“They Did It!”

The president just concluded a frenzied “jobs” bus tour to explain why unemployment is at 9.1% — after borrowing nearly $5 trillion in stimulus the last three years. You know the usual suspects responsible for our, not his, malaise: George Bush did it; the Republican obstructionists in the Congress who were wary of approving another $2 trillion in debt did it; the Tea Party did it; Standard and Poor’s did it; the Japanese earthquake did it; the Japanese tsunami and nuclear accidents did it; the Middle East unrest did it; the European debt crisis did it; new technology like ATM machines did it. Obama has cited these culprits and many more — though never either himself or his advisors who took a weak recovery and turned it into a near recession.

Where Are They Now?

Unofficial and sometimes presidential economic advisor Paul Krugman is increasingly petulant, blaming too little borrowing for the dismal 9.1% unemployment rate, some two years after the recession that began in December 2007 “officially” ended in June 2009. (Note the Zeno-like paradox of too much never being quite enough.) Remember the presidential advisors  – Austan Goolsbee, Peter Orszag, Christina Romer, Larry Summers – who, in the euphoria of the hope and change election sweep of November 2008, advocated a World War II-like new level of federal indebtedness. They are now quietly back on Wall Street, back to their tenured academic perches, or considering departure. They remain either mum or in op-eds visibly confused about why a strong recovery did not follow a strong recession in the manner of all other post-war ups and downs.

So there seems to be genuine confusion — and fear — on the part of leftist economic advisors that the capitalist engine that fuels their redistributive government for some unknown reason is not running on all cylinders and thus cannot quite continue to make the money that even capitalism’s critics count on for support. It reminds me of the please, please letters alumni receive when annual giving to their almae matres is down, and the left-wing president’s mega-salary and the center for gender studies are possibly imperiled.

Start Hiring, Stupid!

Both the president and his supporters fault supposedly self-interested corporations and “the rich” who sit on “trillions of dollars” in capital and won’t hire new workers or make massive purchases of equipment. They are the real cause of record budget deficits, unsustainable aggregate debt, credit downgrading, high unemployment, a nose-diving stock market, sluggish growth, near-zero interest rates, explosive trade deficits, sky-high energy and food prices, a still ruined housing market, and a general fear of new hyperinflation.

There is some truth to Obama’s screed, though not quite in the way he thinks. So let me be perfectly clear and make no mistake about it and let’s be honest: The employers of America have taken a time out, despite the fact that now might be a good time to gear up for the inevitable recovery. They haven’t let the resting world fall entirely from their broad shoulders, but they have bent over for a bit and the globe is tottering on their upper arms.

Consider why after nearly three years our tired Atlas is starting to slouch.

The Slurring and Smearing

Every president lets slip a smear now and then. The key is that there should be little consistency or frequency in his targeting. But with Obama there is both monotony and predictability. He clearly does not like private businesses — except the super wealthy who are liberal and share his refined tastes and politics and have enough millions in “unneeded income” that they figure they will either die before or weather through our transition to European democratic socialism.

Of course, one Huey Long–like “fat cat,” an occasional adolescent “millionaires and billionaires,” a once-in-a-while juvenile “corporate jet owners,” a few 1960s-like “spread the wealth” or “redistributive change” slips, a single petulant “unneeded income,” or a sole pop-philosophizing “at some point you’ve made enough money,” or even on occasion the old socialist boilerplate “those who make over $250,000 should pay their fair share” in isolation are tolerable. But string them together and even the tire store owner and pharmaceutical rep are aroused from their 70-hour weeks, and start to conclude, “Hmmm, this guy doesn’t like me or what I do, and I better make the necessary adjustments.” And, believe me, they are making the necessary adjustments.

Play Money

Business people were confused by the Bush bailout. Some gave Obama a pass for Stimulus II (especially those on the receiving end). When we hit $3 trillion in proposed new borrowing, concern rose. Now with nearly $5 trillion recently borrowed and another $10 trillion scheduled over the next eight years, the private sector has concluded that this guy loves trillion-dollar debt because either (1) it fuels big government and more regulations and more dependent constituents; or (2) it will inevitably cause more redistributive taxes on the productive sector; or (3) it will spur inflation and erode the value of accumulated wealth; or (4) all that and more still.

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How are we to make sense of flash mobbing, the London rioting, more hatred expressed for the Tea Party, more calls for ever more debt and spending, and Barack Obama’s dive below 40% approval in the polls? Let me backtrack a bit.

Paleolithic Liberalism

I grew up with die-hard Roosevelt Democrats. Packers, shippers, and distributors made all the profits; farmers, we were told, did the work. Co-ops like Sun-Maid were noble; in contrast, grasping private packers paid on “consignment”: give us your produce in an oversupplied market and we will get what we can, when we can, for it. Often plums and peaches were dumped, and we paid the packing and storage fees for the privilege of losing the crop. Unfairness, not the capricious nature of market capitalism, is what we wished to hear.

In my youth, my mother helped out in the “Dollars For Democrats” campaign. I remember the 1960s’ talking points still, as she drove us through the poorer sections of the San Joaquin Valley raising money for JFK (Nixon would win the state by 36,000 votes). We had high hopes for Pat Brown and Sen. Claire Engle. Charles “Gus” Garrigus was our local assemblyman. At eight I met a young Alan Cranston at a run-down café on the old 99 Highway in Selma, a sort of awkward gangly guy still at that stage talking about hard-core, bread-and-butter populism.

After all, what was so unfair about wanting a 40-hour week, overtime pay, disability and unemployment insurance, public works and infrastructure (e.g., the California water projects, LAX, the state freeway system), fair housing, money for the new JC/CSU/UC tripartite “master plan” of higher California education? It was not uncommon in those days to see unpaved streets and a few outhouses — something I was told the distant wealthy could avoid but the state should not.

Most of my parents’ and grandparents’ friends, however, were Grange/Farm Bureau/Chamber of Commerce Republicans. I emphasize “friends” since in the early sixties, pre-Vietnam-protest age, politics still never impeded friendships. Most of my mom’s rural friends were amused rather than angered by her genuine liberalism, since it was directed at trying to improve the lot of the working poor, who were ubiquitous and often next door.

Remember, this was pre-Great Society stuff, well before globalized cheap material goods, the age of food stamps, two years of unemployment insurance, aid to dependent families, and the entire government umbilical cord. Most readers will shake their heads and now mutter: “Victor, Victor, did you not see even at seven that the obvious, the logical result of that idealized government help would be something like the annual $1.6 trillion debt and entitlement culture of the present? Did not Plato warn us that the egalitarian mandate has no logical end?”

Perhaps, but in those days it was not hard to think that the ‘”Okies” and “poor folks” and “Mexican-Americans” in the San Joaquin Valley needed some sort of foundational equality of opportunity — given the scarcity of capital and endemic prejudice. My most distinct memory of first grade was hygiene and dentistry problems: half the kids had rotten teeth and clothes that were unclean. (I remember Jimmy Hopson pulling out his front [permanent] tooth in second grade and showing it off.) Stern teachers from the southwest, with Texas and Oklahoma accents, lectured us on how to shampoo and comb our hair, change socks and underwear, brush our teeth, and use soap under our arms and on the backside of our arms. We were to “make something of ourselves” and be “presentable,” the sort of people “we ourselves would want to sit next to.” “Relief” carried the same stigma associated with “hypos” and “switchblades” or “bums” and “hobos.”

Word and Deed

I detour here, because late 1950s liberalism was in some sense conservative, given the rural poverty, the lack of high-tech appurtenances, the coming end of the U.S. postwar monopoly in manufactured goods, and the worry over “commies.” Of course, JFK, like FDR, personified noblesse oblige, but mostly the heroic Democrats were guys like Truman and Humphrey. For my dad, FDR had built the B-29s, Truman stopped the North Koreans, and JFK had stood down Castro — some mythic history in that, but not much.

You might think their square-deal politics were naïve, but they were salt-of-the-earth types, whose lifestyles reflected the politics that they advocated, and whose personal tastes were simple. To the best I can recall, there was no manifest contradiction in my grandfather’s voting for JFK in 1960, and his stern warnings about “lazy” “no-goods” who came out to prune for a week, abruptly to quit when they earned enough money for “booze” and “were up to no good.” The new pocket transistor radios, he swore, only encouraged sloth and poor work habits — and he wanted no one on the farm listening to one, us included.

In those days, liberalism, if we can even call it that, was clearly an equality of opportunity idea — whatever the intrinsic contradictions of the prior New Deal that logically led to the Great Society and the other failed “societies” to come. It was still not socialism of the European type, but singularly American and predicated on a “fair shake” as the majority of its adherents’ lives were not too distant from the objects of their worry.

I’ll skip the next half-century, since the tragedy is too well known, and focus instead on the vastly different, contemporary liberal mindset. To be blunt, what strikes us about its recent and most vocal emissaries — politicians such as a Barbara Boxer, John Edwards, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi; or the Hollywood celebrities; or the great fortuned like a Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, or George Soros; or the credentialed technocrats who run the foundations and government agencies, or the high-paid media types in the NY-DC corridor — is how vast apart are the circumstances of their own lives from the objects of their concern. In addition, present-day liberalism finds its most numerous adherents among the upper-middle class suburbanites and those who work for government and enjoy de facto tenure (e.g., the public employee unions, teachers, the public professoriate, etc.).

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Progressive Angst

This week the president’s positive ratings are hovering around 40-42%; in some polls there is a 10% gap or more between negative and positive appraisals. I expect that they will go back up, and then even lower as the year wears on. But the latest nosedive has prompted many on the left to attack Mr. Obama, from a psychological portrait offered by one Drew Westen to unusual carping from Maureen Dowd, Richard Cohen and E. J Dionne. Cornel West is back again, in rather vicious fashion reminding us that he supposedly helped to introduce Obama to us and now regrets that he did, given the president’s purported ingratitude. Often the critics invoke everything from Jimmy Carter parallels to the unease of European statesmen to emphasize their own disappointment (I think that is a fair and tame term, since I doubt their present disenchantment will result in not voting to reelect Obama).

How Could He?

As I can fathom this August of discontent, it runs something like this: at best Barack Obama is too aloof, professorial and unable temperamentally or unwilling politically to mix it up with Republicans. Therefore he has compromised far too much on various budget deals, which in part explains his sagging ratings and the general laments in the American and European press that Obama lacks leadership qualities. The nearly $5 trillion in new debt since 2009 is a needed, if too timid, “stimulus”; and if it is seen by some as too excessive, it can be easily remedied by new taxes on the wealthy — something Obama talks about a lot but does little to enact, this buskin Theramenes who bends with the wind.

At worst, there is a sort of victimization that might be described as, “Obama mesmerized us and therefore we did not quite appreciate how inexperienced and unaccomplished he was until now when we sobered up — and when it is too late.” Or as Drew Westen put it more bluntly and less kindly in the New York Times:

Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted “present” (instead of “yea” or “nay”) 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.

A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in “Dreams From My Father” appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there—the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.

A number of us throughout 2008 and later were criticized for raising just these issues, both about Obama’s lack of experience and his Hamlet-like propensity of hesitation and his academic disengagement. But why this sudden about-face from former disciples?

With Friends Like These…

Politics, of course. The combination of sinking polls to the near 40% range, the stock market nosedive, the Standard and Poor’s downgrade, the tragedy in Afghanistan, the confusion over Libya, the embarrassing golf outings and First Family insensitive preferences for the aristocratic Martha’s Vineyard, Vail, and Costa del Sol have contributed to a general unease on the Left about Obama’s judgment, perhaps to the extent that he might well take the Left down in 2012, both in the House and Senate, whether he wins reelection or not.

But the argument remains incoherent: Obama is being blamed for not being liberal enough — after federalizing much of the health care delivery system, expanding government faster than at any time since 1933, borrowing more money in two and a half years than any president in history, absorbing companies, jawboning the wealthy, going after Boeing, reversing the order of the Chrysler creditors, adding vast new financial and environmental regulations, appointing progressives like a Van Jones or Cass Sunstein, and institutionalizing liberal protocols across the cabinet and bureaucracy, from the EPA to the Attorney General’s Office.

In other words, there is now an elite liberal effort to disentangle Obama from liberalism itself, and to suggest that his sagging polls are not a reflection of Obama’s breakneck efforts to take the country leftward — but either his inability or unwillingness to do so!

Partly, the disappointment is understandably emotional. Just three years ago Obama was acclaimed as a once-in-a-lifetime prophet of liberalism, whose own personal history, charisma, teleprompted eloquence and iconic identity might move a clearly center-right country hard leftward where it otherwise rarely wished to go.

Partly, the anger is quite savvy: if one suddenly blames Obama the man, rather than Obama the ideologue, then his unpopularity is his own, not liberalism’s. There is a clever effort to raise the dichotomy of the inept Carter and the politically savvy Clinton, but in the most improbable fashion: Clinton supposedly was a success not because he was personable, sometimes compromising, and often centrist, and Carter was a failure not because he was sanctimoniously and stubbornly ideological, but just the opposite: Clinton is now reinvented as the true liberal who succeeded because of his principled leftwing politics; Carter like Obama was a bumbling compromiser and waffler.

Revisionist Nonsense?

I think few will believe that implausible narrative, given that Clinton salvaged his presidency after the debacle of Hillarycare and the 1994 midterm bloodbath, only due to Dick Morris’s brilliant and cynical triangulation and his deal-making with Newt Gingrich. In contrast, Carter pretty much stuck to his guns about trumped up fears of communism, the excesses of the wealthy, and the need for more statist control of the economy — and went down in flames for stagflation and an inept foreign policy.

But what are the practical political ramifications of an incipient liberal revolt?

1) Hillary. One can continue to appreciate how brilliant was Obama’s selection of Hillary Clinton as secretary of State. It was not just that he diminished her status by outsourcing much of her job to regional and theater czars, or boxed her in with the “reset” diplomacy of the Susan Rice and Samantha Power sort, or even that her appointment suspended Bill Clinton’s lucrative speechmaking abroad, giving up millions in honoraria at the courts of foreign autocrats and strongmen. More clever yet, Obama seems to have anticipated his present bad stretch in polls and wanted no Teddy Kennedy-like distraction. A Senator Clinton right now would be under some pressure to weigh a divisive run for the nomination. But should Obama implode and see his ratings after three years drop to where George Bush’s were after six years — the 32-36% range — she would be under enormous pressure to declare her candidacy. And unlike Kennedy — who was both an inept candidate and had far too many character flaws and past sins—Hillary Clinton remains a skilled politician, with a brilliant political contortionist as her husband and, of course, has been thoroughly vetted and dissected.

2) Is Race Behind the Leftist Criticism? I think the race card will be put away for just a while — even as it was starting to be replayed. When a Cornel West or a New York Times guest op-ed writer offers Rush Limbaugh-type putdowns and nonetheless remains immune from charges of racialism, then most mainstream critics will probably be as well. Quite simply, from now on to suggest that Obama was not thoroughly vetted, was inexperienced and unqualified, or that he is without leadership qualities and conviction cannot be credibly seen as racially motivated — unless prominent liberals are said themselves to be motivated by such impulses. (And they won’t be so said.)

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The Silliest Column I Have Ever Read

I rarely comment on the op-eds of others. And I try not to use ad hominem attacks in lieu of argument. Usually I reply forcefully on the principle of retaliation rather than preemption. So I hesitate to devote space to a single essay. But in the case of an article by one Jakob Augstein in the recent issue of Der Spiegel I’ll make an exception, since his asinine views are emblematic of the poverty of thought that now is so evident among the European Left. In what follows I quote the article, “Once Upon a Time in the West,” in italics, with a bracketed commentary following each paragraph.

08/04/2011

Opinion
Once Upon a Time in the West
A Commentary by Jakob Augstein

The word “West” used to have a meaning. It described common goals and values, the dignity of democracy and justice over tyranny and despotism. Now it seems to be a thing of the past. There is no longer a West, and those who would like to use the word — along with Europe and the United States in the same sentence — should just hold their breath. By any definition, America is no longer a Western nation.

[By referencing American democracy as a “thing of the past,” I expect the author now to demonstrate how the United States either does not hold elections or is not governed by its republican Constitution. Somehow, I expect in what follows to learn neither — and anticipate that Mr. Augstein objects not to the lack of democracy, but to the particular election results resulting from a quite vibrant democracy.]

The US is a country where the system of government has fallen firmly into the hands of the elite. An unruly and aggressive militarism set in motion two costly wars in the past 10 years. Society is not only divided socially and politically — in its ideological blindness the nation is moving even farther away from the core of democracy. It is losing its ability to compromise.

[By “elite”, does the author mean that those with certificates from particular Ivy-League universities, or with incomes far above the national average, or with children in prep schools, or with expansive mansions, or with tastes that are characterized by vacations in a Vail or Costa del Sol are inordinately represented in our legislative and executive branches? I would tend to agree. But somehow, I do not think that Mr. Augstein is too worried about the elite circumstances of a John Edwards, Al Gore, a late Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, or Barack Obama, who have occupied or run for our highest offices. Does an “unruly militarism” refer to responses to decades of unanswered terrorism, the 9/11 mass murdering, and violations of UN accords by Saddam Hussein, in which the U.S. took on two wars, both sanctioned by the U.S. Congress, against two mass-murdering regimes? Does the author believe that a Saddam Hussein was preferable to the current elected government in Iraq, or the Taliban to the Kabul government? And did an “unruly militarism” not once remove despots such as Slobodan Milosevic and Manuel Noriega, or force the collapse of the Soviet gulag? And how exactly is the U.S. moving away from its “core of democracy”? Do EU citizens have more say about the conduct of their continental-wide government? In fact, there have never been more active popular movements that have channeled grass roots enthusiasm into political representation. Web sites, talk radio, and cable news have given the public an unprecedented variety of viewpoints that transcend the traditional filters of the old corporate networks and big-city newspapers.]

America has changed. It has drifted away from the West.

[Even this simple assertion is wrong. America is drifting as never before toward Europe—the ostensible model for an Obama administration that has borrowed nearly $5 trillion in three years, federalized health care, assumed control of private companies, blocked new plant openings, is eager to increase taxation, and seeks to subordinate U.S. foreign policy to the United Nations, as we see in the case of Libya, where the Obama administration went to the Arab League, the United Nations, and its European allies, but not to the U.S. Congress for authorization.]

The country’s social disintegration is breathtaking. Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz recently described the phenomenon. The richest 1 percent of Americans claim one-quarter of the country’s total income for themselves — 25 years ago that figure was 12 percent. It also possesses 40 percent of total wealth, up from 33 percent 25 years ago. Stiglitz claims that in many countries in the so-called Third World, the income gap between the poor and rich has been reduced. In the United States, it has grown.

[Most of the extraordinary wealth of America’s richest — a Bill Gates, Jr. or Warren Buffett — is based on the advent of American-style globalization that opened up new markets for products and financial services, or brought in billions in foreign investment. In response, never has the top 1% paid a greater percentage of the aggregate income tax (the top 1% pays almost 40% of all income tax revenues collected; the top 5% pays almost 60%; the bottom 50% of households pays essentially nothing in income tax). But the barometer of national health should be not be found necessarily in income disparity, but rather in the per capita income of Americans. As American companies and financial institutions made unprecedented profits from global commerce and investment, so too did the standard of living of all Americans rise between 1980s and 2008. Per capita GDP reveals that the United States is the wealthiest large nation in the world, whether one uses average pre capita GDP or per capita national income, exceeded mostly by tiny oil rich or tax-exempt nations such as Norway, the United Arab Emirates, or Luxembourg. By measures of access of the poor and middle class to electronic goods, cars, or square footage of living space, the U.S. far exceeds the European mean. Such opportunity explains why some 10-15 million Mexican nationals, without legality, education or English, have flocked to the United States.]

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There are a number of things I don’t fathom about contemporary American popular culture and politics. Here is a small sample.

1) Is there a theoretical limit to our national borrowing?

The so-called tough debt ceiling deal still ups the borrowing to $16 trillion, or over 100% of annual GDP. So why are we rejoicing about curbing, rather than stopping, the borrowing? We are not discussing paying back the massive sums that we owe. And we talk not of cutting the baseline expenditures, but only about the rate of increase in entitlements — reminding us that revolutions start not with the impoverished, but with threatened cuts of subsidies to the middle class. Its appetites increase faster than the state can satisfy them, as most judge their well-being not in having at last more than the poor but in always having less than the affluent.

Our staggering debt also raises an existential question — at what point would Obama stop borrowing on his own? Should aggregate local, state, income, and payroll taxes climb from 50-55% on one’s income to 60%, 70% or perhaps 80%? Should the top 5% pay not 60% of aggregate income taxes, but, say, 70% or even 80%? Should the 50% who pay no income taxes be expanded to 60% or 70% of the electorate? Should food stamp usage climb from one-sixth of the population (e.g., 50 million) to a third or about 100 million? At what point would the advocates of borrowing be content?

Would the Obamites lead us to borrow and spend until we hit a Greek-like implosion, until the laws of physics stopped them? And then what? Given that government is presently so large, the debt so staggering, combined taxes so great, it is difficult to envision how one could expand on all that. How does one pay back $16 trillion — the Roman way of coating silver coins with bronze veneers, the Confederate way of printing paper money, the Castroite way of simply confiscating private property? The stimulus model during World War II is evoked, but neither the home front frugality of the war nor the aftermath of 1945 is cited — when America provided the goods, capital, and services to rebuild an industrial world in shambles and pay down its debt, given the destruction of Germany, Japan, Russia, and much of Western Europe, the premodern status of India and China, and the self-destructive path to socialism in Great Britain. I don’t see such a scenario of recovery this time around. The current borrowing bingers have no conception of ever paying back the debt (Bush surely offered little plan of payback, and Obama none).

The nation is similar to those with four or five maxed out credit cards, and no net worth, who plan on dying and leaving their debt to the banks and less than nothing to their children.

2) What are we to make of the self-referential wealthy who demand higher taxes?

About every month or so either a politician — a Barack Obama or John Kerry — or a billionaire — a Bill Gates Jr. & Sr. or Warren Buffett — or a celebrity — a Matt Damon — pontificates about the need for some sort of higher taxes, as if we are supposed to be in awe over such professed magnanimity. Usually the narrative goes one of two ways: “I wouldn’t mind paying more taxes” or “My secretary pays more taxes than do I.”

These apologies insult our intelligence, since the boaster either makes so much money that he would not notice whether he paid 35% or 39% on his income; or he is in government where the state picks up much of the tab for his health care and transportation, and subsidizes his housing and meals. The subtext is Gore-like aristocratic disdain, as in “Why don’t those accountants and dentists pass on their jet skis and Yukons and fork over more to the more noble needy?”

Of course, the very wealthy who rant about higher taxes simply could pay higher taxes. Such an iconic gesture would do far more than a YouTube rant: the media would love Matt Damon if he were paying 70% in taxes on his income. Indeed, he could start a movement to shame other Hollywood celebrities, who then could shame CEOs, who then in turn could shame the rich in general. Or alternatively, the very wealthy who feel under-taxed simply could donate directly to their own favorite government program — a Head Start, solar power subsidy, or food stamp program. Or, again, a Matt Damon could limit his take per picture to $1 million (e.g., curbing those millions he “didn’t need”), and start yet another campaign in Hollywood to reduce movie and DVD prices for the needy.

3) Is contemporary American aristocracy compatible with, antithetical to, or the logical complement to modern liberalism?

So another mystery is the leftism of those who live in a world of hierarchical privilege. If we examine the elite media (the MSNBC or New York Times megaphones), or Hollywood  (the lifestyle of a Sean Penn), or leftist politicians (a Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, or Al Gore), there is almost no tangible difference in the way they live their lives from those of the corporate or private sector elite they deprecate. Ensuring that a child goes to a segregated elite prep school, making a well-placed call to an elite university admission officer, guaranteeing a prestigious internship for a daughter, marrying another anchor person or DC insider politician, living in the right zip code, vacationing in Tuscany — all that is privilege to the core, and in theory at odds with radical egalitarianism.

That begs the question — is the elite left’s infatuation with the good life not so much a paradox, not a hypocrisy at all, but rather a sort of medieval exemption, or perhaps penance? The price for living well is to advocate government subsidies for the less well off that are rarely seen, and disdain for those who grub for money and as tea partiers lack the refinement that is the dividend of the very rich or the so well connected. Does buying a $40,000 ticket to the president’s 50th birthday party mean that one is exempt from the presidential invective against “millionaires and billionaires” and “corporate jet owners”? As a general rule, the more I hear of such carping, the more I assume the whiner covets what he so childishly is obsessed with ending.

4) Fairly or not, the entire illegal immigration debate is couched in terms of anger at the U.S.

That makes no sense. The recent Rose Bowl crowd’s booing at the U.S. soccer team, the ubiquitous Mexican flags at immigration rallies, the Aztlan-La Raza anguish, the massive May 5th parades, the romantic refashioning of Mexico, the stern lectures from Mexican consuls and government officials — all this emotion is misdirected: millions have left their mother country, convinced its government has mismanaged the economy and impoverished them, while life in the north offers an opportunity of a good life not found in Mexico. Would not then the illegal immigration movement be located in hyper-pro-Americanism?

I can understand the frustration of being an alien in an alien land, of the poverty and challenge that confronts one without English, legality, and a high school diploma, of the indifference often shown the other who, in a great part, does manual labor that heretofore American youth pass on. (Picking peaches or driving a tractor for 10-hour days has a sobering effect). But that said, if life were still felt to be preferable to what is found in Mexico, then would not the entire immigration movement be awash in pro-American chauvinism, of affection for the antithesis of a Mexico that drove them out: American flags waving at parades, a grass-roots movement to speak and master English, something like the National Council of Mexican-Americans rather than La Raza?

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Shy and Retiring America

A perfect storm of events is eroding the perception of American deterrence—and the world will shortly become an even scarier place. The fiscal crisis has cast doubt on the government’s ability to act forcefully, especially the president’s emasculation during the entire process. These perceptions, of course, pale in consideration to the reality of out of control spending the first three years of the Obama administration that added almost $5 trillion to the U.S. debt and is both humiliating America and questioning whether it can still pay for its enormous military. Almost every day, we are borrowing $4 billion, enough to build a new fleet aircraft carrier (and, of course, are not building aircraft carriers with such daily deficits as we did in World War II).

Instead, defense spending is seen by the administration as the preferred target for cutting, especially in comparison to entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That sometimes 18- and 19-year olds learn more in the military on a flight deck than taking 6-units of -studies courses per semester for 7 years on federal grants is near libel. No matter—defense is going to be cut and the perception that it is going to be cut will be almost as important as from where exactly the ships and planes are withdrawn.

Enemies as Friends, Friends as Enemies

But more importantly, the Obama administration, in four or five key instances, has signaled to the world that there are no advantages to being a nonjudgmental U.S. ally, and no downside to being an outspoken American enemy. Who has been more often on the receiving end of U.S. lectures—Netanyahu or Abbas? Eastern Europeans or Russia? Who has been the recipient of U.S. outreach? Iran or Israel? Syria or Egypt? It would be far better to be a totalitarian police state that practices institutionalized murder than a pro-American kleptocratic autocracy, at least as seen in the differing attitudes accorded a Tunisia in comparison to Syria and Iran. This administration has a bad habit of calibrating a regime’s authenticity and legitimacy by the degree of its expressed anti-Americanism between 2001-8.

Internationalized America

In addition, to the extent that we use military force, it will be haphazard and questions of quitting will trump those of winning. International organizations—whether the Arab League or the United Nations—will win deference that neither the U.S. Congress nor American allies enjoy.

We see our fourth ground commander in Afghanistan, a war that was once deemed the “good” one by Obama—who ignored it for his first four months in office, then meditated for months on a surge, then escalated, and now talks of withdrawal. Obama can explain to us what victory won’t look like, but not what it might look like. In Iraq, he left the Bush-Petraeus withdrawal plan in place—ignoring his own demands as a senator that all troops should have been out by March 2008, then by the end of 2008, then by the end of 2009, and so on. But such allegiance to stabilizing Iraq is nullified by his serial denunciations that the removal of Saddam and fostering subsequent democracy—today the only real functioning Arab democracy—was a terrible mistake.

Libya is a mess—no mission, no methodology, no outcome. The rebels are who—Islamists, incompetent reformers, Westernized intellectuals, students, terrorists? Who knows? They seem only united in hating Gaddafi’s black African mercenaries and wanting to kill them all. “Leading from behind” was supposed to be a correction for admittedly costly and thankless “leading from the front” in past wars; but we can see now that when America does not lead, the Euros sputter, bicker, and now are divided and about to quit Libya.

Obama has done the almost impossible: he is losing a war to a country on the Mediterranean with less than 7 million people, and an almost perfect topography, weather, and location for NATO air operations. World War II American Liberators and B-17s on bombing runs from Sicily would have been more effective than Anglo-French jets. All that can be said for the mess is that Obama seems to have wanted to embarrass the usually parasitic, ankle-biting Europeans, and at least accomplished that—at the expense of Western military prestige. (The only thing worse than fighting a needless war against a savage weak regime is losing it to a savage weak regime.)

Is Guantanamo Open or Virtually Closed?

Obama confused the world about American anti-terrorism protocols. As a demagogic senator and candidate, he spent three years damning them as both ineffective and anti-American, and then embraced them all. But no one knows to what degree Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention, wiretaps, intercepts, and Predators are still Bush-Cheney war crimes or valuable American tools that will persist. If you engage in them, are you a patriotic overseas contingency operations fighter, or a future war criminal to be brought up later on charges by Eric Holder? Will those, who once sued on behalf of Guantanamo detainees, and now in government sue to justify Predator targeted assassinations—soon once again out of government sue on behalf of Guantanamo detainees? Was KSM virtually tried in New York in the fashion that Guantanamo was virtually closed (“virtually” defined as media agreement that Obama’s wishing to do the liberal thing is better than actually doing it).

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Borrowing Is No Longer Stimulus?

The Congressional Budget Office not long ago forecast that Barack Obama’s $1 trillion-plus annual deficits — scheduled over the next decade — would result in almost another $10 trillion in aggregate debt. Going back to the pre-Bush tax rates this time won’t balance the budget. Slashing discretionary spending will not. So large has the splurge become, and so hooked are the constituencies of federal money, that massive cuts to entitlements necessary to stave off financial implosion may well prompt Greek-like protests.

That staggering sum was apparently conventional wisdom until the November 2010 election. But now there is fear that at some point in the future, Obama will not be known as the first African-American president. Nor will he be cited even as the hope-and-change phenomenon of 2008. Instead, posterity shall know him as the single greatest borrower in American presidential history, a novice who nearly wrecked the U.S. economy by borrowing over $4 billion a day without any feasible proposal how to pay back such a vast sum — taking a post-recession recovery and turning it into a stagflationary mess. In the third year of his tenure, Obama is still left only with “Bush did it” as an explanation of what went wrong.

Obama has managed the nearly impossible: the greatest peacetime deficits in U.S. history — about $1.5 trillion per year — in his first three years achieved almost no economic expansion. Instead, unemployment is chronic and stays over 9.2%; growth is stagnant; gas is sky-high — and the president seems stunned that none of what he had promised came to pass. All his liberal nostrums have been tried and been found wanting. There is no successful EU model, no winning blue-state statist paradigm for guidance.

Remember that his key advisors — Goolsbee, Orszag, Romer, Summers — have now quit and did not last even three years, their policies orphaned by the very parents who spawned them. Even the president joked that “shovel-ready” was a joke. When he evokes “stimulus” and “investment,” in response, we do not even think “borrowing” and “taxes,” but rather “he’s clueless again.” The old argument that we simply did not borrow enough (say, $5, $6, $7 billion a day?) is laughable beyond the point of caricature, given that the administration followed the Bush record of record peacetime debt. The only mystery is whether the massive Obama borrowing was a product of incompetence, a poorly thought out gorge the beast way of increasing taxes and redistributing income, or a more cynical effort at creating a permanent constituency of millions of new food stamp recipients and federal workers. Or more than that still.

Your Debt And None Of Our Own

Obama himself recently proposed a massive deficit budget that not a single Democrat in the Senate could vote for; then suddenly he flipped, and said that red ink of the sort that he ran up was now unsustainable. When did the president of the United States metamorphosize from the greatest Keynesian in presidential history to a fiscal hawk — January? March? April 1?

As he calls for higher taxes, he still has not offered any plan whatsoever that details where the president himself would cut. Remember that he conceded in December that higher taxes were bad; but by July they were then good again. He courts Wall Street one day for campaign money, yet on another calls them “fat cat” bankers and deplores their jets. Food stamps recipients now number 50 million — and we dare not imagine that even one has taken a dime without good cause.

The would-be employer is told to hire, but on what confident supposition, what rationale? That he knows well the tax rate to come, the health care costs to come, the regulations to come, the pro-business, veteran CEO appointee to come, the next presidential slur to come? Apparently Obama believed that capitalists were so greedy, so wealthy, so money-hungry that they would not mind much the redistributive obstacles he erected.

He talks grandly of getting America back to work, as his subordinates try to close down a Boeing aircraft plant, layer more regulations and burdens on energy production, reverse the order of creditors in the Chrysler mess, and take over GM — even as he continues the old “spread the wealth” and “redistributive change” adolescent rants with newer, sillier faculty lounge concoctions, claiming that at some point we have made enough money and that he himself has hundreds of thousands of dollars in income that he does not need and thus should have higher taxes on. (If so, please, help the Treasury out by offering to pay the gas for the Costa del Sol, Vail, and Martha’s Vineyard first-family freebies). One expects such banalities from the college dorm lounge, but not the middle-aged president of the United States.

Carter 2.0

Abroad the misdirection, confusion, and petulance mirror-image the debt mess. In Libya we have no mission aim, no methodology, and no desired outcome — our consolation only that Libya is a tiny country compared to a nearly 30-million person Afghanistan or Iraq. Obama went to the Arab League and the UN, but not the U.S. Congress for authorization — but to do what? Help the rebels? Enforce a no-fly-zone? Kill Gaddafi? Overthrow the government? All, some, or none?

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“Reckless Fiscal Policies”

Why did Obama only enumerate George W. Bush’s big spending as responsible for the out-of-control $14 trillion-plus debt, while not mentioning his own contribution of $5 trillion? Why is there a debt limit standoff now, rather than, say, in 2009 or 2010? Why did this latest $1.6 trillion Obama budget prompt the current crisis? Why did not Obama earlier start debt limit talks the moment that his own hand-picked Simpson-Bowles commission presented their findings? Why did Obama just recently submit, and have rejected, a budget that would have scheduled even larger deficits of the sort he is now warning against (“Armageddon”)?

Why is voting against the debt limit reckless now, but in 2006 Obama lectured us thusly:

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”

(He then failed even to vote on the issue in 2007 and 2008 when the limit was raised again. So Obama has an even weaker case than the weak case of the congressional Republicans who approved the Bush deficits, given that if Obama was right at the time to vote “no,” then $6 trillion later, with a ruined, rather than robust, economy, he could now be really right to vote again “no,” when he has the political power not to raise the debt ceiling.)

Why is Obama talking of new tax increases when he ruled that out in December 2010: taxes then bad, now seven months later good? Why does the president claim 80% of the people want taxes when polls prove no such thing?

Failure, Failure Everywhere

In 2009, newly arrived Obama was convinced of redistributive Keynesian postmodern economics, a sort of updated fable that borrowed money would spawn more money, or at least would not have to be paid back, or could be excused along the lines: “If a Republican Bush borrowed nearly $5 trillion in eight years, then, dammit, why cannot a liberal Democrat be allowed to borrow more than $5 trillion in three?” And if Reagan gave us “starve the beast” (cutting taxes would cut revenue that would force smaller government), Obama could console himself with “gorge the beast” (growing government in extraordinary fashion would force higher taxes that in turn would redistribute income from those who “didn’t need it” to those who work for or receive from the government and who most certainly did need it).

The architects of his economic policies — Austan Goolsbee, Peter Orszag, Christina Romer, Larry Summers — did not even last three years. All now are either back in tenured academia, making millions in the revolving door that Obama once blasted, or writing op-eds why following their former advice is leading to insolvency, or all three combined. None are making the argument any more that we need more of their stimuli or ObamaCare will save us billions and create “400,000 new jobs.”

Their borrowing did not stop unemployment from plateauing at 9.1% or prevent the housing market from getting worse, or growth from stalling, or gas from soaring, or the beginnings of a new inflation. In the meantime, the model of Obamism (e.g., Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland) in Europe of high taxes, redistributive government, astronomical debt, and unsustainable pensions has crashed. So Obamism did not work, and now is the politically opportune time, before the 2012 election, to follow the famed Obama reinvention stratagem: Cite straw men and extremists on both sides, and put St. Obama plop in the middle as the sober, great dragon slayer, who blames both his contemporaries and his predecessor. Hard to do, I know, when you wasted $5 trillion, but do it nonetheless he has. In the word of Obama, wasted borrowed money is “stimulus,” not so shovel ready jobs are “investments,” and hiking taxes on someone else is “revenue enhancement.”

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The First Symptoms of Hatred—2004 to 2008

For about seven years the nation lost its collective mind — and was only partially coming-to in November 2010.

During the years of insanity, Al Gore won both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award for his propaganda film An Inconvenient Truth — before the disclosures of ClimateGate, new data on everything from the Himalayan glaciers to polar bear populations, realization that temperatures had not risen in the last 12 years, and the rather blatant and various money-making schemes of Gore, Inc. (that parlayed green advocacy into a billion-dollar, medieval exemption/carbon offset empire, several homes, and a propensity for carbon spewing private jet travel). Give Gore credit: he understood brilliantly that anger over Iraq and Katrina, his own popular vote victory in 2000 but subsequent lost presidency, his vein-bulging “he lied” screeds, and puppy dog pouts had combined, in perfect storm fashion, to locate Gorism at the nexus of anti-war, anti-Bush madness.

In these years of insanity, I used to be asked on-campus questions, but delivered as lectures, along the lines of “Bush’s polluting pals are ruining the planet when we know Al Gore’s cap and trade would save us. Now it’s too late!” Of course, in 2006 gasoline was relatively cheap, unemployment low, and there was growth in the economy. College students had the luxury of declaiming how George Bush had wiped out the polar bears as they waited for several good job offers.

Do you remember the hysteria over the supposed trampling of the Constitution? Those were the days of anger when Harold Koh, instead of writing briefs defending the Obama’s administration’s targeted killing by Predators and bypassing the War Powers Act in Libya, had been suing various Bush-Clinton-Bush administrations over the unfortunate at Guantanamo. At one time or another, a Sean Penn, a Hollywood producer (Rendition, Redacted, In the Valley of Elah, Lions for Lambs, etc.), a Whoopi Goldberg, a David Letterman, and legions more were all claiming that we had lost our freedoms to the satanic George Bush. These were the glory days of Dick Durbin comparing U.S. servicemen to mass killers, as John Kerry claimed they were quasi terrorists, in Harry Reid’s “lost” war, committing John Murtha’s war crimes — to the chorus of Michael Moore (guest of honor at the 2004 Democratic Convention) cheering on their killers as “minutemen.”

Until January 2009, almost nightly on the news, a liberal grandee would swear that Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention, Predators, wiretaps, intercepts, Iraq, etc. had ruined America in these days of “General Betray Us” ads and “suspension of disbelief” putdowns. Then in a matter of hours the verbiage suddenly stopped, abruptly so in January, 2009 — and has never returned to this day.

(I remember remarking to a former CSU colleague in those dark hours that the Congress had approved Iraq, with stirring speeches in support by Kerry, Reid, Clinton, and other liberal giants, that the public voiced a 75% approval when the 3-week war ended, and that Andrew Sullivan, as a tiny example, had mentioned Bush as Nobel laureate material and the need to use nukes against Saddam if he were behind the anthrax scare. Funny days, those, when Fareed Zakaria and Francis Fukuyama were writing serious, sober, and judicious briefs for preventative regime change in Iraq. The professor said to me, “That’s a lie. They all always opposed his amoral war and the Bush criminality.”)

In those days of “civility,” Bush hatred soon became a liberal creed. “Nuclar” (I don’t find such a tongue-twisted pronunciation as grievous as “corpse-man,” which reflects phonetic ignorance rather than clumsiness) was the stuff of NPR vignettes. Books came out about killing Bush; comics joked about his death. The Guardian ran an op-ed in which the writer longed for the return of John Wilkes Booth. Bush and Cheney as the Nazis or brownshirts or fascists was evoked by everyone from Al Gore and John Glenn to Garrison Keillor and George Soros.

The British were told to write Ohioans to stop the Bush coup in the 2004 election. Moving to Canada should Kerry lose (promises, promises) was a Hollywood boast. In these days before the BP spill, and assorted later disasters, Katrina was a mad Bush plot to disenfranchise people of color. Barney Frank was pontificating about the vendetta against Fannie and Freddie, as Maxine Waters et al. blasted scrutiny of the brilliant Franklin Raines, even as he prepared to walk away with tens of millions in “bonuses” after helping to wreck the American mortgage industry.

We forget now that the Bush administration (under which nearly 50% of the population was exempted from income tax and under which home ownership reached new highs) was pegged as some right-wing monstrosity that nonetheless caved and gave us No Child Left Behind, a prescription drug plan, and had allowed the liberal congressional cadre to turn mortgages into entitlements. Finally Bush was reduced to enlisting Bono to prove that he really did give billions in relief to Africa — even as the latter trashed him to the Left as the philanthropist schemed to avoid paying taxes to his soon-to-be-broke Irish homeland.

Quite mysteriously, radical Islamists trying to kill us became victims of Bush’s police state, and poor dying Oriana Fallaci was a lone voice in the desert warning us of our madness.

I’ll stop here and turn to the second phase that begin in 2008 after the page jump.

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Dinosaur Thinking

Even to talk of illegal immigration earns slurs. I can attest to that. It is the most self-censored topic in America today, where we construct artificial worlds of rhetoric that in no way resemble reality (e.g., try to suggest that California’s current problems with 30,000 to 40,000 too many prison inmates, or spiraling entitlement costs, or test scores right below Mississippi’s, or gang-related crime have something to do with the entry over two decades of millions of illegal aliens, and then see whether that proposition is discussed or slurred in ad hominem fashion). The most ardent critic of open discussion is often the most likely to self-select and remove himself from any concrete exposure with the issues he champions at a distance. No one is a better exemplar of the dishonesty than the president who, with large majorities of liberal Democrats in both houses of Congress for two years, deliberately ignored his own “comprehensive immigration reform” agenda — only to demagogue his opponents for now opposing what he would really, after all, at last, but of course, like to do — but only after it is, conveniently, legislatively impossible. So we get “moats and alligators,” a perfect summation of the bankrupt status of the entire hushed debate.

So here it goes: the old matrix of how we were to understand illegal immigration is extinct. The concept of a largely white privileged class exploiting poor immigrants who simply wished to be a part of the American dream is now fossilized — dead and buried by new realities: the sheer millions of those entering the U.S. illegally, the cynicism and connivance of the Mexican government, the outflow of nearly $30-40 billion in remittances to Latin America, the rise of the multicultural salad bowl in lieu of the multiracial melting pot, the illiberal nature of the advocacy for open borders, and the rise of a new tribalism and ethnic solidarity on the part of the immigrant community.

For the last half-century, the subtext of illegal immigration was racial prejudice — how a hard-working minority struggled against a largely white overlord class for social justice, best emblemized by Caesar Chavez and the farmer worker rights movement. Those divides are now largely gone — or at least have become so problematic and complex to have been rendered irrelevant.

Racial Reactionaries

So-called whites are now a minority in the state. Integration and intermarriage are commonplace. Racial heritage sometimes evokes the one-drop rule of the old Confederacy. A thriving middle-class third- and fourth-generation Mexican-American community speaks little or no Spanish and has no direct memory or firsthand knowledge of Mexico. If there is Latino “under-representaton” at a UC Berkeley, it is not a “result” of white “over-representation” (whites are proportionally “under-represented” at UCB), but of the superiority in test scores and grades of the Asian community, which enrolls at four times its numbers in the general population.

Blacks and Asians are as opposed to illegal immigration as is the majority of the population, including millions of Mexican-Americans. And more importantly, the entire argument for open borders, both here in the United States and in Mexico, disturbingly, is taking on racial and ethnic overtones —as a recent spectacle attests of thousands of Hispanic residents booing mention of the United States while cheering the Mexican national soccer team at the Rose Bowl.

(These trivial incidents [cf. the recent Morgan Hill, California high school 2010 walkout on Cinco de Mayo] are insignificant in isolation, but in aggregate offer disturbing symbolic evidence of an increasingly Balkanized tension that is the logical wage of multicultural separatism, and furor at the absence of almost instantaneous parity with the host. I note here in passing that in my years of residence in Greece, had I, as an American apartment-dweller in Athens, joined a majority of expatriate Americans in booing the Greek national team and cheering a visiting American team at a match in the national stadium [demanding that the victory ceremony be held in English], I would have had to sprint out the exit for my proverbially dear life.)

The new, vastly changed racial realities thus raise a fundamental question that the proponents of either amnesty or open borders cannot or will not address. What, I wonder, exactly privileges illegal immigration from Mexico — in a way that might not be true, say, of allowing half-a-million aliens to enter the country illegally from China or Africa? Proximity? Race? History? Money? Politics? Power?

Surely what drives Mexican consular officials to demand certain rights for Mexican national expatriates in a way that they would not for other nationals is not the abstract concept of illegal immigration, but only concern that illegal immigration remain mostly a phenomenon from Mexico — or at least by extension Latin America.

The same is true of the La Raza lobbyists — that they have no interest in the notion of illegal immigration as an issue per se, since there are no doubt a few thousand here illegally from Poland, Uganda, and South Korea. Their concern is largely confined only to Mexico and Latin America, and thus is entirely predicated on one or two (or both) notions: first, racial affinity should adjudicate who and who does not need to follow U.S. immigration law, and, second, Mexico has some sort of historical claims on the American Southwest. Is that a logical deduction?

If so, illegal immigration has transmogrified into one of the most illiberal, reactionary phenomena on the current American scene, an ossified concept of racial solidarity and tribalism that attempts to privilege one group, solely on the basis of race or ethnic fides, in its exemption from federal law, and in a manner that would never be extended to other immigrant lobbies, with less numbers, influence, and potential electoral power. We have come full circle back to the 1920s when immigration was likewise largely seen through racial lenses — when one’s race determined how one navigated immigration law.

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