exceptional identity in the world. . . it is American conservatism that has opened up the chasm between the politics of the United States and that found in other industrial nations of the world. . . the American Left, with its industrial unions, government workers and liberal intellectuals, has its obvious counterparts in Great Britain, France, Germany and much of the rest of Europe. The Democratic Party [isn’t] out of place within the European context. It [isn’t] the American Left that makes the United States an exceptional nation.
American conservatism, on the other hand, is a unique and unusual movement in the modern world. Its various affiliated groups promoting liberty and free markets, lower taxes, religion and traditional morality, or patriotism and national strength, are largely unknown elsewhere. There exists no political institution in Europe that resembles the various components of the conservative movement, such as . . . the various tax-limitation and patriotic groups now active, or the Tea Party movement. And conservatism’s . . . Sarah Palin [or] Newt Gingrich would make little headway in other countries. [Thus,] the conservative movement increasingly defines American exceptionalism in the contemporary world.
James Piereson is president of the William E. Simon Foundation and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He has written an important essay that proclaims American conservativism to be the country’s most vibrant political philosophy; the very essence of American exceptionalism.
Here Piereson’s argument, in his words, Part I:
one of the more significant political developments in the United States over the last half of the twentieth century was the rise of conservatism from a marginal intellectual movement in 1950 to its position by the end of the 1990s as a rival to liberalism as the nation’s most influential public doctrine. It fought its way to that position. . . because it solved a series of public challenges—from crime to the Cold War—that liberals could not, or at least did not, address.
there are now more conservatives in America than there are liberals[; they] make up a highly significant minority of American voters. . . liberals in power, if they are to survive, must tack to the center while conservatives can govern more from the right—and, indeed, [are] why Obama’s attempt to reprise FDR and LBJ was bound to fail.
American conservatism began . . . as a movement of ideas and. . .has managed to maintain its original character. Thus David Brooks has observed that conservatives differ from other political sets in their apparent preoccupation with books, ideas and a handful of influential authors. One rarely hears of liberal groups discussing major works written by the intellectual architects of the welfare state, such as John Dewey, Herbert Croly or John Rawls, or sponsoring programs in honor of leading figures like John Maynard Keynes or John Kenneth Galbraith. One would be hard-pressed to identify an influential book or essay that sets forth the principles of contemporary liberalism as they relate to feminism, multiculturalism, diversity or economic planning.
Conservative groups, on the other hand, regularly pay tribute in their programs to the founding fathers of conservative thought . . .The texts that energize conservatives . . .are: (1) The Road to Serfdom, published by F. A. Hayek in London and in the United States in 1944, which developed the enduring case for classical liberalism; (2) Witness, published by Whittaker Chambers in 1952, and The Conservative Mind, by Russell Kirk in 1953, which provoked a renewal of Burkean conservatism, which in turn led to the founding in 1954 of National Review by William F. Buckley Jr.; and (3) the Public Interest, a quarterly journal founded in 1965 by Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell which was the original forum for neoconservatism, a set of ideas that quickly found expression in other influential venues, such as Commentary magazine and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.
traditional conservatives, led by Buckley, Kirk and Chambers. . . argued [the Cold War] was not solely about preserving liberty but also about the conservation of the religious and moral tradition of the West. . . The neoconservatives, for their part, developed their own synthesis in response to the unraveling of the American welfare state in the 1960s and a parallel rise in anti-American sentiment. . . the problem with the expanding social safety net was . . . that it increasingly promoted disorder, crime, broken or unformed families, poor schools and a general loss of authority in society[, undermining] the middle-class values upon which a successful commercial civilization must be based. . . neoconservatives were not in principle opposed to the welfare state but only to a liberal welfare state that did not uphold the ideals of family, order and community.
An essential aspect of conservatism is the conviction that . . . republics follow a cycle of rise and inevitable decline as the people or their leaders gradually sacrifice their principles in the pursuit of money, security or power. Conservatives. . . are thus skeptical of liberal notions of inevitable historical progress that do not take into account . . . corruption and decline. This is one of the key reasons conservatives have always looked for external supports for representative institutions, whether in nationalism and patriotism, religion, family and community. . . which provide direction and discipline for liberty and self-interest. Conservatives [fear eroding of] those private associations and loyalties which sustain and support representative institutions.
. . . conservatives look to . . . Alexis de Tocqueville, James Madison, Joseph Schumpeter and [Edmund] Burke as important sources for their ideas. . . The seminal conservative thinkers of our era . . . have identified these external supports . . .—Hayek in the founders’ Constitution, Buckley and his colleagues in religion, family and tradition, and Kristol and the neoconservatives in bourgeois virtues and patriotism.
These authors, books and publications are still read by conservatives [and none], to the surprise of critics, has been discredited among conservatives by recent events—not the classical liberals by the financial crash, not the traditional conservatives by the libertarian cultural politics of our day and not the neoconservatives by the war in Iraq.
At the same time, little that is new or fundamental has been added to the conservative movement since the neoconservatives arrived on the scene. It still runs by and large on that set of ideas developed in the postwar period in response to totalitarianism, socialism, and an expanding and self-confident welfare state. . .
The critique of Obama’s agenda is increasingly framed in popular circles in terms of “big government” as a threat to liberty and the constitutional order. [Hayek’s] Road to Serfdom recently rose to the top of best-seller lists after [FOX’s Glenn Beck] urged his viewers to read it as the clearest diagnosis of the challenges posed by liberal policies. [Hayek’s conservativism] is increasingly being presented as an alternative to the Democratic agenda. Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, has similarly framed the debate as one of “free enterprise” versus “big government.” The Road to Serfdom, however, while a penetrating diagnosis of the corruptions of the welfare state, offers few prescriptions for unwinding it in its mature phase.
Democrats are strong in minority districts, but minorities do better in white districts running as Republicans. From Josh Kraushaar, writing in the National Journal:
It’s clear Democrats are a much more inclusive party—just look at the fact that nearly one-third of House Democrats are non-white. [But o]f the 75 black, Hispanic, and Asian-American Democrats in Congress and governorships, only nine represent majority-white constituencies—and that declines to six in 2011. . . And when you only look at members of Congress or governors elected by majority-white constituencies (in other words, most of the governorships [picture: Nikki Haley of South Carolina] and Senate seats, and 337 out of 435 House seats), Democrats trail Republicans in minority representation.
We need government, and we probably even need big government. But the current Federal government is too large and inefficient for our own good (proof: record sustained high unemployment under total Democratic rule, 2009-10). Yet Democrats continue to defend big government. It’s impossible in fact to tell where Democrats end and government begins. They are a virtual identity.
The goodness, the moral virtue, within which government wrapped itself in the Great Depression has frayed over time. Government is now the establishment, supported by the Democratic Party, the media, academia, arts and entertainment, the non-profit sector, liberal churches, and much of big business. Becoming increasingly brittle in their effort to hang on, and acting increasingly out of fear, our elite sincerely hold to their moral authority, which makes dislodging them from power even more difficult.
At base, the elite believe some elite has to be in charge, and that our American meritocracy is the last, best hope for a good elite. They reject rule by money, opposing the capitalists who flourish when government is absent from the picture. You can say government exists to tax; to redirect resources from money through government to the worthy and needy (government of course retains money for itself as the funds pass through it—see kleptocracy).
One may wonder why our wealthy elite denounce America’s concentration of wealth, and why they favor progressive taxation. One answer: doing so underpins their moral authority to rule, and doing so offsets their guilt at having so much. But also, doing so may reflect genuine revulsion at others who inherit or acquire wealth without earning it, yet seemingly fight to keep it all. Such persons are the elite’s inferiors—by another name, Republicans.
The elite’s ideology, their moral authority, rests on three additional principles: 1. THINK. Knowledge is power. Government and its people must defer to superior knowledge, to expertise, to brains. It’s “what you know.” Remember “who you are” is based on “what you know.” New facts displace old facts; speed wins.
2. ACT. Rule based on science. We must honor our modern versions of the Greek gods, superior humans who act on our behalf, and who practice “relativism”—breaking the rules—based on science that always moves forward. Scientific rule inevitably overrides fixed moral values tied to ancient, outdated texts.
3. LOVE. Helping victims. That means feeding the major components of the Democratic coalition—those benefiting from government transfer payments, as well as blacks, other minorities, and unmarried women. Love your core supporters as well—government workers and other union members, liberals, and young people. All together, the elite and their victims make up a potential majority of voters.
Politics is about power. Ideology justifies grabbing and holding onto power. We fight for power in the name of some greater good. Without moral authority, it becomes difficult to impossible for any elite to impose its will on the population.
Republicans are a shadow elite, a leadership group out of power. The party has a bad name as a result of past corruption, troubles in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, deficits and debt, and the Great Recession that began on its watch. Today Republicans prefer to call themselves conservatives and speak of lower taxes, less government spending, less regulation of the private sector, and opposition to government-run health care.
Republicans believe a strong economy lifts all ships, that it’s better to grow the pie than to fight over how to cut it, and that individuals make wiser decisions affecting their own lives than do bureaucrats in Washington. Republicans believe in freedom, the modern word for the Declaration of Independence’s “liberty,” as in “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Because Republicans seek to decentralize power to each individual, they are opponents of today’s elite. According to Democrats who are today’s elite, Republican ideology sets up a situation leaving the rich free to lord it over the masses of unrich. We need government to correct capitalism’s imbalance.
The French Revolution, which followed ours by six years, paid lip service to “liberty,” but also honored “equality” (re-cutting the pie into more equal pieces) and “fraternity” (governing for the collective good)—two words that can override “liberty.” Isaiah Berlin in the mid-20th Century modernized the contradiction between freedom on the one hand, and equality and collective good on the other, in his seminal essay on “Two Concepts of Liberty”—positive and negative liberty.
Karl Marx was a scholar of the rise of capitalism who called for transferring power over the economy from the capitalist class to the people. While Marx believed history’s law made the transformation inevitable, as workers conscious of their rising power seized the means of production, decades later Vladimir Lenin believed that for revolution to take place, an intellectual elite, a “vanguard of the proletariat” must act on behalf of the people. The resulting bloodstained, tumultuous, and ultimately failed history of Lenin’s experiment, the Soviet Union (1917-1991), discredited the elite Leninist road to a better world.
Democrats are not Leninists. But they share a Socialist concern about capitalist concentration of wealth and power at the expense of the people, and believe government exists in part to correct wealth’s misdistribution. Democrats scorn Republicans as defenders of the rich. In the 20th Century, under Woodrow Wilson and every subsequent Democratic president, the party set about to rebalance the country away from business and toward the people. That drive provides Democrats their ideology, their moral authority.
“It’s the economy, stupid.” Except when it isn’t. If the economy hums, the people running the country are happy to talk about it. But when the economy’s in trouble, people want to change the subject. They want to talk about enduring values instead, what I call protecting our culture. Here are blog entries, some of my earliest, discussing the tension between economic progress and culture:
In a more recent blog post, I quoted Washington Post commentator Robert Samuelson’s thoughts about how describing issues in moral terms dodges the need, when money is scarce, to pay for solving a problem:
politicians prefer framing issues in moral terms. Global warming is about "saving the planet." Both sides of the abortion and gay marriage debates believe they hold the high ground.
Obama pitches his health care plan in moral terms: health care is a "right;” its opponents less moral. Why not use this tactic? On a simple calculus of benefits, Obama’s proposal would have failed. Perhaps 32 million Americans will receive insurance coverage -- about 10% of the population. But for most Americans, the bill imposes costs, including higher taxes, fees, and/or longer waits for service.
Supporters instead back expanded health care as "the right thing"; it makes them feel good about themselves. They get "psychic benefits." Economic benefits make people richer, but cost money. Psychic benefits make them feel morally upright and superior at no monetary cost to politicians! The magic solution.
Neither the right nor left has a monopoly on using moral values to deflect policy away from hard economic choices. Today, though, the left is in charge, and the economy isn’t working. So the left is deflecting.
Here, from Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, writing in the Washington Post, is a present-day example of a progressive shifting the discussion to culture. Kennedy Townsend does so with a spirited defense of the left's high moral standing:
[Sarah] Palin. . . argues that "morality itself cannot be sustained without the support of religious beliefs." That statement amounts to a wholesale attack on countless Americans, and no study or reasonable argument I have seen or heard would support such a blanket condemnation. . . Somehow Palin misses this. . . she may be appealing to a religious right that really seeks secular power. . . no American political leader should cavalierly - or out of political calculation - dismiss the hard-won ideal of religious freedom that is among our country's greatest gifts to the world.
A contrasting example of a conservative focusing on the economy is Walter Russell Mead’s American Interestarticle advocating growth through free enterprise not through big government:
For America to move forward, power is going to have to shift from bureaucrats to entrepreneurs, from the state to society and from qualified experts and licensed professionals to the population at large. . . we must drastically raise productivity by re-imagining the way our society makes and distributes the services that, currently, the. . . learned professions provide.
The world is moving in ways so opposed to [intellectuals’] most hallowed assumptions that they simply cannot make sense of it. They resist blindly and uncreatively and, unable to appreciate the extraordinary prospects for human liberation that this change can bring, they are incapable of creative and innovative response. . . [they] try to turn this [transformation] into a left/right debate rather than one about the past and the future.
Tom Friedman of the New York Times seems to be one of those Mead describes as “unable to appreciate the extraordinary prospects for human liberation.” Friedman instead wants even bigger, better government with its long-range planning:
given where we need to go, [the Obama-GOP tax] deal is just another shot of morphine to a country that needs to do things that are big and hard and still only wants to do things that are easy and small. . . in the politics of sports, the G.O.P. just scored a goal on Obama. We don’t seem to realize: We’re in a hole and still digging. Our educational attainment levels are stagnating; our infrastructure is fraying. . . We need a plan.
Friedman writes as if he advocates change. But look, he’s defending giving more resources to planners who make big, hard decisions, and we already have the biggest, planningest government in our history. Really Friedman in his own way is endorsing the very status quo Kennedy Townsend seeks to protect when she changes the subject to culture.
My FOX Index measures the gap between the current market and a healthy close for the three major indexes: 12,000 for the Dow, 1,300 for the S&P 500, and 2,500 for the NASDAQ, or a total of 15,800.
November 5, just after the Republicans’ midterm election victory, the Index reached its highest point (-551) since the 2008 financial crash. It’s now even higher, at -311 (see chart) with the Dow Wednesday hitting 11,559, the S&P 500 at 1,259, and the NASDAQ at 2,671, the highest the NASDAQ’s been since late 2007. The FOX Index has now passed its previous pre-crash high of -336, reached on August 7, 2008 (I created the Index in July 2008). Stocks are up because Republicans should begin bringing the federal budget under control next year, and because the President and Congress have reached agreement not to raise taxes January 1.
The economy, however, continues marked by high unemployment, and Mark J. Perry and Robert Dell think they know why our housing and finance-based Great Recession has been so severe. Writing in the American Enterprise Institute’s American, Perry and Dell explain how our banking crisis should be “understood more fundamentally as a government failure than as a market or business failure.” Greedy top executives at the government's Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, backed by friends in Congress, employed government-guaranteed credit to generate a sub-prime based housing bubble that private banks would never have undertaken on their own.
David Ignatius is a fully-certified member of our national elite. He’s a columnist for the Washington Post, the son of Paul Ignatius, Navy Secretary under Lyndon Johnson, and a graduate of Harvard.
On Thanksgiving, Ignatius presented his ruling class perspective on where we stand at Thanksgiving 2010. Maybe not in such a good spot:
you'll hear revelers worrying about national decline. Certainly I've heard it a lot lately, from departing Obama administration officials, global leaders and my family and friends [all pretty much the same crowd, eh David?—GF]. There's a sense that something is torn in the national quilt.
But Ignatius then offers “some hope that the American essentials are still in place:”
➢ Harvard. It was founded in 1636, just 15 years after that desperate first Thanksgiving. It said something about the people who created our nation [oh, the Pilgrims “created our nation”? What about Virginians, colonizing America 13 years ahead of the Pilgrims?] that they gave education such a prominent role: Even in the wilderness of the new nation, knowledge and reason were to be the guides. [emphasis added]
➢ [While] the Sarah Palin set [attacks] Harvard and treat[s] its graduates as elitists. . .if you spend any time on campus you see students drawn from all over the world . . . whose chief assets are brainpower and hard work. You can't "fix" a Harvard degree the way you can most things in life. The reality of the place is brute meritocracy. [emphasis added]
➢ [The] universal human dream [is] that brains, not brawn, will rule -- and the fact that America has the world's finest institutions of higher education may be our greatest single national asset. So be careful, Sarah Palin, when you trash the Ivy League. This is a national-security issue. [emphasis added]
➢ the triumph of the '60s [is] that they loosed . . . movements for the liberation of women, gays, blacks and Hispanics. We all benefit from the new freedoms that were embraced in those years. The president of Harvard. . . said of the [‘60s] turbulence we saw all around us that it should give us "a restraining awareness of the dubiety of all human ends."
➢ history tells us that -- if we keep our wits and hold tight to sweet reason, freedom and creativity -- we always seem to prove the naysayers wrong.
Harvard + the ‘60s movements Harvard helped produce have given America the ruling class it needs, as long as Sarah Palin doesn’t take it away.
You can't make this stuff up.
Here’s the difficulty with Igantius’ perspective. For two years, our Harvard law review president president, the “smartest man in the room,“ has had all the power, with much of that period even with a filibuster-proof 60-vote Senate majority. His job: get the economy moving. He failed, and the midterm election results awarded him his deserved “F.” We tried the “knowledge and reason” way, the “brute meritocracy,” the “brains will rule,” top-down government (Obamacare whether we wanted it or not) of Plato’s philosopher kings, and it didn’t work.
Let’s be clear. We need our brains. We need our Harvards. But what a mistake to think that the American economy works best if Harvard runs it! If “the vanguard of the proletariat” is in charge. Better by far to spread the decisionmaking around, to use all our brainpower and experience, to go bottom up, as recommended here. America, the America for which we are genuinely thankful, is the anti-aristocracy, freedom for everyone to succeed and fail America created in 1776 (not 1620), not the America of the new elite constructed in Harvard’s admissions office.
There is going to be a conflict [between North Korea and] South Korea and the US, I would say, in the near future. And North Korea is going to lose and collapse. China is going to have a unified Korea on its border anyway. China needs to realize the fact and needs to allow North Korea to collapse sooner, rather than later. Because the later North Korea collapses the greater the conflict is going to be, the greater the damage is going to be in the entire region. So, China really needs to be turning off the aid to North Korea.
Myers is quoted in an article by Sunny Lee, a South Korean reporting from Beijing on the Chinese-Korean relationship. Myers provides a blunt look at the future. Who, however, would take issue with his prediction that sooner or later, North Korea will collapse, and Korea will emerge a unified nation? And if that is the future, isn’t China better off as part of the solution, rather than the problem?
Seems to me South Korea should be working with China now, reassuring China a unified Korea can be neutral, foreign base-free, and nuclear free, if China will cooperate by—essentially—forcing the pace of reunification. One would call this the Austrian solution, modeled on the 1955 treaty between Austria and the “Big Four” of the U.S., U.S.S.R., Britain, and France that made Austria free, united, but neutral.
This time, (South) Korea and the “Big One,” China, make it work. The U.S., Japan, and Russia could join in.
Marco Rubio is a natural leader and is likely to be a leader of our party. In five years, no one will remember Jim DeMint, and Marco will be president.
Rubio president within five years? That would mean winning in 2012, right?
Here are three reasons why sane people beyond DeMint are talking about Rubio as our next president:
1. Obama did it.
Barack Obama set the “none to one” pattern by going from Illinois state senator to president in four years. Marco Rubio would be “none to one” in two years, topping Obama’s rapid rise, if Rubio won in 2012.
Rubio will be 41 years old next presidential election, and if he won, the youngest president ever. The newly elected senator from Florida is a lawyer, graduating cum laude from Miami U (Obama was law review president at Harvard). Rubio served in the Florida legislature for nine years (Obama served eight years in the Illinois State Senate), and was Speaker of the House for two (Obama chaired a committee for two). Rubio wrote a book in 2007, in advance of his Senate run (as did Obama in advance of his Senate run), but probably hasn’t time to write another (as Obama did) before any 2012 presidential run. Rubio represents the fourth largest state, with 28 electoral votes (Obama’s Illinois has just 21). Florida is the largest and most important swing state, having decided the 2000 election (Illinois is predictably Democratic).
If Obama was qualified to be president, than so too would be Rubio. Right now, Rubio’s challenge is that Republicans think Obama wasn’t qualified, and believe Obama proved it in his first two years. Many Republicans instead are looking for the anti-Obama, literally an experienced, competent, even colorless leader who can skillfully turn our economy around while repealing Obamacare. Someone like Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana.
But then, that really isn’t the whole picture, is it? Republicans haven’t been truly excited about a candidate for president since Ronald Reagan. Maybe they don’t need any more excitement in 2012 than the joy of beating Obama. Maybe a Mitch Daniels-like white male will do. But if not, if the Republican faithful grow enthusiastic about Sarah Palin they way they did in 2008 because she’s heartland America’s “momma grizzly;” because she’s from their world and not the Washington elite, then the GOP may be looking for someone equally telegenic and even fresher to stop Palin.
Right now, Palin’s running second behind Mitt Romney in Gallup’s polling of Republicans for 2012 (Romney seems an unlikely nominee because he backed an expensive Massachusetts health care plan much like the Obamacare Republicans reject). Rubio’s chance to capture the GOP presidential nomination rises if Palin first catches fire, and he becomes the excitement alternative. Rubio’s stock also rises, however, if all the GOP frontrunners including Palin fall flat. So a “Marco Rubio for President” campaign could happen.
2. The new Ronald Reagan.
Steve Hayes of the Weekly Standardhas caught the quality that makes Rubio so special. He’s an optimist about America’s future the same way Reagan was, and shows a similar ability to share that optimism. Says Hays:
Rubio is underrated. Some Democrats seem to understand this. That fact, probably more than anything else, explains why the White House encouraged Bill Clinton as early as last spring to use his influence to get [Democrat Kendrick] Meek out of the [Florida senate] race and clear the way for [Republican Governor] Charlie Crist to run as a Democrat. No Republican in the country offers a more compelling defense of American exceptionalism and a more powerful indictment of the Obama administration than Marco Rubio. He has had lots of practice. He ran against Obama more than he ran against either of his two opponents.
Hays then quotes Rubio’s Reagan-like message:
people in Washington . . . have two things wrong: a fundamental misunderstanding of how our economy functions and a fundamental misunderstanding of America’s role in the world. And those two things are what led to [wrong] policies.
Number one—The economy functions like this: Jobs are not created by politicians, they are created by people that start businesses or expand existing businesses. And the job of government is to create the environment where doing that becomes easier, not harder. Number two—America’s role in the world is pretty straightforward. The world is safer and it is better when America is the strongest country in the world.
These are the two principles that are at stake in our country right now. And they are as important as any issues that any generation has faced before us. We are literally fighting for whether we are going to be exceptional or not.
Rubio understands how Reagan inspired an earlier generation of Republicans and Americans to pull together to do better. Rubio wants us doing the same today.
3. Jeb Bush II
Many people feel the wrong Bush was elected president, George Bush instead of younger brother Jeb. More than Jeb’s Phi Beta Kappa background, what set the ex-Florida governor apart was his wife from Colombia, and his attractive, half-Hispanic family completely fluent in Spanish. Jeb Bush not only understands how important Hispanic America is to the Republican Party’s future, he is also a strong advocate for a new U.S. immigration policy, one that opens doors to talented and hard-working immigrants. Jeb Bush would move Republicans in a new, more pro-immigrant direction.
Jeb Bush is just what Republicans need to break the Democrats’ grip on America’s minorities, especially Hispanics. Unfortunately, brother George has wrung the remaining value out of the once-useful Bush name. Jeb knows he can’t run for president.
The person the 59-year-old Jeb supported for Florida senator, Marco Rubio, is 39, only five years older than Jeb’s eldest son. Perhaps it’s now time for the “son” to lead the party and country down the path upon which Jeb Bush set himself, but cannot himself complete. Moreover, as a Cuban-American, Rubio would out-Jeb Jeb. Rubio would be America’s first Hispanic president, and likely would attract Hispanics to the Republican Party the way Kennedy attracted Catholics, Carter Southern evangelicals, and Obama non-whites. Rubio as a Hispanic can move Republicans away from their seeming hostility toward Mexican-Americans, doing so as only an Hispanic leader can. Rubio would lead, Republicans would follow, and politics would never be the same.
In short, Rubio offers the current political landscape the possibility of tectonic-plate-shift proportions.
Is Rubio ready to lead such an effort? TIME, at least, thinks that in Rubio’s final Florida senate campaign ad, they have seen the opening of Rubio’s campaign for president:
America has a great future. And it’s because of our people.
Let’s begin with one basic principle: the most important activity we perform as a nation is generating economic wealth. Wealth makes all good things possible. To generate economic development, we must organize to make maximum economic use of our national talent. That means pushing aside our top-down governing elite, and promoting job creation from the ground up. We need small business capitalism, not government-engineered social democracy.
I value Thomas Sowell of Stanford’s Hoover Institution for clarifying why decentralizing economic decision making helps our economy flourish:
How [is it] possible that transferring decisions from elites with more education, intellect, data and power to ordinary people [leads] consistently to demonstrably better results? One implication is that no one is smart enough to carry out social engineering. . .
We learn, not from our initial brilliance, but from trial and error adjustments to events as they unfold.
[E]xperience trumps brilliance. Elites may have more brilliance, but those who make decisions for society as a whole cannot possibly have as much experience as the millions of people whose decisions they pre-empt. The education and intellects of the elites may lead them to have more sweeping presumptions, but that just makes them more dangerous to the freedom, as well as the well-being, of the people as a whole.
And I value Arnold Kling of the Cato Institute’s pointing out that:
linking expertise to power . . . diminishes the diversity and competitive pressure faced by the experts. . . We should . . . resist the temptation to give power to government experts, and instead allow experts in business and nonprofit institutions to grope toward solutions to problems.
In our search for new ways to release expertise, Forbes’s Joel Kotkin reminds us that
immigrants are 60% more likely to start a new business than native-born Americas. . . the immigrant experience . . .encourages innovation—[they have] the advantage of non-acceptance.
the uniquely international cast of American business [means] leading American firms will not have to go to graduate school in international training; they will have received theirs at home, talking to [their] parents or grandparents[, tapping] the global market, and culture, in ways other countries . . . just can't match.
And right now, I like how David Brooks puts it all together. Brooks understands how America’s reliance on innovation and immigrants can benefit not just the U.S, but an entire peaceful and prosperous world:
creativity is not a solitary process. It happens . . . when talented people get together. . . imagine you are [a] creative person . . . living in some small town . . . foreign or domestic. You long [for] a place where people . . . think about the things you are thinking about, creating the things you want to create. . . you’ll want to be in America. . .because English has become the global language. . . because American universities lead the world in research and draw many of the best minds . . . because American institutions are relatively free from corruption[, because i]ntellectual property is protected [and h]uge venture capital funds already exist. . . the United States is a universal nation [with] people . . . with connections all over the world. A nation of immigrants.
America hosts the right kind of networks — . . . one of those societies with high social trust. Americans build large, efficient organizations [unbound] by the circles of kinship and clan. . . Americans are not hierarchical. American children are raised to challenge their parents. American underlings are relatively free to challenge their bosses. . .you’re less likely to have to submit to authority.
the U.S. is well situated to be the crossroads nation. . . Building that America means [to]: improve infrastructure to ease travel; fix immigration to funnel talent; reform taxes to attract superstars; make study abroad a rite of passage for college students.
In his “here’s the rope, now hang yourself!” interview with Roger Ailes, the 70 year old head of FOX News, the “Daily Beast’s” Howard Kurtz drops in this line, “Fox is averaging 1.1 million viewers this year.” Really? Just 1.1 million?
In fact, FOX News’ evening line-up currently averages 2.7 million viewers, as against 2.3 million for CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and Headline News (now called HLN) combined. Glenn Beck has 63% of the total cable news audience during his hour. Bret Baier has 59%, Shepard Smith 56%, Sean Hannity 52%, and Greta Van Susteren 49% of the total cable news audience during their hours.
Bill O'Reilly, the king of cable news, is on twice during primetime. The total “O'Reilly Factor” primetime audience is 5.3 million. The most recent audience for “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric” was 6.4 million. O’Reilly’s professed goal is to top at least one of the broadcast evening news shows in total viewership.
On election night, FOX shocked the entire TV news world by garnering a larger audience—over 7 million—than did ABC, NBC, or CBS (4th at 5.9 million).
By the way, the current readership of Kurtz’s “Daily Beast” is 1.6 million.
Former Hawaii State House Republican Leader, State and City economic development executive, and U.S. Foreign Service Officer stationed in East Asia and Washington D.C. Holds Ph.D. in Public Affairs (Princeton). This blog has recorded over 75,000 views.
How could we not help women the same way we helped blacks? The one had to follow the other.
