An auditor visiting Earth from another planet might be gobsmacked at what our society considers to have economic value. Indeed, the nearly $100 billion envisioned IPO of Facebook could capture the attention of an inquisitive stranger from a distant galaxy, causing him to wonder not only about capital formation, but about social values. With that valuation, the upstart social media enterprise would suddenly be about equal to Abbott Laboratories or Citigroup in value, with only 26 of the Fortune 500 having greater market capitalization. The need to communicate is as old as homo sapiens . Since the Stone Age, our species has needed to reach out and touch others. Hirsute, carnivorous prehistoric Man may have felt loneliness in his own way, hoping to relate socially in caves and at campfires. Much later and over the centuries, inventions such as the printing press, telegraph, and telephone permitted more widespread social interaction. And now, at the outset of the 21st century, the art of communication is made even easier. The expected valuation of Facebook shows how powerful is the human desire to liaise and interface. Once the hype quiets down, it may be worthwhile to ponder why a huge array of software, servers, and electrons traveling at the speed of light could be worth so much, while other American companies in basic industries are imperiled by competition and loss of market share. Why is it that smart, young geeks can suddenly become so rich, while those smart, tried and true folks who work hard and retire to bed early struggle for economic stability and fulfillment? A principal value proposition of Facebook is to allow the shy to assert themselves. A socially awkward person can blossom into a digital socialite, with a few clicks of a mouse. Where else can a minnow look like a whale, a solitary extremist look like the Chinese Army, and a clumsy person look like a tango instructor? Indeed, phalanxes of the social hermits of yesterday now sit mightily in their comfortable high tech enclaves, the bland, light gray cubicles that Dilbert championed. Some even manage to eat several meals a day there. Facebook is their triumph and confirmation that intellectual capital is worth as much or more than time honored physical capital formed the old-fashioned way — with distribution having enormous potential for advertising revenue. And so one generation trumps another. Facebook is indeed the affirmation of the erstwhile undemonstrative, and their numbers could be in the billions. The market is of course not just in the United States, as there are many timid people in Brazil, Russia, India, and China, known as the BRIC countries, where there are massive youthful populations yearning to copy, connect, and join the mainstream of globalization. The ascent of Facebook should also be seen in a broader context: a new technology-focused generation values the ability to liaise and conduct self-display more than privacy. Part of this culture is the obligatory panoply of digital kit, designed to amuse and release the human spirit. Packing iPods and Velcroed iPhones, they glide effortlessly from Facebook page to Facebook page. When not downloading the latest new apps, they may listen to music and text simultaneously on a handheld, even while crossing against the light — all the while thinking it new found productivity called “multitasking.” With fingers pounding in a furious atavistic dance, they immerse themselves in a digital frenzy, limited only by telecommunications capacity and their number of thumbs. And ease of access to cyberspace allows the conflating of data with information with knowledge with wisdom. Add some hypercaffeination with macadamia lattes and extra foam, and you have a heady brew of technology and consumerism. Finally, another value proposition of Facebook is to promote democracy, as it makes it more difficult for governments to assert control and repress their populations. One dissident with a popular message going viral can create a tidal wave against an established order. The 20th century was unkind to despots, and the 21st is no different, as we see from the Arab Spring. But there is also a dark side: snooping governments can find out who peoples’ friends are, and recruiters can search Facebook to see who has outlandish behavior in the public domain. The potential of Facebook is as vast as the universe itself, about which we thus far know relatively little. In the event that there is life elsewhere — in the Milky Way Galaxy and possibly in billions of other galaxies — Facebook has massive export prospects. The only trouble is that instead of instant gratification, it will take many light years to reach out and touch.
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Facebook: Where a Minnow Can Look Like a Whale
Infantile. The characteristics of a baby or child, says Webster’s. Being infantile is a charming characteristic — in a baby or child. In adults? Adults charged with the serious responsibility of discussing or actually running public policy? Never good. As seen here in this story about Occupy Wall Street, replete with photo of a protester defecating on a police car. R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. has been observing and writing about this kind of ludicrous behavior that he terms the “Infantile Left” for some 40-plus years through the magazine that he created and you are reading, The American Spectator . What brought this memorable photo of a defecating Occupy protestor to mind was reading the stunning, pull-back-and-survey-the-battlefield book that is Tyrrell’s new book, The Death of Liberalism . The book is nothing less than an autopsy conducted while the battle still rages. An astute recognition that Liberalism’s defenders are being reduced by the day if not the hour to the political equivalent of the survivors of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, the latter known to history as the high-water mark of the Confederacy. A great swarming, savage last-assault across the political battlefields into the incessant cannon and rifle fire of the American majority. Leaving in the aftermath not only massive Liberal casualties on the battlefield, but inducing a sense of crippling psychological failure among the Liberal survivors, of which at the moment the Occupy Wall Street debacle — they of the defecating-on-police-cars and rape tents crowd — is the most vivid example. The irony? It wasn’t always so. Classical liberalism, as Tyrrell states, originally “stood for adherence to individual liberty, to tolerance, to reason, and for many of us, to empiricism.” The classic liberalism of a George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and the others known today as the Founding Fathers but one example, if the example most familiar to Americans. Tyrrell cites this wonderful definition of classical liberalism given all the way back in 1873 by England’s Sir William Harcourt, who made the point in a talk at Oxford. Liberty, said Harcourt, …does not consist in making others do what you think is right. The difference between a free Government and a Government which is not free is principally this — that a Government which is not free interferes with everything it can, and a free Government interferes with nothing except what it must. A despotic government tries to make everybody do what it wishes, a Liberal Government tries, so far as the safety of society will permit, to allow everybody to do what he wishes. Harcourt anticipated the reign of Obama and Pelosi by 139 years. In the style of true conservatives everywhere, he understood the eternal human nature — and its temptations with centralized power. Tyrrell employs a literary device that originated with the late William F. Buckley, Jr. To wit, separating the original meaning of “liberal” in its classic sense from today’s term by capitalizing the word to “Liberal” or “Liberalism.” It is a useful device to differentiate what has come to mean two very, very different belief systems, one of them appallingly nuts. For a small sample of just how infantile one can see the Infantile Left at work here in Oakland, California in 2011, in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, at the Pentagon in 1967, in Los Angeles in 1992 or all manner of places in 1986 when Ronald Reagan bombed Libya in response to an attack on U.S. military personnel in then-West Germany. Here’s an interesting one with Infantile Left expressing itself on the environment. And who could miss these two bookmarks to the career of Massachusetts Senator John Kerry doing the Infantile Left gig here (as captured in a Swiftboat ad) and here , where he windsurfed as a presidential candidate. And there’s Hillary as potential president The examples are endless, and you can’t make it up. The details of the Liberal autopsy begin immediately, with Dr. Tyrrell walking slowly around a figurative steel table examining the lifeless political corpse, diligently recording the life of the deceased. Just who were these Liberals, anyway? After 40 some odd-years of experience, Tyrrell knows them well. Liberals: …who began as the rightful heirs to the New Deal, have carried on as a kind of landed aristocracy, gifted but doomed. They dominated the culture and the politics of the country, unchallenged from the beginnings of the Cold War to the first Nixon Administration. So dominant were they that they could totally pollute the culture with their prejudices and their views. In its place they created Kultursmog , a Kultur whose contaminants were everywhere in the media, among the literate classes, even among illiterates — everywhere. Kultursmog is the only form of pollution to which the Liberals never object. In fact, they deem it healthy. While Tyrrell doesn’t say it here, the saga of Liberals is not unlike the saga of the late Whitney Houston. At one time the very essence of raw talent refined, polished, sparkling and dominant. Followed by the inevitable results of decline evident after years of what might be called snorting political cocaine — the dependence on sheer racism, a culture that glorifies sexual gratification, a wild addiction to the idea of feel-good emotions replacing hard science, economics and plain common sense. Followed by the inevitable…political death. No, one does not crap on a police car to make a point about economics. Rational political actors do not get drunk and leave a girl in a car to drown then resume a lifelong Senate career as if nothing untoward had happened. One doesn’t fan riots or anti-Semitism that results in death and destruction of property, gain fame by making preposterously false allegations of a racial rape — and get to host an MSNBC television show as a reward. Paying off a pregnant mistress with tax-deductible funds after exhibiting one’s streak of anti-Semitism by musing aloud to a reporter about New York City as “Hymietown” shouldn’t make one a serious player in a serious political party. Not to mention that fiddling with an intern and lying about it to a grand jury should cause more than an “ahem” from a party that insists it is fighting some grand war for women. As Tyrrell documents, the list of infantile behavior by the left is long, well beyond the specifics of behaviors by the late Senator Edward Kennedy, the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and, of course, President Bill Clinton. Not to mention the monkey business of one-time presidential hopeful Gary Hart with Donna Rice and the still imploding reputation of ex-Senator and 2004 vice-presidential nominee John Edwards. The plagiarism scandal of Joe Biden has elevated him to the vice-presidency. But there is more to this behavior that has caused the Death of Liberalism . There are those pesky fundamentals called issues, approached by Liberals with what Tyrrell correctly calls the real objective of the “Stealth Socialist.” (Interestingly, Tyrrell points out that when Republicans are presented with political leaders who engage in likeminded personal misbehavior, they reject them — two of the more prominent examples being the presidential run of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the exploded career of South Carolina’s Governor Mark Sanford.) One by one Tyrrell examines issues and events that served as the proximate cause of Liberalism’s death . And the Stealth Socialist issues and events are as momentous if perhaps not as memorable as the personal behavior is tawdry. • Henry Wallace: The rise and fall of FDR’s Liberal Vice President Henry Wallace, whose Liberalism even in 1944 touched off alarm bells with the powers-that-be within the Democrats’ own party hierarchy. Replaced by Missouri Senator Harry Truman (and in the nick of time — FDR died a bare four months after being inaugurated, placing Truman, not Wallace, in the White House) Wallace set about leading the opening round of what became the Liberal civil war within the party. Eventually, Wallace departed, becoming the 1948 nominee of the Progressive Party. • The Big Lie: Combined with a laughable yet disturbing sense of moral superiority, the Big Lie is now routinely used as Pickett’s armies used the bayonet. In hand-to-hand political combat the sharp end is pointedly used to accuse of racism those who question Liberalism’s latest panaceas or by shrieking, as Tyrrell notes, that “anyone questioning their latest scheme of alleviating poverty hates the poor.” This use of the Big Lie began with the fiction that Alger Hiss was not a Communist, something that has now been positively affirmed by the release of the Venona files. The longer Hiss lied, the angrier Liberals became at those charging him with lying. More recently when Bill Clinton as president lied under oath about Monica Lewinsky, the Big Lie was employed to insist that “it was a minor infraction of the law, like double-parking one’s tractor in downtown Little Rock.” • McGovernism: In 1972, a young delegate to Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party convention of 1948 was South Dakota Senator George McGovern — the Democrats’ presidential nominee. Tyrrell examines a now obscure but key moment for the Liberals, that being the formation of the “McGovern Commission.” Formed after the pitched battle between Liberals and the battered remnants of the old FDR-Truman Democrats in 1968 — and it was a battle, with Infantile Liberals taking to the streets of Chicago during the party Convention and getting into a furiously bloody battle with the police of the old line Mayor Daley — McGovern’s task was to reform the party’s delegate selection process. He did — by obliterating the idea that individuals should be elected as delegates to the party’s national convention and replacing it with the now-sacred cow of identity politics. If you were black — and X percent of your state’s population was black — you have a delegate’s seat based on skin color. Ditto with gender, etc. Running himself four years later, using the rules he himself had engineered, McGovern not only trounced the party Establishment and won the 1972 nomination but permanently ousted the dwindling remnants of what FDR historian and ex-JFK aide Arthur Schlesinger once termed The Vital Center . • Class Warfare: If FDR employed a bit of class warfare during the Great Depression, it was McGovern who immersed the party in this pernicious cycle of greed and envy. The greed for government money — taxpayer money or “free” money as it is called today — combined with the envy of those who achieved without it. McGovern proposed three policies in particular that caught Tyrrell’s eye in his autopsy, three policies he notes that “stand out as beyond the wildest hallucinations of Henry Wallace” — began instantly to clog the Liberal artery that normally channeled a sensitivity to the sensibilities of working Americans. They were: — “a government grant of $1,000 annually for every man, woman, and child, rich or poor”; — ” a 37 percent reduction in the Pentagon budget…the savings going to social welfare programs…”; — “a rise in taxes, most strikingly on inheritance — no one would be able to receive more than half a million dollars from one’s family in a lifetime or at the time of one’s death!”
Q. “ Should student loans be priced differently according to major? ” (see here and here for more) A. Yes. Moe Lane ( crosspost ) PS: Oh, all right… this is perilously close to being taboo to say in this culture, but I will anyway: society is not in fact set up to permit everybody to spend their entire lives playing , and nor should it be. We have finite resources; easily sufficient ones to keep everybody fed, clothed, sheltered, literate, and numerate. And this culture is amazingly good at making sure that this happens across the board*. Particularly when it comes to historical comparisons; take a look around you, folks. Most of your distant ancestors would identify this place as being some variant of the Garden of Eden. And yes, that does include Detroit ( life has really been that bad for most of history). But the brutal truth is, not every job is created equal. Some professions are simply more valuable to society than others. Now, we live in a free society, largely because we still tend to have a reasonably free market-driven society, so we are understandably reluctant to tell somebody that they can’t be allowed to spend six years getting a graduate degree in Hyphenated-Identity Studies. But society is not under any real obligation to pretend that there’s a large call for people with that academic path. If someone can afford it on his or her own, fine. It’s their money. If they want a loan, well, that’s the bank’s money – and the bank should be allowed to take into consideration the notion that somebody with that degree is going to be an inherently greater credit risk than someone with, say, a degree in engineering. Or a certified electrician. Because Life Is Not Fair. PPS: What? Hold on, let me check. Nope, sorry: Life Is Still Not Fair. *I know, I know: your college textbooks told you otherwise. Hey, remember the classes that had you read those textbooks? Exactly how good were they at getting you and keeping you a job, again? Personal satisfaction? Ah, I see. What’s the exchange rate on that, in terms of legal tender?
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“Should student loans be priced differently according to major?”
My father was a unique character. I never met a man who was more set in his ways or more unwilling to change them, especially when it came to his looks. His one ill-advised attempt at updating his wardrobe — my mother’s really — was the purchase of an awful Nehru jacket sometime in the late 1960s. It just didn’t fit him; not in a sartorial manner, but because pandering to something so trivial as current fashion would have undermined his air of authority and diminished our trust in his rock-solid dependability. I’ve always felt that there is something comforting in a man who disdains passing fads while I’ve never wholly trusted one who is a slave to fashion. This must have run in my family, because my youngest sister once said that Ronald Reagan — who, though a well-tailored movie star, never altered his appearance with the changing styles — always made her feel “safe.” Likewise, I instinctively mistrust anyone who has been tagged with the puerile sobriquet of “rock star”; a paean to cool and hipness that is truly a symbol of all that is wrong in America. I suppose there is something to be said for hipness when you’re a teenager and peer pressure demands the need for such foolishness, but when your bank account is overdrawn or the IRS comes a’knockin’ at your door, who do you want to handle it? Do you want a bling-bedecked hipster or do you want a nerd with a pocket protector full of pens and pencils? Or when the bogeyman sneaks up on you in the middle of the night, is it a rock star you’d want to protect you? George W. Bush, with his dreary vacations in Crawford, Texas and his penchant for being in bed by 10:00 PM, was the epitome of what was once known as “square,” but even the most ardent lefties were glad he was in charge during 9/11. It may have been the cool rock star who gave the order to kill Osama bin Laden in flashy, video-game style, but it was the slow, plodding and sometimes painful ways of the dull Bush that laid the groundwork. Since the culture-busting days of the ’60s, our nation has been schizophrenic in its choice between style and substance, starting with the first paparazzi president, John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie; the first First Lady to assume the role of stylish trendsetter. Although JFK was far more credentialed than the current cool cat in the White House, many felt that his election was the product of marketing his attractive family background and his ruddy, New England good looks. After JFK came the dreary career politician, Lyndon Johnson, followed by Richard Nixon, a man so square that when he appeared on Laugh-In during the 1968 presidential campaign, I’m pretty sure he didn’t even know what “Sock it to me” meant. Next came the enigmatic Jimmy Carter, with a personal style that was chock-full of corn yet whose policies were the stuff that liberal dreams are made of. The two terms of Reagan brought to fruition a synthesis of elegance and gravitas which had probably not been seen since George Washington, and might never again grace the highest office of our land. He naturally attracted the “beautiful people” of Hollywood, yet they remained only on the fringes of his social life and had no bearing on his presidency, unlike the next rock star, Bill Clinton, the first “black president.” Clinton, who followed on the heels of George H.W. Bush — so unhip that his nickname was “Poppy” –was the first president to use the cool and the hip to advance his career; famously using Hollywood producers to make videos for his campaigns. While Reagan actually was a movie star, Clinton merely played one in the White House. Then came George W. Bush who, as I said, would never be mistaken for being hip, cool or in any way a rock star. Together with his wife, a down-to-earth schoolteacher who nonetheless carried herself with exceptional grace, he was about as exciting as white bread but was fundamental to the nation’s need for emotional stability and leadership at a time when this was desperately needed. No, some men are just not destined to be “hip” nor is this spurious attribute one that voters should seek in a man who is to lead us out of our deadly moral and economic decline. We’ve danced and slow-jammed around our problems enough for the last four years. It is time for a square deal for America.
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Square Deal for America
There is a certain kind of inside-the-beltway conservative (you know the type) who emerges from his cocoon from time to time with the good news that all is well in America. “We’re a center-right country,” he tells us. “It can’t happen here.” The guarantee of individual liberty expressed in the Declaration of Independence, central to which is our tradition of religious liberty, is enshrined in the Constitution. We might debate the extent of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise clause, but unlike the French we never had an anti-clerical party that bashes churches. In the guerres franco-françaises , from 1789 on, one took sides with either the Church or the Republic, but never both. Admirably, my conservative thinks well of his country—but he should get out more often. If “it” means a sharp turn to the left, that certainly has happened in the last three years. As for religion, the HHS mandates, which would force religious believers to violate their conscience by offering contraceptive and abortifacient drugs to their employees, are really about anti-clericalism. The Administration seeks to justify the mandates as a means of serving women’s health, but no one really believes that. Pregnancy isn’t an illness, and drugs that prevent or terminate a pregnancy don’t make people healthy. Even apart from that, the dollars in question are so trivial that no one is hard done by if she has to buy the pills herself. The cost of the “free” prescription is about $100 a year at Walmart, the price for a movie and dinner for two at Red Lobster. People on the left complain that, by opposing the contraception mandate, the Church is denying women contraceptives, but that’s only true if I am denied a dinner at Red Lobster because I have to pay for it out of my pocket. People who believe that also believe, with Big Brother, that Freedom equals Slavery. So all that is a subterfuge behind what is really going on, which is picking a fight with the Church. For the Administration, that’s a winner, for three reasons. First, anything that distracts attention from important issues is a godsend, and resurrecting the culture wars does just that. The economy is in the tank, Iran is about to get nuclear weapons, and what does the mainstream media want to talk about? A $100 a year prescription! Second, keeping the focus on religion gives Democrats an opportunity to beat up on Republicans. Democrats poll-tested the question last summer, and came away thinking that, by taking on the Church, they’d win more votes among women and the radical left than they’d lose among Catholics. That’s even more so if Santorum wins the Republican nomination, which explains the timing of the announcement. Here is noted philosopher Bill Press on Santorum and his religion: “It’s perfectly acceptable for Rick Santorum to hold and preach those beliefs about sexuality, no matter how medieval. But he’s running for president of the United States, not for pope.” With his finger on the pulse of American voters, Press goes on to predict a 50-state landslide for Obama over the issue. The Sisters for Life have protested that the new rule tramples on their right to practice their religion. Each of us will be required by law to obtain health insurance, or face fines. Since this HHS mandate will require every insurer to include abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and artificial contraception, we will not be able to obtain any coverage that is free from those “services,” and we will be forced to pay for them directly. Since we are neither employers, nor employees, of any religious institution, we cannot even take advantage of the “religious exemption” contained in the new regulations or the “compromise.” The Sisters describe themselves as a “contemplative/active religious community,” which means that they’re almost as other-worldly as my inside-the-beltway conservative. What they haven’t realized is that limiting their religious freedom is the very point of the bill. Their mistake is the one James Bond made in Goldfinger . Agent 007 is strapped down on the table, unable to move, as the death ray creeps slowly toward him. “Do you expect me to talk?” he asks. And Goldfinger smiles. “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!” Now, no one wants the good sisters to die. All the Administration wants is to convert them to the church of Saint Nancy Pelosi. They’ve been a great annoyance. They go on marches and the like. Of course the press never notices them, but still they’re an oppositionist movement. And for all their talk of “rights,” these are the same people who would deny the rights of loving homosexual partners to adopt children. After taking some flack on this, Obama came out with an “accommodation,” an accounting gimmick in which insurance companies are required to provide the drugs “for free,” a tactic that stripped away many of the rule’s critics, the Washington Post , left-wing Catholics, libertarians. If the prior rule was offensive, however, the “accommodation” is even more so because, without relaxing the requirement, it insults one’s intelligence. Only the deeply stupid and economically illiterate would believe that insurers will offer a costly service without passing on the cost to their insureds. The accommodation slaps the Sisters for Life in the face and then, compounding the humiliation, tells them to pretend that the slap never happened. It’s also amusing that an Administration which complains of the financial burden of having to pay for the prescription out of one’s pocket tells us, out of the other side of its mouth, that the cost is so trivial that the insurer will do it at no charge. If that were the case, why was Nancy Pelosi, barking madness apart, so worked up about this? There’s a third reason why the issue is a winning one for liberals. The Church is one of those inconvenient institutions interposed between the president and the people. When one has direct knowledge of the good, as the liberal does, and a president with whom one agrees, intermediary institutions simply get in the way. If they articulate a different political or moral vision, they’re Bill Press’s medieval church. If they provide social services, schools, hospitals, adoption agencies, they are doing what government should be doing, and often with a dangerously illiberal agenda. And it’s not just the Church. There’s also the Supreme Court, whose Citizens United decision Obama regularly takes on, remarkably to their faces in his 2010 State of the Union speech. Then too there’s Congress, which sadly has been given the power, under the Constitution, to oppose the will of the president. “What’s frustrating people,” Obama said, “is that I haven’t been able to force Congress to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008.” (Those darn Founders! Maybe I’ll recess appoint my entire cabinet next time around.) Then there are charitable organizations, which Obama wants to shrink by limiting charitable deductions. Who needs them, when government should be doing it all? There also are families, who shockingly send their children to school with turkey sandwiches and not the Chicken McNuggets approved by the Department of Education. Finally, there are the states and American federalism. Libertarians have properly complained that a government which can force people to buy health insurance (without invoking the taxing power) can require people to eat broccoli. Or possibly arugula, were it up to Michelle Obama. What seems not to have been noticed is that Obamacare is also an issue about federalism, or would have been so but for the expansive view courts take of the Commerce Clause (“the feds always win”). For libertarians, it’s always about Man vs. the State. For statists too, it’s the same line-up, only this time the state always wins. Conservatives view it differently, as we see a need for intermediary institutions between man and the state. They give people the meaningful diversity that comes with a range of choices, and the information about how to live and how we should be governed that Washington cannot alone provide. That is why anti-clericalism is so dangerous. It does more than trample on individual rights. It also attacks an institution which permits its members to flourish in solidarity with each other, and which, merely by existing, defends their freedom. When every other barrier to oppression is removed, in a Poland or a China, what remains are churches faithful to their mission. Our modern liberal is an imperialist, you see. He would treat everyone equally, and to ensure equality would refuse to recognize any intermediary institution. “To the Jews as Frenchmen, everything,” said Napoleon. “To the Jews as Jews, nothing.” For what are the Sisters for Life, after all, except a number of female citizens, and a small number at that? To them as Catholics, nothing; to them as citoyennes , the state offers Ortho Tri-Cyclen!
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Liberal Imperialism
