Jay Reding.com

As a follow-up to the previous article on the subject one of the commentators at Asymmetrical Information gives a very interesting defense of modern liberalism. His comments are interesting enough to warrant further analysis:

As a Democrat I completely disagree. The big idea for the Democrats is that the government should be the arbitor to level the playing field between those who have power due to market forces and those who don’t. Simply, the government should be there to help people and businesses accomplish things that are beneficial to all, when those individuals or businesses are unable to do so themselves. The government is there, because capitalism unchecked doesn’t bring the greatest good to the greatest number of people but it needs to be (dare I say the r word) regulated.

All of the various factions of the Democratic party (and I agree that there are deep divides between them) agree on that point. Labor generally wants laws to support workers’ being able to have power to bargain for a fair wage. The environmentalists want the government to counter standard market forces to include the cost we are incurring by destroying the environment. Inner city communities want the government to empower them to be able to do what they with their own monetary and family backgrounds make difficult to achieve.

Now, I’d imagine many Democrats are nodding their heads to that one. As a political philosophy, it’s rather concise. It sounds perfectly agreeable. Capitalism can be nasty, dirty, and impersonal.

The problem with that ideology is that government is nastier, dirtier, and even more impersonal. Trusting the state to “fix” the problems of capitalism is like hiring a Tyrannosaurus Rex to guard your sheep. Yes, it will probably eat some of the wolves, but also most of the sheep – and if you look at wrong, it would be perfectly content to gobble you up as well.

America was a country that was founded upon a fundamental and abiding cynicism towards governent. Our country exists because we felt we were getting taxed too much. One of the most singularly distressing things about the state of American society today is the way in which government has become excessively bloated and extremely rapacious. As Joel Miller explains in his brilliant little book Size Matters: How Big Government Puts the Squeeze on America’s Families, Finances, and Freedom (a book I can’t recommend highly enough), the Kudzu-like growth of government is one of the single biggest drags on individual freedom we have.

Liberalism takes a look at the state of government and says, “things are broken, so let’s do more.” Lyndon Johnson declared a governmental “war on poverty”. Poverty won. Bill Clinton finally bowed to the fact that welfare reform had a filibuster-proof majority and signed it into law - poverty decreased and has stayed down ever since. That isn’t to say that government is incapable of doing good - it’s just that it eats a lot of money to do a small amount of good. Furthermore, the state is in direct tension with the freedom of the individual - the more power the state has, by nature the less we have. We’ve already gone too far down the path of disempowering individuals, and as Miller documents in lurid detail, we all suffer for it.

If further pushing that balance towards the state and away from the individual is liberalism’s big idea, it’s no wonder that so many Americans view the term “liberal” as a pejorative and only a small minority of Americans self-identify themselves as liberals.

Over at Asymmetrical Information there’s an interesting piece on the paucity of Big Ideas coming from the left these days:

Conservatives have a few things that pretty much all of them can agree on: the lower taxes are, the better; government programmes and regulations often create more problems than they solve; keep your damn hands off our guns. Pretty much everyone from the Libertarians to James Dobson and Co. can get behind this platform, and sell it to the American public. You can even add “The US military should be able to kick the [expletive deleted] of anyone who threatens us in any way” and keep all but the most hard-core Libertarians. I’m sure there are a couple of other things you could throw in, and still get a platform that is reasonably large, coherent, and agreeable to not only pretty much the entire conservative movement, but a fair number of moderates besides. There are lots–LOTS–of things that the conservatives disagree on, from gay marriage to flag burning. But there are enough that the conservative movement can craft a mission statement and sell it to America.

What’s the liberal Big Idea? Raise taxes? I’d say pretty much all the liberals I know are for that . . . but raising taxes, even “raising taxes on the rich”, is not an ends, but a means, unless you’re the kind of emotional toddler who wants to take other people’s things away just because you can’t have them. And the left (into which I throw moderate Democrats, just as I’ll throw moderate Republicans on the right) does not agree what it wants to do with the taxes it raises. The DLC types (and swing voters) want to close the budget deficit in a (IMHO futile) attempt to build the Clinton legacy. The left-liberals want a big government health care programme, and other sorts of Great Society style social programmes. The far left wants . . . ohhh, a lot of things, but they’re not going to get any of them, so that hardly seems relevant.

She hits on a very important point here. Conservatives disagree on a whole host of issues, but agree on general principles: government should be small, national defense is important, and taxes should be low. You can write it on a notecard. Granted, that is a dramatic oversimplification, and conservatives don’t travel in ideological lockstep like some would claim, but there’s ane element of truth here.

The left doesn’t have big ideas because they’ve become Balkanized by their own form of identity politics. Gays and auto workers have very little in common. African-Americans and Hispanics are as socially conservative as the “theocratic” right. All these groups are united by the thin promise of some government largesse down the road, which is why the closest thing that the Democrats have to a coherent ideology is the belief in bigger and more expansive government.

The problem with that ideology is that the Democrats are dramatically out of step with the movement of society. Look at the changes in society over the past few decades. It used to be that you went to a travel agency to plan a vacation - it was annoying and costly to do it yourself. Now, everyone from Expedia to Travelocity makes it easy for individuals to book flights, hotels, and cars in a few minutes and right from their houses. It used to be that people had to either struggle through complicated tax forms or pay an accountant to do their taxes for them. Now, you can buy a piece of software that can guide you through your taxes in an evening and have your return automatically credited to your bank account. In every aspect of society, things are moving towards the empowerment of the individual over the power of groups.

For all the talk of a “progressive” movement, the “progressives” seem to be a throwback to an older era. As society moves towards further rights for individuals, identity politics are based on group identity over individualism. “Progressive” economics are based on shifting the balance of economic power towards the states - the argument they make is that we should raise taxes to pay for social programs. Fair enough, except that social programs tend not to work, and the left is also trying to wear the mantle of the deficit hawk - those aren’t compatible positions.

One of the reasons for the current political realignment in America is that the policies of the left are contrary to the direction of society. Because of that shift, the left has become increasingly shrill. For all the talk about how Bush is ratcheting up fear, every election cycle we get the same message that Republicans will put Grandma on the street and make Little Timmy eat expired cat food for school lunch. The way in which both John Roberts and Sam Alito were demonized is part and parcel of the left’s M.O. these days - and the way in which no one outside donors to groups like People for the American Way cared is also part and parcel of how effective those attacks have become. The problem with those scare tactics is that they don’t do anything to appeal to an audience who don’t already think that Dick Cheney enjoys a tall glass of puréed puppy in the morning.

Ironically enough, it’s Bush that appears to be illustrating the most why Big Government doesn’t work. If I were a believer in some kind of political “rope-a-dope” in the White House to make the Democrats embrace smaller government I’d say that the plan is working brilliantly. However, I don’t believe that and think that Bush’s “compassionate conservativism” is really just another term for “being a budgetary squish” and that it’s an experiment doomed to failure. It has forced the issue of fiscal sanity towards the forefront of our political culture, but the fact is that as long as the government can run up masses of debt the idea that we can spend our way into smaller government just doesn’t work.

The Bush Administration may be doing a wonderful job of pissing away the GOP’s narrow electoral advantages in advance of the midterms, but in the long run it’s the left that has the most to worry. Elections aren’t won by wonkish policy proposals (Kerry, Gore in 2000) or hatred of the Other Guy (Dean, Gore today). They’re won be an ideology that can reach across party lines and capture the vital center. The left doesn’t have one, and their ideological instincts cut against the grain of American society today. As one commenter wryly notes: “A number of people look at the government and don’t see FDR trying to pull the U.S. out of Depression, they see Patty and Selma at the DMV.” Empowering the state over the individual just doesn’t work in an age when individuals are more empowered than ever before. So long as “progressivism” stands in opposition to individual liberty, it will never be a dominant force in American politics.

Hillary Clinton, whose hubris knows no bounds, is now complaining that Karl Rove “obsesses” about her.

Let’s see, she’s a sitting US Senator, the front-runner for the 2008 Democratic nomination, and shares the last name of the only nationally-successful Democratic politician in the last 14 years. You’re damn right that a political strategist is going to be watching her career closely.

Then again, given that it’s over two years before the election and Hillary fatigue has already set in, perhaps the junior Senator from New York’s political future isn’t quite that bright. Bill Clinton may have had the morals of an alleycat, but he was one of America’s best politicians. He was able to reach out to the American people in a way that only the most gifted masters of political rhetoric can. In contrast, Hillary tends to come off as shrill and preachy. The fact that she shares her husband’s sense of self-importance without the benefit of his charm means that while Hillary may be the front-runner now, that may not be guaranteed in the future.

This video illustrates (with hilarity) why simple is better when it comes to product branding.

After the last few days of violence it appears that the situation in Iraq is calming down as both Moqtada al-Sadr and the Sunni Muslim Scholars Association are calling for an end to violence in the country. At the same time, the negotiations to form a new government are about to reconvene.

Al-Zarqawi was trying to provoke the Shi’ites into lashing out and ripping Iraq apart. Instead he’s further cemented opinions against him - this act has angered by Sunnis and Shi’ites and further alienated al-Qaeda from the Iraqi people. This act of premeditated violence has not achieved its goals, and the Iraqi people are beginning to recover.

This incident highlights how fragile the situation in Iraq is, but it also shows that progress is being made. Sadr’s thugs can still cause trouble, but even the firebrand cleric realizes that armed rebellion isn’t the way to achieve his end. The legitimatization of the political system is one of the most important steps towards developing an Iraqi civil society.

What is crucial to understand is that civil society is a long-term development. Iraq is in the first stage of democratization in which the basic institutions of democratic society are formed. Those first steps are crucial, but they also don’t guarantee democracy. It takes both functioning institutions and civil society at the individual level for democracy to flourish. Iraq is developing those things, but slowly.

At the same time, it’s unreasonable to believe that progress will be anything but slow. The level of progress already achieved is considerable for the short time span since the fall of the Hussein regime. However, expecting Iraq to turn into Switzerland - or even Turkey - overnight isn’t a realistic expectation. Turkey didn’t become fully democratic until the first peaceful transfer of power in 1950 - and their democracy has been turbulent at best. Iraq has a very long way to go before it can be a truly functioning democracy, and we should expect more reversals like the one that occurred last week.

That doesn’t mean that the forces of defeatism are correct or that Iraq is incapable of supporting democracy. However, our job is merely to kick off the process. We can help rebuild the infrastructure and help train security forces, but we can’t make Iraq into a democracy. That is ultimately up to the Iraqi people. It isn’t up to the US, and it certainly isn’t up to two-bit thugs like Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi.