The Disaster: A Teenage Victory

Last Tuesday (11/6/2012) there was a vote about the future and the teenagers won. They now have the keys to the family car.

I have never in my life so wanted to be wrong in my judgment. Here it is: President Obama’s re-election is an even worse disaster than his election was. Do I think that many of the people who voted for him gave serious thought to the giant national debt, to the impending entitlement implosion, to the tepid economic growth, or even to the unusually high rate of unemployment? No. Do I think a sizable percentage did? No. Do I think a few did consider all or any of this? I am not sure.

President Obama won re-election decisively. His margin in the popular vote was nearly three million votes. Apparently* there were none of the gangsterish electoral tactics that marred his 2008 election. This makes the results worse as far as I am concerned.

President Obama is still not a monster. It’s possible that he is manipulated by a brand of leftists we thought had disappeared long ago. It’s also possible that someone like me will nurture in his brain paranoid notions at a time of major anxiety, such as now.

The camps were clearly drawn and it seems that the camp of those who think the “government” or the “rich” owe them simply carried the day. This kind of conviction sometimes comes from stupidity, not always, not even often, I believe. (This is subjective.) More frequently people make these kinds of decisions when they believe that normal social and economic processes are rigged, or otherwise “unfair.” You don’t need to be stupid nor unobservant to believe that. You don’t have to have a low IQ to make up stories of victimization in your mind . (See my story on hunger: “Child Hunger in America and Gullibility“) They come up naturally in many people’s minds irrespective of the evidence available. I have long been aware of this phenomenon but I don’t know why it’s so common. My best bet is that it’s an atavistic mental return to what Karl Marx called “the idiocy of village life,” with its envies, its jealousies, and its generalized rancor. (Correspondingly, President Obama said during his campaign that, “voting is the best revenge.”) If this guess is correct, it forces the question of why many manage to escape the curse. (I did. I do.)

When I was still in academia (for thirty years), I was surrounded by that kind of people, many were intelligent; a few were reasonably cultured, a tiny number were both, some were downright brilliant. Almost all professed the view that the word was greatly unfair, including and especially American society. I often pointed out to them that this view of America was difficult to reconcile with the existence of people like me: happy, reasonably successful immigrants, immigrants who could return home and didn’t. Invariably, they would begin by crediting my parents – who, in truth, had not ever lifted a finger. Then, they would trot out the cozy cliché of the exceptionally hard-working immigrant. When I replied that I had seldom worked hard in my whole life, that I had remained mostly lazy or distracted, they would simply change the subject. Some would even walk away angrily, as if I were acting stubbornly unreasonable. One guy – who had reasons to think he would not see me again – simply called me an impostor to my face. A small number never wanted to talk to me again. Their minds were made up. They just could not keep a healthy, coherent worldview while considering such discordant facts as I offered.

I am not suggesting here that the 2012 Democrat victory proceeded from mass mental illness, far from it. When apparent insanity is widespread enough, you have to stop thinking of it as an illness. Over the years, beginning in the years following World War Two, one after the other, most European countries have made the choice of having big, meddling government, high taxes and accordingly limited personal freedom . I was myself reared in such a society that later made that choice. I left it as soon as I could because it offered me little promise of a good life, and even much less of an interesting life. And it sure as hell was not going to allow a second chance to the high-school dropout that I was. (The dropout had earned a doctorate from Stanford only a few years later.) This is not a good time to write in detail about what I reproach France, my native country for. This time around, I will just summarize, beginning with what one cannot fault the country for.

First, it’s not a tyranny. Fair elections take place on a regular basis. Alternance in power is achieved peacefully. Judicial processes are fair, by and large. They are fairer than they were when I was a teenager. It’s also obvious that they were made fairer, with better guarantees for the accused, through deliberate imitation of the American model.

France is a very boring society where one’s life chances are determined early and seldom change. It’s a society marked by tremendous cultural sterility. It has no popular songs, no contemporary pictorial art (painting) to speak of, and its munificently subsidized movie industry persistently turns mediocre to bad products, most of them boring. Like all western European nations it is unwilling to defend itself vigorously. Like all others (less than most, in fact) French society demonstrates its ennui with life, its lack of vital enthusiasm through its unwillingness to reproduce itself. And, by the way, France is far from the worst of European countries in all respects I just mentioned. Germany, which always does better economically than France, is even more culturally sterile. Italy is in large part a Third World country. Spain, well, Spain is disappearing before your eyes. In 2004, Al Qaeda won the general election there. Incidentally, I agree that it would be interesting to examine the apparent exceptions to this dismal picture of Europe. The Netherlands, for example. There is no time to do this now. Let me just say that I think a socialist America wouldn’t head that way, that it wouldn’t even have a chance to become France, with its competent civil service.

The Big Government, high taxes, great social services experiment began decisively in Western Europe about fifty years ago. It’s not too early to judge it.

I am afraid that the mass demonstration of infantilism that took place November 6th 2012 is very difficult or impossible to reverse. Elsewhere, as in Greece, people became addicted to big government/ high taxes/ basic services provided by government without counting until it was too late. We may have reached a tipping point where, among those disposed to vote, those who see themselves as benefiting from a forcefully income re-distributing government systematically and permanently outnumber those who don’t.

So, practically, what do I fear? Three things.

1. An ever-increasing national debt and confiscatory taxes with the following consequences: American descent into poverty through declining value of the dollar, chronic unemployment, a drying up of investment in the private sector, and diminishing productivity. Then, an abrupt suppression of entitlements such as Social Security retirement payment traceable to the Demo majority’s lack of gonads in dealing in good time with a problem all could see coming.
2. A fast military weakening inviting attack from terrorist groups and miscalculations from gangster regimes, especially the very successful mafia called the Communist Party of China. Terrorist attacks can probably not inflict massive human casualties on this country. Yet, they can create great social disorganization, weaken economic performance again, poison the tenor of daily life. Beyond this, I envisage the end of the pax americana under which many countries thrived and became decent societies since 1945. There is no limit to the possible consequences of miscalculations by heavily armed gangster regimes from big countries such as China and Putin’s fascist Russia.
3. If this tipping point becomes irreversible, if achieving a majority becomes the habitual means to the despoiling of some by others, many people, including me, will lose their faith in democracy. Because I think of modern democracy as an incredibly lucky, improbable accident, I perceive the possibility of a return to a previous, less civilized age.

On a more personal level, I am afraid I will leave for my grand-daughter a world worse than the harsh one in which I grew up post-World War Two.

By the way, this is not my worst case scenario. I know several people, including some who lived in Communist countries, who believe that the Obama clique is engineering an old-fashioned collectivist take-over as happened in Czechoslovakia in 1948. (See “A Blueprint for a Communist Takeover“) I wish I could simply dismiss them as cranks. I cannot.

Now on to the causes of pres Obama’s victory. It seems to me that nothing substantive explains his clear- cut Obama win. The economy remains very bad, unemployment is much too high, labor participation is at a historical low, economic growth is anemic and halting. Above all, the national debt is terrifying. And about 1/3 of the debt – most of which was accumulated since the birth of this Republic – was incurred under the first Obama administration. (That’s my approximate estimation. Please, correct me if I am very wrong. Don’t bother if I am only a little wrong.)

Again, do I think many of the people who voted for Obama considered these problems to the best of their ability? Probably not. Do I think that a few did? It’s hard to believe. I have not heard or seen Obama partisans do it aloud during the campaign. If the Obama camp had done such considering on any scale at all, it seems to me it would have come to my attention. All the Obama supporters I know personally completely dismissed the topic, same on Facebook.

Do I think that the few Obama supporters who did take those issues into consideration simply decided that Mr Obama was the best candidate to deal with them? It’s nearly impossible to believe. To my knowledge, there was simply no poll before the election that gave Obama preference in that area.

Or rather, did a majority of those who voted to re-elect Mr Obama did it because he held the key to even more important problems than high unemployment, low economic growth, and a gaping national debt? I can think of only one general family of issues where Mr Obama might have been seen as a better bet: peace at all costs. I disagree strongly with the underlying attitude, but I have a grasp of it. It’s what children want: Let’s not fight, fighting is bad, let’s all get along. If there are other reasons to have voted for Obama in spite of the dire national economic situation, I would like to be instructed, even on a hypothetical basis, about what problems were more important than the economic issues I listed above. (Please, don’t just give me a reading assignment lightly. If you give one, say why I should do it.)

The man, Barack Hussein Obama, has not changed. He is still an incompetent guy. He is still the semi-literate guy who reads aloud Navy “corpsman” as if it had to do with a corpse, a cadaver. (No, this is not an Internet rumor; I heard him with my own ears, at least eight times in the span of five minutes.) He is still the guy who thinks he has good reasons to keep his grades as a twenty-year old under lock and key. I can’t imagine why anyone would but he does. He is still a guy surrounded by competent advisers who flee his administration and by other advisers who turn out to be a little bit crooked. Above all, Barack Obama is still the guy who has never achieved anything in his life except get elected – with one major exception. The exception is the passage of Obamacare, of course. It’s a completely unacceptable kind of achievement for someone like me, and even more because of its form than because of its content. Without being melodramatic, I believe it takes only a few instances of 2,500-page bills that you must pass before you can read them to destroy the handful of virtuous habits that make up democracy.

Other than this, Obama has done nothing, including during the two years when he had iron-clad majorities in both houses. He did not even bother then to turn back the clock on Bush-era practices that infuriated his best supporters. That would include the “foreign rendition” of terror suspects and the maintenance of an offshore prison outside the reach of American justice. His blaming of Republican obstruction for this failure to fulfill his own promises, spontaneously made to his own supporters, is a plain lie. Incidentally, to give Mr Obama credit for withdrawing American troops from Iraq exactly according to the Bush calendar is ridiculous. His martial boastfulness on the occasion of the death of Bin Laden, caused by events in the planning for years, is grotesque. (I suppose we might be grateful that he did not forbid it though.) One may thank him, I suppose – but I would not have expected his supporters of 2008 to do so – for setting up a private international presidential assassination program of terrorism suspects. In short, it’s difficult to understand why many of the people who voted for Mr Obama do not see that he is simply ridiculous, not a monster, as I have said, but a figment of some ones’ imagination, including his own. (I don’t want to deny him credit on this account.) In spite of all this, Mr Obama still looked infinitely more cool than Gov. Romney. The cool guy won, though.

I ask myself what the Republican Party could have done differently and I add my comments. Here, below is a short list that is not intended to be exhaustive (because I am exhausted). I focus on the things I think I understand fairly well.

The Republican Party has trouble coming up with charismatic candidates who also appear competent enough. It seems to me that this is a function of our set of values. Hard work, meritocracy, balanced budgets, conjugal sex only ( if any) are not, sexy notions precisely. The people who hold those ideas as primary are likely to look a little pallid as compared to determined men who will wrench back American jobs from China or stop the rise of the oceans. The most charismatic Republican leader since Reagan has been Sarah Palin of Alaska. She was felled by latent, naïve sexism in both parties, including in women, and by a vicious conspiracy of powerful media bitches. I am not sure we can often do better than Romney in producing candidates. I am not sure I want us to. Free people shouldn’t need charismatic leaders. Have there been any charismatic Swiss at all since William Tell? (And he was not even a leader, just a really cool-headed archer and temporary burgomaster.)

All the same, I wonder if Mr Romney’s uninspiring personality caused several million Republicans to stay home. (And every time I write this, I have trouble believing that it did or that they did.)

Hispanics. We could have gotten millions of votes from them if they had heard a different voice from the Republican party. We screwed up badly. During the two years preceding the election, local Republicans spend a great deal of energy frightening and insulting millions of Hispanics. They did this at the very time when the problems posed by illegal immigrants – most of them Mexicans – were in the process of solving themselves. I warned several times on this blog about Republican misunderstandings in that area. (see “Bizarre Conservative Ideas…,” “Immigration: More on Conservative, Liberal Ignorance,” and  ”The Arizona Immigration Law…“). The problem is easy to fix for the next time around if many Republicans decide to loosen their mindless principles and look reality in the face. (See the link on this blog for a co-authored paper of mine describing an imaginative solution.)

Women: We got manipulated into distraction by the Democrats’ silly accusation of a Republican “war on women.” We allowed ourselves and our wise line of reasoning to be sidetracked. I got caught up myself in such a discussion (see “Limbaugh Insults Prostitutes…” ) arguing that it was not my responsibility to pay for strange women ‘s entertainment expenses, be they ski boots or contraceptives. We failed to do the obvious, to explain clearly and calmly that women don’t need free contraceptives, that women do not need to have the government force employers to provide contraceptives, but that they need good jobs that afford them the dignity of buying their own contraceptives, or not. We should have shown tirelessly how a bad economy, high unemployment directly and indirectly sacrifices women’s happiness, the happiness of women as women, specifically. We should have insisted that a fast growing economy is the best thing that can happen to women’s security, and to their dignity as well.

But that’s not the whole story. Let me say first that it would take only about five minutes to persuade me that women, on the average, work harder than men do, on the average. Nevertheless, I think that the desire to be kept runs deeply in the heart of many women. Its’ so common that it might be hardwired (which would make some evolutionary sense). Those who deny this have never know any women, or they have known only three, two of whom lied to them. Women commonly admit to this trait when they talk to other women. Women spontaneously express admiration for other women who achieve this cooly. I don’t know what Republicans can do about the siren song of government as exemplary husband who brings a paycheck home, who never drinks to excess, never argues, and does not fart in bed. Republicans been promoting traditional marriage with stay-at-home moms. It’s more working than not but it takes too long to turn the tide of women being kept by my tax money and who don’t even admit that it’s my money. I don’t know what the political solution to this deep-seated problem is. I am interested in anyone telling me.

Abortion: Extremists at every election assure us that anyone who speaks against the now nearly sacramental right to abortion will pay dearly or has paid dearly come election time. I don’t know to what extent this is true, I suspect not so much. Nevertheless, the question arises of which side I am on, as a conservative. It arises for all conservatives. As it happens, I am for keeping abortion legal, as the lesser of several evils. Nonetheless, I don’t wish to go on record as being against those who think that terminating the life of a creature three months after conception is a lot like terminating the life of a seven months creature which is in turn a lot like terminating the life of an eleven months-old creature. I also don’t want to line up on the side of the simplistic argument that women ought to control their bodies absolutely. After all, a child two years out of the womb often places greater demands on a woman, including on her body, than does a three-weeks fetus. Why not get rid of the little nuisance, the brat, I mean? And, as I have said elsewhere, there is always the alternative of perversion which avoids abortion, skirts the moral issue altogether, and which costs next to nothing.

Nevertheless, I wish the useless Republican national committee -which represents no one – has kept its collective mouth shut on a number of sex-related issues. We did not need this baggage.

Dumping on China. Romney tried to win over Ohio and other rust- belt states by making absurd statements about the relationship between Chinese manufacturing industry, Chinese monetary policy, and decreasing manufacturing employment in this country. I have dealt with this issue several times on this blog (see “The Golden Age of Manufacturing…,” “…the Currency Issue Made Simple,” and “Shipping Jobs Overseas…” for a few examples). I don’t want to repeat myself here. It’s all absurd. However, Obama did the same and worse. Neither candidate took the trouble to notice that Chinese imports have been increasing by 20% each year for about ten years. No one mentioned that the Chinese increasing prosperity is up for grabs. No one took the trouble to mention that German industry is still thriving exporting conventional industrial goods. The bipartisan spreading of ignorance involved is helped by many years of pernicious university mis-education by mindless academic liberals. Here again, here might be a tipping point. It’s been the case for thirty years that students have heard disparagement of capitalism in many classes while not taking any economics class (that’s zero).

A week later, I still don’t understand why so many Republicans stayed home or appeared to have done so. Its’ very difficult to accept that they did. This fact alone keeps my mind open to allegations of cheating. See the footnote below. Liberals will say that registered Republicans kept away because of distaste for extremism in their own party. But it’s absurd to think of anything led by Gov. Romney as extremist. It seems to me that Republicans who declined to vote are several times more likely to have done so because they perceived Romney as soft on liberalism. I keep wondering if the turnout would have been much better if the Romney campaign had taken even harder positions on tax hikes. And I am perplexed that economically hard-headed Paul Ryan seems to have disappeared from the stage soon after he was selected.

I hope the Republican majority in the House will have the fortitude to resist any but the slightest compromise on taxes. We have already paid the price for obstructionism, most of it imagined. It’ a bad time to weaken one of our most comprehensible, defining positions:

You can stop the monster’s growth by not feeding it.

Now, is the economic decline I fear wholly ineluctable? Probably not because happy, fortuitous developments, or luck, can nullify the effects of persistently bad policies. Perhaps there will really be a big oil and natural gas boom. Perhaps, an Obama administration committed to windmills and to failing solar power firms will not be able to kill it. Perhaps.

In other news, the Director of the CIA has resigned. That’s just about one week before he was due to testify before Congress on the disaster in Libya where an American ambassador was assassinated. Many conservatives, including myself, believe that the White House did everything it could to cover up its role in the fiasco. A tough public interrogation of General Petreus might demonstrate how wrong our suspicions are. Others, including me again, think that the administration used its clout to delay an open discussion of its incompetence until after the election. I realize that coincidences happen. All the same, the timing of the resignation stinks. The love affair that supposedly caused the resignation did not happen yesterday so, why does it come up at exactly this time? And why the urgency for the Director to resign? He has been a sinner and a rat for quite a while anyway. It’s practically impossible to avoid wondering how long the president has known and kept the knowledge of it in the White House safe until such time as it could be useful.

At any rate, I don’t see why the resigned Director of the CIA, the ex-Director cannot testify about what he did and about what he knew when he was still Director, a short time ago. Senator Feinstein, the congressional ranker on such matters, seems to agree with me. I will be paying attention to the excuses. If no excuses are forthcoming, I will believe that a conspiracy has taken place.

Update on 11/15/12: Gen. Petraeus testified. Stay tuned.

* I am aware of loud protests on Facebook about alleged massive fraud, more than enough fraud to overturn the results of the election. I am also aware of the fact that it’s common, a general practice for the losing losers to make such accusations. The fact that they are usual does not in itself demonstrate that the allegations are unbased. I will keep watching, with both a open mind and skepticism. The skepticism is related again, to the expectedness of such allegations. The open mind has a lot to do with the thought that it would be difficult both for so many polls predicting a high Republican turnout and a Romney victory to be wrong at the same time. It ‘s especially difficult to understand how the many liberal press organs who predicted a close race could be so wrong.

Karl Marx Was Right (Pretty Much)!

Karl Marx spent a lifetime arguing that the motor of history, what caused social change, was the “class struggle.” (Marx said other, more complicated things in relation to the class struggle . I don’t care to talk about them right now because they are obscure and there is little agreement among Marxists about what they mean.) Marx also did not assign enough importance to technological progress, it’s true. That would happen largely as a result of ever greater densities of population, irrespective of any political system. Many people in close contact in cities are more likely to come up with better ways to get things done than few people who barely ever meet anyone outside their small group. Literacy also helped, of course, by helping preserve accumulated knowledge. With these major lacunas, I think Marx was mostly right.

Marx had an elaborated conceptualization of social class that he never really completed. First, what “class” is not, according to Marx (also according to Delacroix). Class explicitly does not refer to “the rich and the poor” as many think. That would have been of limited usefulness when Marx was writing and it would be utterly useless now. The fact is that the distribution of wealth in modern, capitalist societies (the ones Marx had in mind) is continuous, that is, there is not break-up point. Next to the person, or family who owns $1,000, 000 there is one that owns $999,000, and next to that one, there is another that owns $998,999. Likewise, next to the person or family who owns $50, there is one that has $51 in wealth. And so forth. Moreover, who owns what is not fixed except at the lowest end. I was poor when I was thirty, I am not anymore. People who own vast wealth are liable to lose large portions of it in a day or two, thanks to the normal operation of the stock market, for example. Thus, there is frequent re-shuffling and rich and poor are pseudo-categories and therefore, useless.

Marx explained at length that what social class one belongs to is determined by one’s “relation to the means of production.” This is a bad translation of the bad German that prevailed at the time Marx was writing. Generations of Marxists everywhere have striven to conserve this opaque language because it made them sound profound, not least in their own eyes, and because it made them look like possessors of higher, “scientific” knowledge. Let me dispose of the scientific claim right away. It’s pure propaganda, deliberate bullshit, one of Marx’s public relations achievements. He made his claims seem more serious than they otherwise would have seemed by calling them “scientific” at a time when the word conveyed much intellectual prestige. Again, it’s bullshit. What makes anything scientific is that it can be refuted by comparison with reality. Another way to say nearly the same thing is to say that scientific claims can be tested. (Don’t worry about the “nearly” in the previous sentence; the statement is good enough for our purpose.) Marx’s claims cannot be tested in a rigorous, logical manner. All Marxists can do is to cry, “See, Marx said so,” after the fact, whenever something develops more or less according to one of Marx’s many unclear predictions. One issue about which Marx was clear was the class struggle. More on this below.

The world in which Marx lived was different from ours in important respects two of which are crucial for understanding the idea of social class in the 21^st century.

1 When Marx was observing and writing, in the second half of the 19^th century, land was losing much of its age-old importance as a source of income, in comparison with manufacturing and mining, and later, railroads. While agricultural productivity was making steady gains in the richest countries, manufacturing and, in its wake, mining, were growing explosively thanks to the Industrial Revolution. (Note what I am not saying: Income from agriculture was not shrinking in absolute terms, it was expanding.) It was clear to most observers then that the quick way to riches was to capture the fast rising income generated by those industries. The best spigot was thus the material industries of manufacturing, mining and later, railroads.

The claimants to this income were uncommonly well defined. On the one side were a small number of mostly family-based companies like the Krupp in Germany, the Schneider in France, the Rockefeller in America, and so on. These highly visible companies owned the manufacturing plants, the mines, and later the railroads. Here is a useful digression: Marx seemed not to have understood the importance of publicly owned companies in which small people and other groups could invest their small savings. He probably thought big corporations would remain in a tiny number of hands forever. Correspondingly, he did not understand well the role of stock exchanges either. He was wrong on this, wrong by large omission.

The other claimants to manufacturing, mining and railroad income were also highly visible. They were the masses of workers flocking to the cities and mining centers from the countryside. Those people were visible because of where they lived, near the centers of cities. Originally, they were also poorly paid and overworked. Marx observed that they were in a favorable situation to organize along labor union lines and also politically to an extend unimaginable by their peasant forebears. This, because of their geographic concentration and because of their ability to realize that they shared a certain type of misery.

From these accurate observations, it was fairly natural to predict that there would eventually be a clash between the super-rich owners of the means of production, manufacturing plants, mines and railroads, and those who toiled for them. It looked like there was at any time, a zero-plus sum game being played: Whatever the owner took, the workers did not get, and vice-versa: capitalists (owners) vs proletariat (industrial workers, broadly defined).

But everyone who was not a worker was not a capitalist in that sense, and everyone who was not a capitalist was not necessarily an industrial worker. The lawyers who serviced the capitalists could be expected to join with them. The tavern owners whose own income came from workers’ drinking would side with the workers, and so forth. This scheme makes it clear that a starving lawyer could be in the capitalist camp and a prosperous pub owner in that of the workers. Hence the idea that people would line up politically according to their “relationship to the mean of production.” This is a more sophisticated idea and also one much more applicable than the “rich vs poor” of the popular imagery of social class.

2  The second big difference between Marx’s time and ours is the size of government. Throughout the 19^th century. governments everywhere were small and poor. There was no income tax; they derived revenue largely from customs (border taxes) and from excise taxes. Governments then were a fiscal burden on everyone if not equally, then commonly, but a fairly light burden most of the time.

Today, governments in the developed world are large to huge. They consume anywhere between 40% approximately and 70% of Gross Domestic Product. They are also everywhere by far the largest accessible source of income.

Superficially, the amorphous, ill-defined “service sector” seems even larger since it accounts regularly for more than 70% of GDP (in rich countries including the US). However, it’s fragmented, heterogeneous, controlled (to the extent that is is controlled) by a myriad owners. Much of it is not very profitable, as opposed to 19^th century manufacturing, for example. The services workforce is also extremely fragmented and it tends to be transient. It would be difficult for that workforce, or for anyone else to get together to capture anything of value. There is not much to take from the service sector and it would be hard to get.

By contrast, the large to very large chunk of money that is in governments’ hands at any one time is easy to capture. It does not take much more than a well engineered vote to get one’s own hands on it. Furthermore, unlike private sector’s funds that depend on the vagaries of the market and on management’s competence, government grants in various forms tend to have a long shelf life. The WWII subsidy to chinchilla farmers was only repealed about ten years ago, fifty years late! Civil service pension funds are another case in point. Obtaining money from government entities is well worth the effort. The government is both a big spigot and an easy one to turn on.

I know I promised to tell you that Marx was almost right. Well, what we see in America today is a classical Marxian class struggle. The classes in conflict are not those Marx described because he was writing almost 150 years ago and he had not foreseen the monstrous growth of government. (No one else had.) The Obamanian/Obamist faction of the Democratic Party has engineered and is engineering an alliance between the main social class of today, government workers, on the one hand and a few other, opportunistically selected groups, on the other hand.

First among the government workers class allies are the small minority of workers in labor unions (maybe 7 or 8% of all employed and unemployed people). Labor unions have always used government to grab what their own muscle failed to achieve. Second, are the majorities of racial minorities. Many – but not most- are poor for reasons that ceased a long time ago to be related to racism. The largest racial minority, so-called “Latinos,” is heterogeneous and many of its members are immigrants or one generation removed from immigration. The Obamists are trying to grab them before they meld into the traditional American dream.

The second largest minority is “blacks.” Only about half of so-called “African-Americans” are descendants of slaves with a historical grievance that is supposed to be addressed by affirmative action. Many in that half, of southern church background, are addicted to resounding speeches about injustice and to the idea that the remedy to their ills can only come from government. They will vote for the best “injustice speech” giver irrespective of what they gain afterwards. (Usually nothing. The Democratic Party had been using and abusing blacks for thirty years.) The other half of Americans with African blood are immigrants and their children. Like Obama himself, in my book, they have no historical claim on the nation. That second half of the second minority might surprise us soon, politically. They, are experiencing normal American social mobility, like general Colin Powell for example, the son of Jamaican immigrants. They are at best temporary members of the Obamian recruits, I think. He, and his Left-Democrat conspirators cannot count on them for the long haul.

A flat and slow-growing economy is always especially hard on immigrants. That’s the main reason western Europe has always – until now – had worse immigrant problems than we have. Immigrants in America open a small business and their kids go to to college and they become the doctors and lawyers and engineers our normally expanding economy requires. Immigrants in France, for example, go to college and then remain underemployed forever because the French escalator is hardly moving at all.

There are no other racial minorities in America today that want to be considered minorities. They are all doing well without recourse to government favor. Many may have voted for Obama without understanding what they were doing. If I were an American communist trying to take over by legal means, I would not count on them further. In the same breath, I would refer to the scarce but disproportionately influential American Jews. I think more than 75% voted for Obama. That was a downright perverse and obstinate vote. I don’t think many are communists. I suspect many more are coming to their senses right now. (I may be placing too much confidence in an unsystematic sample here. All the Jews I know are conservatives. Ten years ago, I did not even know of Jewish conservatives.)

Finally, the Obamists exercise control over a large under-class that they are trying to enlarge yet: All those who are not working but who exist temporarily or permanently thanks to government payments. Marx had described something like this when he spoke of the politically unstable lumpenproletariat, the sub-working class “dressed in rags.”

So, here we are: On the one side, the large and growing class of government employees and the small allied class of union members. Both classes earn considerably more in wages and benefits than the employed in the private sector, nearly twice as much on the average. One bus driver in my small town belongs to both classes, as a government employee and as a union member. Last year, he earned $160,000 (that’s with overtime, let’s be frank). The job requires a high-school education. (I hope he is the one bus driver in this town who is not habitually gruff.) This is the same town where coffee shop baristas with a college degree earn $9/ hour if they are lucky, with no benefits. (I am speaking of Liberal Arts and Environmental Studies majors. Again, let’s be frank!)

To summarize: Government employees and union members owe their superior earnings to their relationship to the means of re-distributing income forcibly, government. They seek to extend and consolidate their hold on government with the help of precariously allied ethnic minorities and of unstable recipients of welfare under various names. On the other side is everyone else, everyone who does not work for government and who pays the taxes that feed the others. They too are defined by their relationship not to the “mode of production,” (see above) but to the spigot of government.

Here is a key figure: Almost 50% of Americans paid no federal income tax last year. That’s a lot of people who are not against the government confiscating legitimate income though legal means.

Once you start looking at the events and policies of the past 18 months as elements of a normal class-struggle, you gain much clarity. And, incidentally, this thesis does not contradict my repeated statements that the Obama administration and the President himself, are not very bright. They are relying on an old play-book that tells them pretty much what to do and that does not require much inventiveness.

I am astounded – if I say so myself – by the predictive power of my historical explanation. We even have the third highest elected official in the land ( third in order of succession to the President) engaging overtly in fascist intimidation: Speaker Pelosi threatened around August 16th “to investigate” those who oppose a mosque near Ground Zero! (See my  column on this: “The ‘Ground Zero’ Mosque Issue Clarified,” posted 8/20/10)

And, by the way, for those of you who got Cs in public school, or Bs in private school because the school needed the tuition, no, I am not confused. The Obamians are a species of communists and, communism is just one brand of fascism. See my two essays on the topic on this blog:“Fascism Explained,” posted 5/27/09 and “How About Communism?” posted 6/1/09.