Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
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Showing posts with label Reinventing Government. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reinventing Government. Show all posts
RELATED: Just now seeing another manchild, "Doctor Science" at Obsidian Wings (hmm, could be a womanchild), "The culture of conspiracy, the conspiracy of culture" (via Memeorandum). This isn't all that complicated, as I discussed yesterday: "Misunderstanding WikiLeaks." Indeed, it's pretty much broken down to a debate between serious folks on national security and antiwar nihilists. And yes, idiotic manchildren, or in the case of Charli Carpenter ... well, I won't go there: "What is Wikileaks?"
For now what's sparking my interest, and some frustration, is the easy accolades so many commenters are offering to WikiLeaks, with attention especially on claims that increasing transparency is a means to a greater libertarian end. And in this I'm finding, as a side note, through Ross Douthat, that Will Wilkinson is now blogging at The Economist. I was a subscriber for three years while in graduate school. I read that magazine religiously. But like just about every other mainstream periodical in recent years, its quality has deteriorated badly. Outside the pages of Wall Street Journal, The Economist used to be the place to read the most rigorous analysis of free market economics. Yet now the previously classically-inclined editors at The Economist have jumped ship. (Alan Caruba captured this unfortunate descent just the other day, "Climate Change Idiocy and The Economist.") So I guess it makes sense that Will Wilkinson's blogging there now. The countercultural left has increasingly joined with ideological libertarianism to escalate the contemporary attack on the modern moral regime and the foundations of social order. To take that attack to its logical conclusion is to launch an extreme repudiation on state power, since it's the state that controls the monopoly of force and the means to prohibit certain activities, such as drug use and prostitution. But with the recent WikiLeaks dump, the left-libertarian alliance has metastasized into a romantic nihilism, which sees a heroic purpose to WikiLeaks when the exact opposite is true. My old infantile antagonist E.D. Kain gleefully provides a synopsis, which perfectly illustrates the verbose left-libertarianism's replacement of firm realism with fluffy fawning:
The government has a monopoly on violence; the media has only words. We should encourage underdogs like WikiLeaks who continue to fight an uphill battle, not against the United States – this country is more than its government, after all – but against the over-reach of the state. We have ceded so much of our own privacy to our government, perhaps now we would like to return the favor.
WikiLeaks may be a small player, really, in the bigger scheme of things. But to some degree it is also a bellwether, a forecast of things to come as information and technology continue to nip at the heels of the state. Perhaps we really are approaching a time when government becomes less relevant, less necessary, where other institutions both real and virtual can begin to supplant the role of the state in our lives, subversively at first but then more openly as time passes. I don’t know. I’m not even sure what that would look like in practice. Predicting the future is not among my talents; I cannot see where frying pans leave off and fires begin. But if I am at all correct then we should also realize that when an institution is threatened it reacts accordingly. Things will get worse before they get better.
If this were just a philosophical excursion vis-à-vis theories of federalism and government devolution, that'd be one thing. But it's not. We're talking about a 21st century non-state actor conducting information warfare against the United States. It's not a big surprise that WikiLeaks' most enthusiast backers are found among the world's anarcho-communist contingents. What's pathetic --- although not new, just even more pronounced --- is how willingly the libertarians jump on board this lame new vehicle toward alleged greater government accountability.
So to be clear: Julian Assange despises America with all he's got. There's nothing good about his agenda. And libertarianism is deathly nihilism if folks can't get their heads around the idea that there's little functional alternative to the nation-state in today's post-modern advanced democratic societies. That's not to say we can't limit the expansion of the state nor improve government performance and accountability. But we'll destroy ourselves by radical attempts to tear it down. And back over at The Economist is a deep clue to the ideological confusion. Folks apparently never got the memo from earlier this year on the bogus WikiLeaks Apache video "Collateral Damage." There's wasn't anything "objective" about it. But tell that to The Economist:
WikiLeaks's release of the "Collateral Murder" video last April was a pretty scrupulous affair: an objective record of combat activity which American armed forces had refused to release, with careful backing research on what the video showed. What we got was a window into combat reality, through the sights of a helicopter gunship. You could develop different interpretations of that video depending on your understanding of its context, but it was something important that had actually taken place.
A lot of commentators apparently act as though they're offering profound insights of democratic theory when expounding on WikiLeaks. I note E.D. Kain as one exhibit, although Glenn Greenwald comes to mind as well. But it's really not such a super sophisticated or intellectually glamorous issue. WikiLeaks wants to destroy authority. People are going to get killed, and not in the name of any state interest that could be otherwise checked by the processes of democratic governance. IBD had a great editorial on Julian Assange the other day, and I'll close with this, "An Infoterrorist?":
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., the soon-to-be chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is absolutely correct in calling for Assange's outfit to be classified a terrorist organization under U.S. law. King has called on Attorney General Eric Holder to charge Assange with a crime under the Espionage Act. While Holder's office has announced an investigation, don't hold your breath.
But what of Assange's accomplices in the U.S. and foreign media?
The New York Times, where Assange gets to dump "all the secrets fit to leak," boasts that its collaborations with WikiLeaks give "the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions" — hardly a rationale for endangering our liberty.
This is a continuing, slow-motion disaster for the U.S., and our government has done little beyond having a State Department lawyer send a huffy letter to Assange's lawyer in Sweden.
These leaks must be plugged — by force if necessary — before it is American blood we find flowing.
At the video, more radical left-wing Wiki-boosting from communist Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!
KOKOMO, Ind. — Voters this week look set to do something not seen since the early 1950s: Oust a substantial number of sitting House lawmakers for the third election in a row.
The apparent Republican resurgence suggests the country is caught in a cycle of political volatility witnessed only four times in the past century, almost all during war or economic unease.
This fall's election has generated dozens of House races, from the suburbs of Denver and Chicago, across the South, and up the Ohio River Valley into New England, where voters who rejected Republicans in the past two elections are threatening to throw their support back to the GOP. In many cases, they're returning to the same candidates they rejected earlier.
The phenomenon is on full view in Indiana, where Democrats are fighting to keep three House seats they won in 2006. Voters in all three districts have a history, going back more than a century in some cases, of rejecting incumbents in moments of strain.
"We know what we don't want better than we know what we want," said Steve Ellison, a commercial real-estate broker who hosted a campaign event in his Mishawaka home for Republican challenger Jackie Walorski, who is trying to unseat two-term Democrat Joe Donnelly in the state's Second District. "I suppose that helps explain the schizophrenia."
If Republicans win big on Tuesday, as polls suggest, it is far from clear how firm a foothold they will have. Voters hold unfavorable views of both parties. Republican leaders acknowledge they could easily be tossed in 2012, just as they were in 2006.
I'll have more on this later, but there's been lots of polling data indicating voter preferences for smaller government --- and depending how robust are those findings, tomorrow's election results might herald a tendency toward limiting the growth of government, if not demands for smaller government per se. Democrats will resist that meme, since they're out to expand the state and monopolize power over the individual. Yet, while electoral volatility has long been a key aspect of the post-1960s dealignment era, the tea parties have revealed some of the deeper wellpsrings of limited government in American politics.
The photo is at the offramp at Pico Boulevard in West L.A. (a couple of months back, when I saw "Restrepo.") I took a quick snapshot while waiting for the light to change. Look carefully: "DEATH TO CALIFORNIA POLICE." Chilling. And this isn't a gangland section of Los Angeles.
Anyway, I can't go all the way with "irreparable," at Jennifer Rubin's essay, at Commentary, "California, There It Went." It's a great piece. And, yeah, sadly, I'm convinced that neither Jerry Brown nor Meg Whitman will be any better than Arnold Schwarzenegger, and that California will continue to be driven by unaffordable ballot-driven governance (initiatives) that makes that state ungovernable and prone to collapse. But Californians are fighters. The tax revolt started here in 1978. A new burst of good-government reform, focusing first on the crisis in state budgeting, will become a reality in due time. It has to. Things simply can't continue as they are. And that's what makes Rubin's piece a must read:
California today bears little resemblance to the land of opportunity whose promise of a better life in a perfect climate once lured so many. Schools, even in expensive residential areas, are substandard and getting worse. Public parks are unseemly and unsightly. Libraries are understaffed and understocked. Commutes have extended from 30 to 60 to 90 minutes or longer.
Because the 21st-century economy is global and portable, residents and businesses have other options. Employers and educated people can uproot themselves, and they have been, fleeing the congestion, the traffic, the crumbling infrastructure, and the deficient schools. Between 1990 and 2000, 2 million more left the state than arrived from other states.
The U.S. Census Bureau report noted that a number of states have benefited from California’s woes: “199,000 of the 466,000 people who moved to Nevada during this time came from California.... Between 1995 and 2000, 644,000 people moved to Colorado from other states, led by 111,000 migrants from California.”
California’s unemployment rate at present hovers a few points above the national average, in part due to a state judiciary hostile to business and the proliferation of pro-plaintiff litigation rules that have made the state a toxic environment for employers. In recent years, Northrop Grumman, Fluor Corporation, Hilton Hotels, Computer Sciences Corporation, and defense contractor SAIC all moved their headquarters out of the state.
The optimism of the 1960s has been replaced by cynicism and resignation: Did you hear that gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown gets multiple pensions totaling $78,000 a year? Did you read about the little city of Bell’s council members who pay themselves nearly 100 grand a year and paid the city administrator $1.5 mil a year? Gallows humor, appropriate for a dying state, is de rigueur among the state’s political class.
My own family has come full circle. My husband (whose family moved from Indiana to Northern California a year before mine moved from South Jersey) and I joined the out-migration in 2005, moving East with our two sons. It was our turn to amaze West Coast friends and family by leaving home. But unlike the trek four decades earlier, there was little confusion about the reasons for our departure. Instead, people seemed wistful, curious about whether they would learn from us that there might be a better life elsewhere, with workable schools, functioning state and local governments, and more modest taxes.
And in the years since our exodus, we have become acquainted, once again, as we had been in our youth, with normal public schools, pleasant neighborhood parks, well-stocked libraries, and state and local governments that live within their means, more or less.
House Minority Leader John Boehner and the House Republican leadership are set to unveil Thursday their agenda for governing, with an emphasis on repealing President Obama’s health care overhaul and reining in tax increases and regulation.
The plan came under immediate criticism from congressional Democrats but also was brutally savaged by some leading conservatives. The full document can be read here.
Erick Erickson, founder of RedState.com, called the proposal “dreck.”
“The entirety of this Promise is laughable. Why? It is an illusion that fixates on stuff the GOP already should be doing while not daring to touch on stuff that will have any meaningful longterm effects on the size and scope of the federal government,” Erickson wrote.
“This document proves the GOP is more focused on the acquisition of power than the advocacy of long term sound public policy,” he said.
But National Review, one of the two leading conservative magazines in Washington, had praise for the document, deeming it “bolder” than the 1994 “Contract with America.”
“The pledge is explicitly a beginning to the lengthy task of providing conservative governance, and a very good one,” the magazine’s editors wrote. “It is also a shrewd political document.”
I'm reading the document now (in PDF). I don't pay too much attention to these things anyway. Parties make pledges all the time. And they often keep their pledges. But they sometimes abandon them as well. What matters to me is focusing on a few key issues, especially those that relate to holding firm on government expansion. Controlling spending and stimulating job growth with tax cuts would be a good place to start. The contract will not abandon social issues, which is good. But Republicans would be wise to avoid the Obama administration's pitfalls. Focus like a laser beam on job creation and spending reductions. With a congressional majority Republicans will be able to stand firm against the social destruction of the Democratic-left. The real business on social issues will be when the GOP again controls the White House (and thus judicial appointments).
Republicans have the choicest electoral --- and hence policy --- environment in decades. I think John Boehner's a smart cookie, so we'll see. I'm going skim over this document a bit more. Perhaps there's a plank on avoiding hubris?
From Angelo Codevilla, at American Spectator (a little on the paleocon-ish side for me on the foreign policy side, otherwise, a phenomenal essay):
The ruling class is keener to reform the American people's family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class's self-definition so definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so open. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its very particular interest -- often defined as mere coherence against outsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its members from playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all, it reproduces itself.
Since marriage is the family's fertile seed, government at all levels, along with "mainstream" academics and media, have waged war on it. They legislate, regulate, and exhort in support not of "the family" -- meaning married parents raising children -- but rather of "families," meaning mostly households based on something other than marriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the distinction between cohabitation and marriage -- except that husbands are held financially responsible for the children they father, while out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizes marriage and forces those married couples who raise their own children to subsidize "child care" for those who do not. Top Republicans and Democrats have also led society away from the very notion of marital fidelity by precept as well as by parading their affairs. For example, in 1997 the Democratic administration's secretary of defense and the Republican Senate's majority leader (joined by the New York Times et al.) condemned the military's practice of punishing officers who had extramarital affairs. While the military had assumed that honoring marital vows is as fundamental to the integrity of its units as it is to that of society, consensus at the top declared that insistence on fidelity is "contrary to societal norms." Not surprisingly, rates of marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have increased. The biggest demographic consequence has been that about one in five of all households are women alone or with children, in which case they have about a four in 10 chance of living in poverty. Since unmarried mothers often are or expect to be clients of government services, it is not surprising that they are among the Democratic Party's most faithful voters.
While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental. That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents' consent, the people who run America's schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents' knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class's assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence. Only sheer political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents' right to homeschool their children against the ruling class's desire to accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: "to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible."
At stake are the most important questions: What is the right way for human beings to live? By what standard is anything true or good? Who gets to decide what? Implicit in Wilson's words and explicit in our ruling class's actions is the dismissal, as the ways of outdated "fathers," of the answers that most Americans would give to these questions. This dismissal of the American people's intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others' comprehension.
While the unenlightened ones believe that man is created in the image and likeness of God and that we are subject to His and to His nature's laws, the enlightened ones know that we are products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and the will to primacy. While the un-enlightened are stuck with the antiquated notion that ordinary human minds can reach objective judgments about good and evil, better and worse through reason, the enlightened ones know that all such judgments are subjective and that ordinary people can no more be trusted with reason than they can with guns. Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is "science" only in the "right" hands. Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them.
