The straw that broke the camel's back

"These days it seems that only Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum know that there is a working class in this country."

Law Professor and social scientist Stephen Diamond made the above observation almost in passing in a January 7 post on his blog but he reiterated the theme in another post on the same day (New book on Obamas stirs controversy -- but why?):

[...] Readers of this blog are long familiar with the political history of the Obamas, from their apprenticeship on the south side of Chicago where Obama worked closely with former radicals like [former Weatherman terrorist] William Ayers and Mike Klonsky, who had turned away from their earlier pseudo-marxism for a new form of poisonous racial and identity politics. And although it is no longer polite to recall this, there was the 20-year record of the Obamas sitting in the pews of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s black nationalist church in that same southside milieu.

So while the details [of New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor's book on the Obamas] help put some nuance on the real nature of the Obamas’ background and race-driven approach to politics, you have to wonder at the surprise of the professional political class.

The larger story here is the collapse of traditional American liberalism. Remarkably, if you turn on Fox News Cable you will hear [avowed political conservatives] Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum talk endlessly about the problems of the “working class” but liberals fear being tagged “reds” if they use the term. Instead, multiculturalism and identity politics are the order of the day.
[...]

I doubt that fear of being tagged communist is the overriding reason for the reluctance of self-described liberals to invoke the term. I think the reluctance to frame America's problems in terms of the working class has more to do with the collapse of liberalism Steve refers to. When it comes to the point where Steve, a dyed-in-the-wool Leftist, has to hold up statements by Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum as rare examples of American political liberalism, that's a warning that something is seriously out of whack with U.S. politics.

Indeed Steve, whose political viewpoint is built on the rights of the worker, would be unrecognizable as a Leftist to many Americans, so complete has been the takeover of the American Left, the Democratic Party and liberal ideology by Americans who have as much to do with the Left as the defense hawks and advocates of constantly expanding federal government who've taken over the Republican party have to do with political conservatism.

When one notes that the collapse of American liberalism (or 'progressivism') finds parallel in the collapse of American conservatism, the largest story in American politics isn't even about the collapse of American liberalism; it's about the collapse of the American political system. The collapse has left most American voters believing that no matter which party they vote into power in Washington, the result is pretty much the same with only the most superficial differences.

The Cuckoo Clock Factor

It's fairly easy to identify the American two-party democratic political system as a factor in the collapse of the country's political system, which has made 'independents' -- registered voters who don't belong to the Republican or Democratic parties -- the deciding voting bloc in the upcoming presidential elections. Although there are several political parties in the USA (there's a Green party and even a Communist party) they operate within a two-party system that is stacked against them at both the state and federal levels, as Ralph Nader learned the hard way during his last presidential run.

The stacked deck has meant that Americans whose views don't fall within the traditional political platforms of the Democratic or Republican parties but who want to pursue an activist agenda have gravitated to one of the two major parties. The situation wasn't a large problem during eras with straightforward and relatively few political agendas. But today you just never know what will pop out at you in the guise of a Republican or Democrat. It could be a Green Fiscal Conservative whose idea of a foreign policy platform is freeing Tibet or a Pro-Gay Rights Fiscal Liberal whose foreign policy consists of bombing every government that doesn't have the hang of the American idea of human rights.

Then some wonder why this blog, dedicated to U.S. foreign policy in the 21st Century, abandoned all hope of discussing foreign policy. The 21st Century of policy-making in America has turned out to be a cacophony of cuckoo clocks, all set at different times.

However, the Cuckoo-Clock Factor leaves unanswered why a situation that is fairly obvious flew under the American public's radar for so long that it crashed the country's political system.

So is the solution to abandon the two-party system? I think that would only give the underlying problem more avenues to manifest. If you drill down to bedrock the collapse of the American political system is the most obvious indication that large numbers of Americans are not happy despite their assertions to the contrary when pollsters quiz them.

How did it come to pass that so many Americans, who live in what is arguably the freest and one of the most prosperous countries, and who're protected by the world's most powerful military, came to be unhappy -- and so unhappy that they made a complete mess of a very nice political system?

The answer, down at bedrock, is that Americans have been submitting themselves to inhumane conditions and now they're rebelling. The male human is hardwired to be always fixing things. Today you need a degree or two in engineering to fix even a toaster oven so you just replace it, as you do for all the other things you can't hope to fix by yourself.

So do not wonder why the rise of the white-collar male worker has followed the rising curve of hideously complicated government schemes to fix not only the United States but also the entire world.

What was that wonderful line in Jurassic Park? "Nature always finds a way." Yes, it always finds a way, and this applies to human nature as well. So if you stare in horror at the crazy ways that American federal and state governments have found to spend tax money, realize you're seeing what's called 'sublimation.'

Meanwhile, the American female has been stripped of her primary source of happiness, hardwired into human female nature, which is having life-and-death power over others.

So do not ask why so much of current American politics translates into asking, "Where does it hurt?"

We've gone way beyond "identity" politics; we're into victim politics, whereby every American is a victim of something or someone and preferably a victim of multiple things and persons.

What do you expect, when you strip from women the jobs of doctoring their families and performing childbirth management? What did you think would happen, when women have to ship off their deceased relatives to a mortician instead of having the responsibility to prepare the bodies of their family members for the final journey in this world?

We're the gatekeepers between this realm and what's beyond, the door between life and death. And you want to hand us a degree in sociology and say be satisfied with that much power? Are you kidding me?

Get it straight: the rise of Mommy government has followed the rise of American females who no longer have the responsibilities they're built to undertake.

The Straw that Broke the Camel's Back

And all this is piled on top of stripping fathers and mothers of responsibilities in their ways of insuring the family's survival. Just one tragedy spinning out from this anti-human situation is that most American sons never even see the inside of the offices where their fathers work; they have no clear idea of what their fathers do to support their survival. It's the same for daughters. So even if you told an American daughter to treat a family member's gaping wound she wouldn't know how. She'd have to go to the Internet after she dialed 911 and try to figure it out from there while the blood was spurting from the wound.

Taking away even the most fundamental responsibilities from males and females has been the straw that broke the camel's back in the United States. Human adults can't be stripped of profound responsibilities, responsibilities which are an integral part of their badge of belonging to the human race, and expect to be happy about it.

We're able to recognize that it's cruel to strip from working dogs the responsibility of work. But we see nothing cruel about setting male and female humans in cubicles in front of a computer screen and telling them, 'That's your life. Pick up your kids at 5:00 PM from the day-care center and deliver your car to the repair shop, and see a doctor about that rash on your hand.'

But again, nature always finds a way to manifest itself, so happily Americans are endlessly creative when it comes to finding ways to rebel. The unhappy part in this case is that when you get to the point where you have to break your political system just to scare up more personal responsibility, this is a national problem.

Meet the real John Galt

How to solve the problem? We can't return to every man fixing everything of importance to the family and every woman doctoring her family. I've told before on this blog that I think that the American Paul Glover -- the Paul Glover who was at one time considered as a Green Party candidate for U.S. president, and who once walked from Boston to San Diego to see for himself what America's real problems were -- has the solution.

The catch is that Glover is too busy improvising hands-on solutions to write up his ideas in any formal or extensive fashion. This leaves us with the prolific writings of the Englishman Phillip Blond (Red Tories), who came to the same basic solution Glover hit on, or who was inspired, perhaps unknowingly, by Glover's ideas. (I suspect that in many Americans have been influenced, if only unknowingly, by Glover's views.)

In any event Glover's basic idea has found some expression in the Localism movement that Blond promotes (not the faux, federal-government backed localism), but Glover's vision of America is still a dream. He sees the nation as a network of interconnected industrial/residential nodes in which the residents of each node have tremendous responsibility for the welfare of each node. So what he envisions, at root, is the responsibilities for running the country chopped back down to human size.

The vision does not exclude a federal government but such would have far fewer responsibilities. So in way Paul Glover, a Green party member, is the 'real' John Galt because what Glover is talking about is a version of Galt's Gulch applied to the entire nation. And by the way, Glover is also a real community organizer; when you put what he's done alongside the community organizing efforts of say, Barack Obama during his Chicago days, you realize there's great variance in the concept of the term.

Would Glover's vision of America lead us to tribalism? Would it break up the union? I think it could be argued that the Occupy movement and several movements to secede from the union are warnings that either we adopt some form of Glover's vision or find ourselves overtaken anyway by tribalism and balkanization.

Every solution generates its own set of problems. As a World Bank economist once told me, you can't fix anything in this world without breaking something, somewhere down the line. But when you consider that Glover's solution places huge responsibilities on individuals, this is the way to fool male and female human nature into believing that nothing much has changed since the old days.

To put all this another way, there are millions of Americans who perform jobs that are vital to the nation's survival and the survival of their families and communities -- but giving them a glowing performance review and holding a dinner in their honor on Father's and Mother's Day is not enough to persuade human nature that it's tremendously important.

It seems there has to be a very direct sense of 'doing' to persuade human nature, and I doubt it's fooled by hobbies that attempt to fill the sense of a void at the center of one's life. I also think it's putting the wrong kind of responsibility on religion to expect it to fill the void.

John Galt appeared at the point in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged where the American government was collapsing. So it was for Paul Glover. When one considers that Rand and Glover are poles apart in so many ways it's striking that two such very different American philosophers pointed to basically the same path to restoring American greatness, which was that Americans take more individual responsibility for their governance.

Are we ready yet for that much responsibility? In this era we have wondrous technological tools at our command, tools that are meant to save us labor. The trick, now, is paradoxically to find ways to use the tools to make more work for ourselves, not less -- but work that carries with it great individual responsibility. A tall order, to be sure, but hey we're the land of tinkering genius.

Study Paul Glover's website (link above) for inspiration and practical ideas, which flow out of him in a seemingly inexhaustible supply.

Update to Localism, Faux Localism, and "Rise of the red Tories"

The Localism post I published the other day is cross-posted at RBO. The blog's author, "Procrustes," chose some highly evocative artwork to illustrate various points I made in the post.

She also found a picture of Phillip Blond to add my post at her site; after I saw what he looks like it could be that David Green was not simply being sour grapes when he complained that Blond is anti-modernity. Phillip Blond looks straight out of Middle Earth. Quite Hobbitish.

Procrustes also sent me a very interesting post on Localism that Hyscience published in November 2008, and which features another essay by (the late) Jim Boulet, Jr. Boulet fills in some detail about Obama's view of Localism.

Check out the book linked at the Hyscience post and the page that's highlighted in the Google Books reader. Once you start digging into the history of Localism, it seems it was co-opted, decades ago, by the Authoritarian Leftist Saul Alinsky and his crowd from writings by Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.

It also seems that it's Alinsky's view of Localism that Obama favors. However, Alinsky's interpretation of Localism could be the only one that's been in the U.S. political stream in the modern era until very recently. As I noted in my first post on the topic, I think Blond and the American Localists such as Greg Stelenpohl, are breaking new ground -- at least, in the modern era. It would be very interesting to see the writings of Paine and Jefferson on the topic. Blond's Localism, as with Stelenpohl's, seems directly linked to the agrarian reform ideas of Paine and Jefferson.

And Phillip Blond's Localism is grounded in economic issues, whereas it seems that Alinsky's is grounded in getting more of the power pie from the government.

Authoritarians do tend to see everything through the authoritarian prism, as we learned last year at Pundita blog from Stephen Diamond's very instructive lectures on the topic. (Dr Diamond is now blogging at King Harvest).

All this is much food for thought. I'll have more to say about the issue in the coming weeks, after I cram.

Localism, Faux Localism, and "Rise of the red Tories" -- what might be the most influential essay you'll read this decade

Introduction by Dan Riehl, originally published at Riehl World View on February 19:

Don't let the part essentially about the USA being the USSR just with a different economic model for decades scare you too much. It is, of course, more complex than that.

Via Pundita - Not the lightest read, nor the heaviest - but quick enough. In my opinion it's the most efficient, serious disposition on how we got here, where we may be going and what obstacles we face.

It may challenge your thinking on certain things. Are entrepreneurial Hippies a conservative/libertarian thinker's best friend? Is Obama the ideal corporate Republican candidate? And does any resurgence of Libertarianism and/or conservatism demand that two legs of the Republican Party part company? It's well-enough referenced to suggest it must be taken into account. And solving the puzzle of "Globalism" is our primary challenge.

There's follow-on discussion here as it pertains to Alinsky's concept of "localism - something very different than that of which Pundita writes.

******************************
In the February 15 Ducking götterdämmerung post I wrote, "As a short-term fix, as the means to duck trade wars that would lead to the twilight of the global financial system, the SDR could be the best shot. [...] The long term-solution is outside the power of financial wizards."

The situation that led to the financial crisis is not really rooted in finance. The problem, strangely enough -- or perhaps not so strangely, given the adage that your best talent can easily become your worst blind spot -- is also the business world's greatest accomplishment: recognition of the critical role of efficiency in production and distribution. To understand how this strange state of affairs came about, we have to walk the cat backward:

Europe's welfare states are well known and understood outside Europe; the same holds true for the Energy Banana Republics in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, which also created a form of the welfare state. What few people even in America understood until the financial crisis is that the United States had taken a back-door approach to creating a welfare state via easy credit to people who couldn't afford to buy or borrow.

In other words, trade in complex financial instruments, which fueled the credit boom, became a proxy for U.S. government welfare programs.

The failure of Lehman Brothers should not have touched off a conflagration in the financial markets. But no one realized just how much dead brush there was in the credit markets here and abroad. What did become quickly evident was that with faith in the credit system collapsed, American consumers couldn't continue to finance the global exporting boom with their purchases.

How did it come to pass that so many hard-working Americans couldn't afford to buy or borrow above the bare necessities, and ended up financing everything else on credit? I'll let Phillip Blond, the author of Rise of the red Tories, which was published in Prospect magazine this month, explain. He's writing about Britain but when you toss out the specific examples he cites you have the foundation of the problem for Americans as well -- indeed, for all people in highly developed modern societies:

The more that price is our only measure of competition, the bigger the economies of scale required to compete, and the higher the barriers to entry for small local competitors. Our fishmongers, butchers, and bakers are driven out -- converting a whole class of owner occupiers into low wage earners, employed by supermarkets. And, once you have a monopoly, it demands that other monopolies serve it, just as Tesco demands economies of scale from its suppliers, driving out small and medium-size farms.

I'm not sure that "monopoly" is the right word but you get the picture: efficiency-driven business production demands more and more efficiency to stay competitive, which in turn demands more and more economies of scale, which again drives the need for greater efficiency to get the edge in competition.

At some stage in the spiral there's little room left at the production end for humans. At that point efficiency no longer really serves its ultimate purpose. Instead, humans become the consuming end in an elaborate distribution network that demands greater and greater efficiency to be cost-effective -- and yet paradoxically becomes less and less efficient for human users.

What is efficient about sitting in a car for three hours a day to commute to a job while burning gasoline you can't afford to purchase except on credit, in order to earn enough money to pay interest on debt for purchases such as frozen green beans imported from China by a supermarket, when you could buy fresh green beans from a local grower for the same price if you had the cash?

But how the frozen green beans got to your supermarket, and how the gasoline got to your gas station, is the model of efficiency. It's just that your personal life is left out of the efficiency chain.

Of course there are many small businesses in the United States, but many of them service consumers who can't afford to own homes or anything else unless it's financed on credit which they can't afford. So the consumers are perpetually in debt that must be somehow financed with more debt.

In short the business production model, which runs on credit, came to dominate the domestic or 'personal life' model -- but the domestic model, which consumes instead of produces, can't exist on ever-deepening debt.

Ergo, easy credit became a socially-acceptable form of welfare and picked up the shortfall until the merry-go-round spun so fast that everyone fell off.

And that's how the efficiency chase led by twists and turns to a financial debacle affecting the entire world. End of story.

Where do we go from here? Is there a new story? Sure there's a new story; the system had spun out of control several years ago -- by the 80s, by some estimates -- and several of those who got thrown off the merry-go-around earlier on didn't curl up and die. They dusted themselves off and created a new story called "Localism."

I warn there are different types of Localism and that the Authoritarian Left in America has already co-opted the concept; this, in a sneaky ploy to shut up Right-wing media outlets by bringing in a version of the Fairness Doctrine, which is so blatant in its attack on free speech that the Authoritarians had to get sneaky.

Wikipedia has a helpful introductory article on the topic of Localism, which is already divided into New and Old Localism.

(Don't cringe; you'll have to learn this stuff sooner or later because within a year everybody will be arguing about Localism.)

Then there's American Localism and the British New Labor Localism and the emerging British Tory Localism that Phillip Blond represents. There's also hybrid Localism, which is an attempt (not very successful so far, it seems), to devise Localism programs from the central government level.

And again, there's Faux Localism, which Jim Boulet, Jr. explained wonderfully for National Review Online in 2008. Readers who are familiar with Canada's Free Speech issues will quickly pick up on how Faux Localism works because it's a play on the multi-culturalism/diversity laws, which paved the way for the infamous federal Section 13 speech-muzzling law and its provincial copycats.

However, we're concerned here with the real deal. A quick introduction to the basic concept behind Localism can be found in an interview with Greg Stelenpohl, an American who founded Odwalla health juices.

Odwalla started as a hippie-type natural foods product, but it tasted so good that it became a hit with the mainstream consumer. To shorten a story, Greg ended up ousted from his company's board of directors just before the company was bought by Coca-cola and Coke's highly efficient distribution network and economies of vast scale.

Greg took his five percent of the profits from the sale and set out to build local business and investing networks; note that he speaks of their "efficiency."

[...] He is extending the warehouse where he lives and works into a "regional slow food centre" serving the Monterey Bay area. But that is just the most visible part of his activities.

"Out of a portfolio of $3 million, most of the individual investments are in the smaller $100,000 range," Stelenpohl said.

He cites a herbal medicine company, a sustainable industries publishing house, a developer of software for non-profits, and an eco retreat centre.

Apart from Adina, his two commitments of over $1 million are the slow living centre and Interra, a new kind of loyalty card which aims to give small local businesses the same infrastructure to offer customers loyalty incentives as major brands such as Starbucks already have.

"By increasing the density of local interactions we stimulate small business job creation and the recirculation of local dollars," he said. "This creates more efficient energy and transportation dynamics and more rewarding social lives as well." [...]

If all that sounds terribly Granola, Localism makes efficiency work for humans again.

But does Localism lead invariably to anarchy? To the death of the state and federal government? Here is where all the argument about Localism comes in.

To help us wend our way through the political and philosophical thickets that have already grown up around Localism, Phillip Blond's Red Tories is a manifesto for Britain's Tory party that has Localism as its centerpiece. As an introductory blurb at Prospect puts it:

[...] Conservative party advisor Phillip Blond in this month’s cover story, which unveils a new “progressive” agenda for the British right. Blond, the director of Demos’s new Progressive Conservatism project, argues for a break with free-market Thatcherism, to be replaced by a bold new “Red Toryism” that is socially conservative, sceptical of neo-liberal economics and radically localist; the most challenging new political thesis of the post-credit crunch era.

Blond is not only an advisor to the Conservatives, he's also a theologian and a card-carrying philosopher educated at Cambridge. So you might want to preface your read of the manifesto with this Wikipedia article, in order to familiarize yourself with his somewhat Jekell-and-Hyde style of thought. He goes in one direction, then the theologian pulls him in another, then the Conservative politician yanks him back in the other direction. After 20 or so paragraphs you get used to it. Here's an example from Wikipedia:

Phillip Blond labels himself a 'Red Tory', proposing a popular capitalism which respects traditional values, local communities and allows the 'little man' to participate in the economy, as opposed to neoliberalism, socialism and communism.

Blond considers that a true conservative should reject present-style capitalism because it has increasingly concentrated ownership to a few 'oligarchs' and created a dispossessed group at the lower level of society, thus preventing many ordinary people from maintaining their own lives and communities. Blond argues the economic gap has widened during the last 30-40 years and the development is similar to that of the 19th century.

Blond is a figure in the 'radical orthodoxy' school of theology and a fervent critic of secular liberalism. He argues that liberalism is equivalent to moral relativism, and that liberal politics can therefore only be actualised through power.

It's at that point that Blond loses me, and loses his most eloquent critic thus far, David Green. Green's In Defense of Liberal Democracy, also published this month in Prospect, straightens out Blond's reasoning on some points, which clears the way for Blond's excellent crash course on how Britain became a "broken society," as he terms it, and his manifesto.

The caveat is that Green makes what seems some unwarranted attacks on Blond, such as calling him an enemy of modernity. From my reading of the essay, I think what Blond doesn't like is that citizens have not mustered adequate responses to the greatest downsides of the business-driven model of society. The dislocations in 'modern' societies arising from the collapse of the credit markets make that argument for him.

Yet Green's criticism is on the whole good because Blond is struggling to articulate a model of modern social order that has been growing in the manner of Topsy, and doesn't yet have strong philosophical underpinnings, much less political ones. He's made a good stab at developing the theoretical framework, which leaves much room for improvement, of course, as with the development of any new philosophy.

The bonus is that in the process of laying out his arguments Blond highlights contradictions that caused the American Republican party to implode.

What Republicans who voted for John McCain don't seem to understand is that it's Barack Obama, not McCain, who is the best representative of their party platform, which is strongly weighted toward globalized big business.

From that viewpoint Obama is a Republican dream come true: neither white nor black, too rootless in his background to be strongly associated with any particular ethnic group, sect, creed or even any country. His strongest identification is with Chicago -- a big city, the kind of urban center where many of the world's consumers now reside. He is the perfect person to represent America's globalized, export-driven society; a persona that can't offend any customer overmuch, anywhere in the world.

If Republicans say that's not what they want; that they want to be more than big business and keep to America's Western roots and values, they'd better trouble themselves to study Blond's essay. Then hunker down and work out the contradictions in their platform.

I will close by noting that one of the articles I read about Faux Localism mentions that President Obama has stated that he's in favor of Localism. The article did not provide a reference for the remark or elaborate on it.

Given that interpretations of Localism vary, I don't know what Obama means by the term. However, from all I know about his political career, I venture that he supports the Authoritarian Left's interpretation of Localism, which I think is false, and which boils down to giving the wishes of minority populations primary importance. In other words, multiculturalism was slapped onto the concept of Localism.

Of course Localism of all kinds supports diversity of thought, as does democracy, but as you'll see when you read Blond's essay, Localism does not refer to multiculturalism or ethnic diversity. To cover up this fact is, I suspect, a stealth attempt to bend Localism to authoritarian agendas.
**********************
February 19 Update
This entry is linked at Riehl World View, Sea Blogger, and Free Canuckistan!

The entry is also cross-posted at RBO. The blog's author, "Procrustes," chose some highly evocative artwork to illustrate various points I made in the post.

She also found a picture of Phillip Blond to add my post at her site; after I saw what he looks like it could be that David Green was not simply being catty when he complained that Blond is anti-modernity. Phillip Blond looks straight out of Middle Earth. Quite Hobbitish.

Procrustes sent me a very interesting article on Localism -- another offering by the late Jim Boulet, Jr., which goes into some detail about Obama's view of Localism.

Check out the book linked to at the post and the page that's highlighted in the Google Books reader.

After reading the page I note that once you start digging into the history of Localism, it seems that it was co-opted, decades ago, by the Authoritarian Leftist Saul Alinsky and his crowd from writings by Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.

It also seems, from the Boulet article, that it's Alinsky's view of Localism that Obama favors.

So this is much food for thought. I'll have more to say about the issue in the coming weeks, after I cram. For now I venture that Blond's Localism is firmly grounded in economic issues, whereas it seems that Alinsky's is grounded in getting more of the power pie from the government.