Canadian Cincinnatus

The demise of political correctness in pop culture

When I was a kid, I was a trekkie and couldn’t get enough of Star Trek. So when, Star Trek: the Next Generation came along, I thought I would be in for more of the same. Unfortunately, it ended up that I couldn’t watch more than a couple of minutes of that show before I became utterly repelled by its rampant, aggressive political correctness. I think the total time I spent watching the whole show was less than an hour. Recently I started viewing the new Battlestar Galactica series on DVD. Excellent show, but the one thing that struck me while watching it was how much the political correctness of the 80’s has receded.

For instance, smoking is popular on the battlestar. The ship’s doctor - a sympathetic character - smokes, even while examining his patients! When the ship’s captain (the show’s hero) is given an order by the new President of the 12 Colonies that he doesn’t agree with, he says, “I don’t take orders from a schoolteacher!” referencing the fact that she had been the Minister of Education before the cylon attack and only became President because everybody in cabinet of higher rank (23 people) had been killed. In another incident, when a captured cylon saboteur says he planted a nuclear device somewhere in the fleet, he is ‘aggressively’ interrogated by having his head repeatedly stuck into a bucket of water. After the President (the same female former schoolteacher) intervenes to stops the waterboarding and the prisoner starts spouting a lot of peaceniky, touchy-feely universalism stuff about why-can’t-we-all-live-in-piece, my cringe meter went off. I thought, here we go, now the political correctness begins, especially when Starbuck, one of the interrogators, starts to buy into it. At that point, the former-kindergarten teacher, now President, has the cylon flushed out the airlock. She then proceeds to tell Starbuck that she has lost her perspective, that the cylon was propagating poisonous ideas that can be more destructive than a warhead because they are designed to cloud human judgement and weaken humanity by creating rifts among people. Whoah! This is different. No United Federation of Planets kumbaya stuff here. 

This TV moment captures a phenomenon I have been quietly noticing for some time, namely, that in pop culture, it has now become ‘edgy’ and ‘cool’ to break PC taboos. Take the HBO series Mad Men about advertising executives in the early 1960’s. While I have no doubt that the show’s creators are doctrinaire liberals, mostly because Mad Men portrays the ‘dark side’ of early 60’s suburbia (a tired liberal trope, if there ever was one), if that’s all the show had going for it, it would be DOA. What brings it to life is the way it portrays how different life was in pre-PC days. Everybody smoked; children played around in their parents cars rather than sit passively in a protective cocoon of child restraints; at work, sexual harassment was something you did rather than something you were charged with; racist and sexist jokes were commonplace; adults were confident enough to discipline other people’s children if required; children were allowed a latitude in play that is unthinkable for today’s helicopter parents; and drinking and driving was what you did when you left the party. I am not sure what the producer’s intentions are, but it is a fact that Mad Men’s principal charm comes from showing the viewer how much more fun life was when political correctness hadn’t gotten us by the throat yet.

In the 60’s it was edgy to push kumbaya universalism, a’la the civil rights movement and the UN (which was still sufficiently unsullied that it could be taken seriously in some quarters as the world’s de-facto government). Hence Star Trek, with the Enterprise’s mixed race crew, the United Federation of Planets and the prime directive (that Captain Kirk never followed). In the 60’s that was edgy. That was the stuff that scared the suits at NBC. In the 80’s it was edgy to push PC doctrine and directly attack traditional values. Same ideology, 20 years advanced.

But today, the pendulum has quietly reversed. In 1979, the blasphemy of Monty Python’s Life of Brian was controversial. Today, it is the piety of Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ, that earned the animosity of Hollywood’s gatekeepers while at the same time making it a runaway success with ordinary people. When Madonna was ‘crucified’ on her Confessions tour in 2006, her blasphemy was largely unremarked. The ‘high art’ world is in crisis because it has run out of acceptable targets to shock. A crucifix in a jar of urine - been there, done that. Need something new. ‘Street artist’ Shepard Fairey  lives with his wife and two daughters in LA and makes enough money to donate $100,000 to his favourite charity. His ‘street art’ poster was used by a successful mainstream Presidential candidate. In spite of all his street-wise affectations, he is as mainstream as Norman Rockwell’ Saturday Evening Post covers were 70 years ago (though he lacks Rockwell’s talent). In the early 21^st century, pious white squares like Stephen and Alex Kendrick and their Baptist church in Georgia are the real rebels, routinely making films like Fireproof that are able to gross 60 times their production cost in theatres. Unlike Fairey, upon whom the establishment elite can’t shower enough favours onto, establishment Hollywood assiduously ignores the Kendrick brothers in spite of their continued box office success, most likely because they are repelled by their pro-family message and their evangelism - in other words, by their subversive, anti-establishment values.

Today, the rebels have become the establishment and the establishment the rebels. Unfortunately this state of affairs has created internal conflict in today’s baby boomer elite. Their values (they judge people by how ‘edgy’ and rebellious they are) clash with their worldly success. People like Toronto’s mayor David Miller still want to believe they are still taking it the ‘man’ (a cool term from the 60’s now made fun of in commercials), when they in fact are the ‘man’. They want to be rebels but can’t admit to themselves that today, it is the conservatives and the Christians who play that cultural role, and as a consequence, suffer the deprivations and collect the rewards that that lifestyle offers.

A picture is worth a thousand words

The following graph of the US Federal deficit as a percentage of the US GDP really says it all:

 

Can anybody say, “debt crisis?”

Barack Obama: deficit hawk

On Monday, President Obama convened the Fiscal Responsibility Summit, a 3 hour ‘brainstorming session’ with 130 members of Congress, administration officials ‘community leaders.’ At the end of it, Obama made a statement to the press, declaring the federal deficit to be a serious problem that must be tackled head on because America cannot afford trillion dollar deficits going on indefinitely. He then stated his goal of cutting the federal deficit in half by 2011 (or was it 2013?).

While on the face of it this is an encouraging development, in reality, it was nonsense. For right now the biggest single cause of rampant federal spending is Barack Obama himself. Though Obama inherited a big deficit from George Bush thanks in large part to his $700 billion TARP bailout bill, at this point in time George Bush is history and President Obama is making the decisions. Between an $800 billion pork barrel spending bill of dubious economic value, another $2 trillion TARP II bank bailout bill and a further ‘stimulus’ package hinted at for the summer, Obama is doing everything in his power to ratchet up government spending.

What he was doing on Monday was creating political cover. It was a choreographed stage show aimed at that portion of the American electorate whose political attention span is short. This significant group of people will have vaguely heard that he is ‘stimulating’ the economy, which CNN tells them is a good thing; they have now heard that he is fighting the deficit, which his political opponents say is a good thing; and so they will conclude that Obama has got all the bases covered, not stopping to ponder the fact that one action is a contradiction of the other. This is Obama’s political calculus.

And we have to give credit where credit is due. It is good politics (though bad policy), and will have a good political effect - at least in the short term.

In the campaign, candidate Obama made a practice of telling every group of people what they wanted to hear, reassuring them, but only in vague terms that didn’t pin him down to anything concrete. Because he was such a blank slate, it worked. Everybody read into Obama what he or she wanted him to say. Hope and change was whatever you wanted it to mean.

Unfortunately for him, this strategy will cease to be effective soon because his slate is being filled up by an ever-increasing track record of concrete policy decisions that he must now justify and defend.

With regard to one of his policies, the federal debt: it is increasing exponentially, and if today’s low interest rates and stimulus spending ever succeed in generating whip-back inflation, it will be increasing even faster than that. When the federal debt inevitably hits the wall, a very large number of painful spending cuts will have to be implemented quickly. At that point, he won’t be able to have it both ways any more. He must choose, and then explain his choice to the voters.

UK libertarian’s speech sends David Cameron Conservatives to the fainting couch

The following speech has been making the rounds on the blogosphere. Normally when I encounter a good passage, I will link to it and only post some of the choice cuts. However in this case, if I did that I would end up quoting almost all of it anyway because there is so much good stuff in it, and because most of the advice he offers the British Conservatives is germane to the John Tory and Stephen Harper Conservatives as well.

So without further ado, here it is:

Text of a Speech to Conservative Future,
Given in The Old Star Public House, Westminster,
Monday the 16th February 2009
by Sean Gabb

I’d like to begin by praising your courage in having me here tonight to speak to you. I am the Director of an organisation that tried hard during the 1980s to take over the youth movement of the Conservative Party. The Libertarian Alliance provided a home and other support for Marc-Henri Glendenning, David Hoile and Douglas Smith, among others, when it looked as if libertarians might do the same to the Conservative Party as the Trotskyites nearly did to the Labour Party. Sadly, our efforts failed. Since then, the Conservative Party has become more watchful of people like us. It has also, I must say, made itself progressively less worth trying to take over.

I did say that I would come here and be rude to you. But that would be a poor thanks for your hospitality. Besides, while your party leadership has consistently ignored my advice during the past twelve years - and has, in consequence, been out of office during this time - there is no point in dwelling on what might have been. We are where we are, and I think it would be useful for me very briefly to outline my advice to a future Conservative Government.

Now, this is not advice to the Government that looks set to be formed within the next year or so my David Cameron. I may be wrong. It is possible that Mr Cameron is a much cleverer and more Machiavellian man that I have ever thought him, and that he plans to make radical changes once in office. But I do not think he is. I think what little he is promising to do is the very most that he will do. In any event, he is doing nothing to acquire the mandate without which radical change would lack legitimacy. And so this is advice that I offer to some future government of conservatives, rather than to any prospective Conservative Government. It may even be a government formed by the people in this room.

My first piece of advice is to understand the nature of your enemy. If you come into government, you will be in at least the same position as Ramsay MacDonald, when he formed the first Labour Government in the 1920s. He faced an Establishment that was broadly conservative. The administration, the media, the universities, big business - all were hostile to what it was believed he wanted to do. The first Labour Governments were in office, but not fully in power, as they were not accepted by the people with whom and through whom they had to rule the country. To a lesser degree, Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson faced the same constraints. A future Conservative Government will find much the same.

Over the past few generations, a new Establishment or ruling class has emerged in this country. It is a loose coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, educators, media people and associated business interests. These are people who derive income and status from an enlarged and activist state. They have been turning this country into a soft-totalitarian police state. They are not always friendly to a Labour Government. But their natural political home is the Labour Party. They will accept a Conservative Government on sufferance - but only so long as it works within a system that robs ordinary people of their wealth and their freedom. They will never consent to what should be the Conservative strategy of bringing about an irreversible transfer of power from the State back into the hands or ordinary people.

A Cameron Government, as I have said, seems willing to try coexistence with the Establishment. The Thatcher Government set out to fight and defeat an earlier and less confident version of the Establishment - but only on those fronts where its policies were most resisted. It won numerous battles, but, we can now see, it lost the war. For example, I well remember the battle over abolition of the Greater London Council. This appeared at the time a success. But I am not aware of one bureaucrat who lost his job at the GLC who was not at once re-employed by one of the London Boroughs or by some other agency of the State. And we know that Ken Livingstone was eventually restored to power in London.

If you want to win the battle for this country, you need to take advice from the Marxists. These are people whose ends were evil where not impossible. But they were experts in the means to their ends. They knew more than we have ever thought about the seizure and retention of power. I therefore say this to you. If you ever do come to power, and if you want to bring about the irreversible transfer of power to ordinary people, you should take to heart what Marx said in 1871, after the failure of the Paris Commune: “the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is the precondition for every real people’s revolution.”

The meaning of this is that you should not try to work with the Establishment. You should not try to jolly it along. You should not try fighting it on narrow fronts. You must regard it as the enemy, and you must smash it.

On the first day of your government, you should close down the BBC. You should take it off air. You should disclaim its copyrights. You should throw all its staff into the street. You should not try to privatise the BBC. This would simply be to transfer the voice of your enemy from the public to the private sector, where it might be more effective in its opposition. You must shut it down - and shut it down at once. You should do the same with much of the administration. The Foreign Office, much of the Home Office, the Commission for Racial Equality, anything to do with health and safety and planning and child protection - I mean much of the public sector - these should be shut down. If at the end of your first month in power, you have not shut down half of the State, you are failing. If you have shut down half the State, you have made a step in the right direction, and are ready for still further cuts.

Let me emphasise that the purpose of these cuts would not be to save money for the taxpayers or lift an immense weight of bureaucracy from their backs - though they would do this. The purpose is to destroy the Establishment before it can destroy you. You must tear up the web of power and personal connections that make these people effective as an opposition to radical change. If you do this, you will face no more clamour than if you moved slowly and half-heartedly. Again, I remember to campaign against the Thatcher “cuts”. There were no cuts, except in the rate of growth of state spending. You would never have thought this from the torrent of protests that rolled in from the Establishment and its clients. And so my advice is to go ahead and make real cuts - and be prepared to set the police on anyone who dares riot against you.

I fail to see how you would face any electoral problems with this approach. Most Conservative voters would welcome tax cuts and a return to freedom. As for those who lost their jobs, they do not, nor ever will, vote Conservative.

Following from this, however, I advise you to leave large areas of the welfare state alone. It is regrettable, but most people in this country do like the idea of healthcare free at the point of use, and of free education, and of pensions and unemployment benefit. These must go in the long term. But they must be retained in the short term to maintain electoral support. Their cost and methods of provision should be examined. But cutting welfare provision would be politically unwise in the early days of our revolution.

I have already spoken longer than I intended. But one more point is worth making. This is that we need to look again at our constitutional arrangements. The British Constitution has always been a fancy dress ball at which ordinary people were not really welcome, but which served to protect the life, liberty and property of ordinary people. Some parts of this fancy dress ball continue, but they no longer serve their old purpose. They are a fig leaf for an increasingly grim administrative despotism. I was, until recently, a committed monarchist. I now have to admit that the Queen has spent the past half century breaking her Coronation Oath at every opportunity. The only documents she has ever seemed reluctant to sign are personal cheques. Conservatives need to remember that our tradition extends not only through Edmund Burke to the Cavaliers, but also through Tom Paine to Oliver Cromwell. We live in an age where it is necessary to be radical to be conservative.

But I have now spoken quite long enough, and I am sure you have much to say in response. I therefore thank you again for your indulgence in having invited me and the politeness with which you have heard me.

[A combination of silence and faint applause]

Comment 1: You accuse the Conservatives of having ignored you for twelve years. From what you have just said, it is a good thing you were ignored. Under David Cameron’s leadership, we have a Conservative Party that is now positively desired by the people. Your advice is and would have been a recipe for permanent opposition.

Response: I disagree. There is no positive desire for a Conservative Government. If there were, the polls would be showing a consistent fifty point lead or something. What we have is a Labour Government that is so dreadful that I have trouble thinking what could be worse.

There are two ways of doing politics. One is to listen to focus groups and opinion polls, and offer the people what they claim to want. The other is to stand up and tell them what they ought to want, and to keep arguing until the people agree that they want it, or until it is shown not to be worth wanting. I think I know what sort of politicians will run the next Conservative Government. What sort of politicians do you want to be?

Comment 2 [from an Irishman]: What you are saying means that the country would be without protection against obvious evils. With no child protection services, children would be abused and murdered. Without planning controls, the countryside would soon be covered with concrete. Without planning controls, cities like Manchester would be far less attractive places.

I will also say, as an Irishman, that I am offended by your reference to Oliver Cromwell, who was a murderer and tyrant. You cannot approve of this man.

Response: You have been taken in by the Establishment’s propaganda. This is to insist that we live with vast structures of oppression, or that we must accept the evils they are alleged to curb. I say that that these structures do not curb any evils, but instead create evils of their own. We have, for example, seventy thousand social workers in this country. They appear to have done a consistently rotten job at protecting the few children who need protecting. Instead, they are taking children away from grandparents to give to strangers, and are setting the police onto dissenting ministers who allow their children to climb onto the roof. None of this should be surprising. The Children Act and other laws have created a bureaucratic sausage machine that must somehow be filled. I say let it be destroyed along with all else that is evil in our system of government.

[What I might have said, but was too polite to say: As for Oliver Cromwell, he was one of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived. It is partly thanks to him that we have just had around three centuries of freedom and political stability. When you refer to his actions in Ireland, you are repeating Fenian propaganda. What he did in Ireland has been exaggerated by the enemies of England, and in any event was in keeping with the customs of war universally admitted in his own time. If you want to throw an offended fit every time an Englishman in London praises an English hero to other Englishmen, you should consider moving to Dublin where all the letter boxes have been painted a reassuring green, and your own national sensitivities never need be offended again.]

Comment 3: All you speak about is winning and the destruction of enemies. Yet you are willing to consider keeping the welfare state. You are nothing but an unprincipled trouble maker. Thank God the Conservative Party no longer has any place for people like you.

Response: If we were facing the sort of Labour Government we had under Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson, you would be right. However, we have an Establishment that has already given us the beginnings of a totalitarian police state. Today, for example, the authorities will start collecting details of every telephone call, text and e-mail sent in this country. Children are about to have their details stuffed into a giant database that will enable them to be monitored by the authorities until they are adults - and probably through their entire lives. We live in a country were privacy is being abolished. Speech is increasingly unfree. The police are out of control. Everything is getting rapidly worse, and it is easy to see the end state that is desired, or total control.

If a government of radical conservatives ever does take power, it will have one attempt at saving this country. That means radical and focussed actions from day one. Anything less than this, and it will fail. I am suggesting a revolution - but this is really a counter-revolution against what has already been proceeding for at least one generation. If we are to beat the heirs of Marx, we must learn from Marx himself.

Comment 4: You are wasting our time with all this radical preaching. People do not want to hear about how they are oppressed by the Establishment, and how this must be destroyed. What they want to hear is that taxes are too high, that the money is being wasted, and that there are ways to protect essential public services with lower taxes. That is why the Taxpayers’ Alliance has been so much more prominent than the Libertarian Alliance. We must have nothing to do with the ranting lunatics of the Libertarian Alliance.

Response: You may have a desire for electoral success that I do not share. But I am the better politician. All debate is perceived as taking place on a spectrum that has a centre and two extremes. If the Libertarian Alliance did not exist, the relevant spectrum would simply reconfigure itself with the Taxpayers’ Alliance at one extreme, and the centre would be still less attractive than it now is. Since most people consciously take centrist positions, it is in your interest - regardless of whether I am right - to say what I do. It makes you and your friend’s moderate in relation to me.

[At this point, some unfortunate woman began screeching that I was a fascist, and the debate came to an end.]

NB—Sean Gabb’s book, Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back, can be downloaded for free from http://tinyurl.com/34e2o3

The Great Flaws in Toronto's Congestion Traffic Plan

The Toronto Transit Commission launched an Orwellian war in 2003 when they announced their Ridership Growth Strategy.  The stated aim is to increase ridership on the transit system to combat traffic gridlock and congestion.  The Orwellian part is that they want to become the primary cause of traffic congestion.

The plan is not about better TTC service but actually about reducing the amount of roadway available to motorists.  More than anything else, the TTC wants to convert vehicle lanes to bus lanes and right-of-ways for streetcars, especially in Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough where main streets like Lawerence Ave are currently wide.

Also part of Toronto's overall traffic plan, but not under the TTC's jurisdiction, is cutting out lanes from roads like Davenport for bike lanes, and narrowing other roads like Lansdowne Ave so that cars can't get past slow moving buses.

The idea is that motorists will get so fed up with being in stop-and-go traffic that they'll decide to take the TTC instead.

The anti-motorist crowd like David Miller and Councillor Gord Perks (former head of the Toronto Environmental Alliance) applauded the plan, repeatedly stating that it would reduce carbon emissions by cutting car use.

The first and biggest flaw is that an idling car produces four times the carbon emissions of a car cruising at 50kph.  Councillor Joe Mihevc was fond of mentioning this when he was fighting a proposed McDonalds drive-thru just behind his backyard.

Surprisingly, Mihevc went on to be an advocate of the St. Clair streetcar right-of-way, a plan to reduce St. Clair Ave from four lanes to two lanes, a plan that will result in 12 kilometers of stop-and-go traffic.

So, if St. Clair has its traffic volume cut in half, but replaced with stop-and-go cars, carbon emissions will actually double.  So much for saving the world from carbon.

The other great lie in the Ridership Growth Strategy is the suggestion that the gridlock will be relieved once motorists start taking the TTC.  Of course, if the roads empty, motorists will see that very easily from their standing room only buses and get back into their cars the next day, so the TTC's real plan is gridlock forever.

My suggestion: how about positive marketing techniques rather than negative anti-motorist techniques to get people on the TTC.

How about a special low cost metropass for a cold month like January of February?  This might lure non-TTC riders to give it a try. 

How about TVs on the subway system like they have in many other countries so that you can watch the news on the way into work rather than someone's armpit?

How about cup holders that could hold a Tim's coffee cup?

How about music in the subway stations?

How about bringing the number of street cars servicing St. Clair back up to 1977 levels so that passengers don't have to spend so much time freezing at the stops, peering hopelessly down the empty dedicated streetcar lane?

Of course, that would mean the TTC would have to focus on moving people quickly and comfortably.  That is exactly their mandate, even though it's not as exciting as trying to save the world.

Mike Downtown

“Five Truths about the Banking Crisis”

Over at Pajamas Media, Tristan Yates provides the most lucid analysis of today’s banking crisis that I have yet read. He contrasts the behaviour of the US Federal government during the S & L crisis in the late 80’s and early 90’s with today’s orgy of Keynesian pump-priming, and concludes that the US government is taking a big problem and making it worse.

About the S & L crisis, he writes:

“Truth #3: Banks can fail without endangering the economy. In fact, over 700 lending institutions failed during the Savings & Loan crisis in the early 1990s, and the damage was minimal.

            Credit the Bush administration — not W. but his father. In 1989, he signed legislation creating a framework in which S&Ls could fail quickly, be removed from the marketplace, and then be replaced with healthy institutions.”

About today’s credit crisis he writes:

“Truth #4: This current crisis almost certainly isn’t a trillion dollar problem, but we can certainly make it into one.”

“Truth #5: Not all financial crises are created equal. When borrowers can’t pay their debts, you get a banking crisis, and as we’ve seen those are painful. But when governments can’t pay their debts you get a currency crisis, which is far worse. During Argentina’s recent currency crisis, the GDP fell by 10% in a single year, the unemployment rate jumped to 25%, and inflation hit 10% a month at one point.

            We are nowhere near a currency crisis now. But the quickest way to get there is to borrow trillions of dollars and spend it on dubious financial rescue programs and stimulus packages that are unlikely to either rescue the financial sector or stimulate the overall economy.”

 

But as Instapundit would say, read the whole thing.

 

I would only add that a currency crisis would only happen if the Federal government resorts to printing money. If the US government instead, just belatedly realizes its indebtedness and starts balancing its budget - like what Canada did in the mid 1990’s and New Zealand in the late 1980’s – then all you will get is a debt crisis. And as Canada’s experience demonstrated, these things by themselves are relatively benign for the economy as a whole (though painful for everybody who depends on the government for a living). What you have to watch for is whether the Federal Reserve Board starts to buy US Treasury bills. That’s the mechanism by which money is printed in the US.

 

But I can’t believe that even Ben Bernanke and the Congressional Democrats are this short-sighted. Most likely what will happen is that today’s low interest rates and Keynesian pump-priming will create significant inflation in a couple of years time. To fight the resulting stagflation, interest rates will have to be increased the way the Federal Reserve Board’s then-Chairman Paul Volker did in the early 1980’s to tame the stagflation of the 1970’s. This will cause the Federal government’s interest load to skyrocket, precipitating a debt crisis. At that point, Washington will belatedly realize that it has to balance its books.

 

Of course, if the government simply refrained from ‘stimulus’ spending, the economy would gradually recover and the US wouldn’t have to put itself into another recession and have a debt crisis to set things right again.

 

Aaah, Democrats...

 

What George Bush did wrong (Part V)

Part I here.  Part II here.  Part III here. Part IV here.

War has to be pursued with the intensity it demands, and the War on Terror is no exception. As Napoleon once said, “I would rather lose a battle than a minute.”  There is no doubt that speed is one of the basic principles of war and that the War on Terror was not pursued with sufficient speed or intensity from the outset.

First of all Bush waited far to long to invade Iraq. Once the decision had been reached to invade Iraq it should have been done as soon as practicable. The whole Weapons of Mass Destruction imbroglio with the UN was pursued to appease Tony Blair, who had promised to contribute significant forces, but it cost over a year of precious time. While it would have been necessary to indulge Blair if British forces were really necessary, the fact remains that they weren’t. The US had plenty of soldiers to do the whole thing themselves. While nobody could have predicted that the Coalition would find such little evidence of WMD’s (all the world’s intelligence agencies were in agreement that Saddam had them, and indeed, it was a matter of historical record that he had used chemical weapons on his own people), what could have been easily predicted was that valuable time was unnecessarily wasted. Every day that the invasion of Iraq was delayed was another day when the embers at ground zero had cooled down a few more degrees, and another day that Saddam had to move his apocalyptic goodies to Syria. If you are going to go, go ASAP.

The second critical mistake was that too few troops were used. It is a basic principle of war that, at the critical point, you cannot employ too much force. While situations do arise in war when you have to attempt a mission with whatever means you have available, regardless of whether they are sufficient or not, there is simply no excuse to do so when most of the US Army remained back home. Unfortunately this principle was overshadowed in the 1990’s Pentagon by a fashionable notion called the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) . The idea behind RMA was that smart weapons and other technology had qualitatively changed the nature of war, making the heretofore fundamental principles of war obsolete. In other words, the Pentagon mandarins thought that the US military had achieved such superiority that they could brush any opposition aside by employing only minimum forces (the light footprint). This was a bad idea for Iraq (though it worked in Afghanistan). Unfortunately Donald Rumsfeld liked it. Personally, though I liked Rumsfeld’s crusty personality, he was ultimately not a good SecDef. The bland Gates has been much more effective. The score: basic principle of war 1, Pentagon fad, 0.

To prevent an insurrection, a big footprint is better than a light footprint. Machiavelli recommends that when you sack a city, you must first rule harshly in order to earn the respect of  those you conquer in order to ensure law and order. As you gradually liberalize your rule, you will be viewed as kind and merciful. If you do the opposite and try to be kind and merciful right away, chaos will result. Then, to restore law and order, you will be forced by events to act harshly. As your heavy-handedness increases over time, you will be branded a tyrant. I think it is a fair assessment that until Gen. Petraeus took over, this dynamic was at play. Rumsfeld failed to follow Machiavelli’s advice. This is the third mistake. The US should not have stood back and watched the Iraqis riot and loot their own country when Saddam was overthrown. It was a signal to them that the Americans are soft and set the stage for the insurrection. While watching the looting on CNN, I remember thinking at the time that it was wrong to ignore Machiavelli and that the US will, in any event, have to re-establish order at some point - at a much larger cost. They should have done whatever was required to re-establish order right away (opening fire on the looters if necessary). It was also a big mistake to parole the Iraqi soldiers right away. They should have been interred in POW camps until the country was stabilized and then gradually released after processing. Young men with military training will always form the core of an insurrection.

It is also a fair assessment to say that George Bush dropped the ball from 2005 to 2006 as the situation on the ground deteriorated. A decisive change in strategy was required and all Iraq got was the status quo – until the 2006 mid-term elections shocked Bush into action. This was the fourth mistake. The public’s appetite for irregular war is limited to 3 or 4 years. After that, the public gets antsy to end the damned thing. From Sept 11 onwards, George Bush should have been running against the clock. If Iraq had been invaded directly in 2001 or 2002 with everything the US had and the insurrection forcefully dealt with as soon as it became apparent, it is likely today’s progress would have been achieved by 2005. What a difference that would have made to Bush’s reputation!

Winston Churchill said that it is a mistake to downplay difficulties in any affair frought with uncertainty, such as war. If you do, you tie yourself to purely artificial and unnecessary constraints and deadlines (e.g. “getting the troops home before Christmas”). That is why Churchill’s memorable speeches always stressed hardship and sacrifice and were never specific on how and when victory will be achieved.

Harper’s stimulus budget is too stimulating

Because there has been so much negative written about Harper’s budget, including Andrew Coyne’s MacLean’s cover story on Feb 9, that I essentially agree with, I have refrained from commenting on it myself until now. Aside from the folly of stimulus spending in general, a topic which I have dedicated many blog posts to, it occurred to me there is one aspect of Harper’s stimulus budget that has been neglected – the psychological aspect.

Ezra Levant has defended the budget in the National Post by noting the disagreeable fact that Harper has a minority government. Because politics is the art of the possible, Stephen Harper has to take into account the fact that the Conservatives need an ally in Parliament if they are going to continue to govern, and that means they have to compromise with somebody. So, in grading the budget, conservative critics should not be comparing it to their platonic ideal of federal budgets, but rather to what the Liberals, in cahoots with the NDP and the Bloc, would have concocted in its stead. For instance, “the most important reason why conservatives shouldn’t be too depressed by this budget is that it doesn’t create any new, permanent government programs that will continue to drain the treasury for generations to come. There are no new ‘product lines,’ such as a national daycare or pharmacare program that would be difficult to uproot. The bulk of the spending is in tangible one-off programs, such as rebuilding roads and bridges and low-cost housing.”

This is all very reassuring and there is much to be said for this argument – after all, the essence of practical politics is compromise, but Harper’s critics on the right nevertheless have a residual point that Levant does not succeed in banishing. And that is that Harper never tried to sell a conservative solution to the Canadian public. If there is a question before the public, and they are weighing two possible responses, but they only hear the arguments for one of them, guess which one are they eventually going to be in favour of? Even if they start with their instincts favouring tax cuts, deregulation and fiscal responsibility, many will end up being browbeaten into supporting the magical elixir that can cure everything, known as ‘stimulus’. And while conservative bloggers (such as myself) and Andrew Coyne have been arguing for a conservative solution, the Prime Minister of Canada has not been. From the time he prorogued Parliament to the throne speech, there has been nothing but silence emanating from the PMO. Doubtlessly there was much work to be done in the background, crafting the budget and conjuring up backroom deals, but there was much to be done in the foreground, selling the fiscal conservative message to the people. And this was not done.

 

Just because he knew he had to accommodate Ignatief at the end of the day, this fact did not restrain Stephen Harper in any way from taking his case to the Canadian people beforehand. In fact, doing so would have helped those negotiations along, ensuring that the ‘stimulus’ was as small as possible and the tax cuts and deregulation were as large as possible. Because this was not done, we can say almost for sure that the capitalism-socialism mix in the budget tilted further in the direction of socialism than was necessary.

 

(Of course, if Harper had unexpectedly handed over the keys to Canada to the ‘three stooges’ coalition led by that consummate bumbler Stephane Dion, it is likely they would have failed so spectacularly that the Conservatives would have been given a majority with a substantive mandate that would have lasted a generation, but that is another lost opportunity and another story.)

 

 

What George Bush Did Wrong (Part IV)

Part I here.  Part II here.  Part III here.

Compassionate Conservatism

The idea behind compassionate conservatism (henceforth called ‘CC’) comes from an excellent book,The Art of Political War by David Horowitz. Horowitz is a former 60’s radical turned conservative who, in the dark days of the Clinton years, wanted to teach Republicans how to fight back politically. Illuminatingly, the foreword was written by Karl Rove.

Having read it, I can say that the book had many good ideas, however some were misapplied. One problem was that the Bush administration took some of Horowitz’s proscriptions too literally. One thing Horowitz recommended was that conservatives couch their legislative proposals in the ‘compassionate, touchy-feely’ language of the left so as to politically disarm them. What Horowitz was definitely not proposing was that the left’s policies be adopted and repackaged by the right.

For instance, take the idea of faith based initiatives. This is the policy most associated with CC and actually has some merit to it. The idea is that grass-roots initiatives to alleviate poverty (such as those run by church groups) are much more efficient at helping the poor than large government programs, so why not channel government money through established initiatives that have already been proven to be sound. Politically, it aims to take the issue of poverty away from the Democrats by showing how right-wing principles (self-sufficiency, individual initiative) tackle poverty better. Whether faith based initiatives increase the effectiveness of poverty relief more than they corrupt local churches is an open question (personally, I’d hate to see any federal money flowing to Rev. Jeremiah Wright), but I think it has some merit, if administered carefully.

However, there were many bad CC policies, where right-wing slogans covered purely left wing legislation. These include:

The No Child Left Behind Act, where standardized testing (a right-wing idea) was suppose to take back an issue owned by the left (education). This legislation has many negative left-wing effects. One is the centralization of educational policy at the expense of State and local authorities. Not only is this unconstitutional but it contradicts the principle of federalism (a right-wing principle). Laissez faire dictates that control in an organization should devolve to the lowest level possible to achieve best results. This is why small businesses are more efficient than the politbureau’s five-year plan. Though they wouldn’t state their objections this way, federal interference was definitely not appreciated by local school boards. Many bad consequences resulted. One was that it forced schools to cater to the lowest common denominator, keeping the smart kids back. On reason why Japan and Germany outperform US schools is because they are much less egalitarian. They explicitly weed out poor academic performers into apprenticeship programs and trades. The American approach is to pretend to send everybody to university, which inevitably creates many unskilled dropouts instead. This has always been a central problem with US schools, but it was made worse with the No Child Left Behind Act.

Next, take the prescription drug plan. This is a brand new entitlement that didn’t exist before – and created by a Republican! With all the extra spending created by the War on Terror, there simply was no room for another entitlement. Bush tried to sell it to conservatives on the basis that it was suppose to introduce the principle of medical savings accounts. However, realistically, history teaches us that free market reforms will always be slowly subverted and sidelined by the entrenched bureaucracy, if somebody high up does not keep on top of the bureaucrats. What is worse, for Bush, this was a lose-lose situation. It upset fiscal conservatives while the big government left, who normally loves this kind of stuff, ignored it as if nothing happened.

The most tragic policy was to cooperate with Democrats (and ‘moderate’ Republicans) in continuing the policy of encouraging banks into making ‘affordable’ housing loans. They forced the banks into loaning money without downpayments, giving out mortgages with subprime teaser interest rates, and other destabilizing practices. This clearly triggered the recent market meltdown. It may have even been calculated at the time that this was good politics even though it was bad policy. But in the end bad policy always ends up being bad politics. While it has correctly been pointed out that the fault dates back to the Carter and Clinton administrations, George Bush is nevertheless at least partially at fault for failing to stop the ticking time bomb on his watch. At least partly, he was complicit because affordable home ownership is one of those compassionate conservative ideas.  

The Keynesian ‘shock doctrine’

The critical psychological moment in the current recession occurred in late September and early October when the stock market collapsed. The public was shocked. In these rare times, the people are in a state of flux and psychologically receptive to many things they otherwise wouldn’t be to. Whoever seizes moments like these is able to frame the debate for years to come. What raised the stakes even higher in this particular case was that it happened at the penultimate stage of both the US and Canadian federal election campaigns. At this critical juncture the electorate were a blank slate, and as the Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao once said, “Upon a blank sheet of paper, the most beautiful poem can be written.”

It is now a matter of historical fact that the men who stepped up to the plate were US Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke and US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and they proposed a $700 billion dollar bailout package for the financial sector. It is important to note that if someone had proposed a $700 billion spending bill even two months earlier, he wouldn’t have been taken seriously. That person is obviously a madman. But in late September of 2008, the people were like a sponge, ready to soak up any plan that promised relief. Therefore Paulson and Bernanke were not seen as madmen. And so now, everybody across the globe talks about Keynesian pump priming.

If the George W Bush administration made a critical mistake, this was it, and it occurred almost right at the end of his tenure. Don’t talk to me about ‘lame-duck’ Presidencies ever again. For if Bernanke and Paulson had offered a comprehensive tax program that encouraged investment and rewarded work, and coupled it with a cost-cutting program in the Federal government, the American people would have bought into it just as unreservedly. Bernanke and Paulson had the opportunity to frame the debate in terms of hard work and thrift but failed. As a result, we will have to spend years back-pedalling from Keynesianism - a once discredited doctrine.

Damn!