Liberals, Honest Ignorance, and a Left-Wing Conspiracy

This weekend, I attended a charity gala in a liberal-liberal part of my generally liberal region. It’s a good charity, by the way, no complaint here. And I was glad to be there with my elegant wife even if we were only acting as extras because we can’t afford to bid on…. Here you go, I was going to say something bitchy. I stopped myself in time. And, by the way is “bitchy” inherently sexist? I can’t very well say “doggy” every other time, or can I? Here, the very language is making it difficult to sound innocent. But I digress. The point I was trying to make is that the evening helped me remember the obvious fact that when people tell untruths, they are not necessarily lying. I keep forgetting because I have been straightening out people for so many years, I feel they should know by now. I am getting impatient. Like many old teachers, I tend to forget that there is a brand new batch of students every year!

Anyway, I found myself in closer proximity to conventional liberals than I normally do. And I enjoyed no courteous latitude to cause them to flee by inflicting pain on them. Sometimes, I just have to sit still and smile and often, suffer through the telling of their last trip to Paris. (And why am I not allowed to charge them for listening, I ask?) That evening, there is a sweet-faced woman in her fifties sitting to my left (to my left by chance, I am sure). She is one of those people I like on sight. Perhaps their faces carry the mask of many years of goodness, of thinking good thoughts, and that makes them attractive. The lady is a third- grade teacher. She is married to a lawyer who, strange thing to say about a lawyer, has a kind face too. Our host at the event, an old friend, is not beyond making trouble, out of curiosity, or to excite other guests’ interest. He must have told others at his table that my wife and I are ogres, genuine, real, not-for-cute-effect conservatives. Toward dessert, the sweet-faced lady initiates a political conversation with me.

She starts by asking me courteously what I do. I think she already knows the answer. I tell her I am retired and I blog. Following more inquiries, I further tell her that my seemingly most successful blog posting is entitled: “Why Young Women Are Stupid.” What could I do, lie? She asked. Besides, my intuition tells me that a part of her enjoys temporarily the company of a really bad boy. I give her the short version of the essay. Regretfully she more or less agrees with me about why  young women are stupid. Then, because I am kind in my heart (and also because of the Vichy side of my personality), I volunteer that the political analysts with the most influence on me are both women. How about Maureen Dowd she asks? I tell her that Maureen has not had an original thought in her life. At this points the lady stops beating a round the bush:
“What I hate about Republicans,” she says, “is what they do to women.” (Bolding mine.)

‘Well, what do they do?” I ask sweetly.

She tells me of several things that Republican presidential candidates have said, plus several that she thinks they have said and that I think they have not said. She cannot come up with anything any Republican has actually done that is cruel or inhuman or worse, to women. This is more interesting than it sounds. The lady is old enough to remember the radical welfare reform, under Clinton but crammed down the liberals’ throats by a militant Republican Congress. There were going to be hungry and sick children lying in the streets, her political sisters predicted at the time. I would bet she, personally said it too. There were not, children, I mean. Maybe she knows it, maybe she does not. Maybe she half-knows it without really knowing it. She has forgotten.

This liberal teacher is angry about what conservatives (supposedly all Republicans) “do” to women but she can’t think of even one such thing. But, she is not lying, just at a loss. I fear this exchange has been in vain. So, reading her mind about what Republicans would do if they could, I volunteer this information: I tell her that there is not a single elected Republican who advocates making abortion illegal. This, at least, will force her to keep thinking.

This morning, driving from the gym, I have my car radio set on one of the FM stations that broadcast both good music and National Public Radio shows. There is a this rare thing on, a liberal talk-show. It’s rare because liberals are always boring. They run out of anything to say in weeks if not days. I catch a woman caller complaining about an acquaintance of hers, an old lady, who is forced to chose between paying for her prescription medicines and eating every day. I heard this before. I am a little puzzled because the old lady is on Medicare and her prescription medicines are heavily subsidized. (Mine are too.) And subsidization of prescription medicines is one of those unfunded benefits that have got the Federal Government in the hole for many years to come. Then the woman caller makes this clear statement:

“What kind of government do we have that can bail out bankers but fails to bail our ordinary working Americans?”

Then, I have one of my rare epiphanies. I realize suddenly that the woman means it literally, that she really thinks that it was bankers, people who own banks and who manage them like say, a bakery, that the Obama administration bailed out in 2008. It dawns on me – and it’s really like a dawn breaking through an ink-dark night – that the caller does not understand that the really important banks, Wells Fargo, Citibank, etc., are owned collectively by ordinary people through their shares. If I were in front of the caller and if I told her that “ordinary working Americans” can own the banks any time they want, she would dismiss my assertion as silly. She lives in a mental world, with thousands like her, in which rich people own banks and that’s all there is to it. And rich people also own “the corporations,” of course. Millions of American exist mentally in the pre-Karl Marx 19^th century. If they were not, I wonder how many liberals would be left at all in this fundamentally fair and honest nation. If I said aloud,” Those who don’t own a piece of a bank or a piece of a corporation only have themselves to blame,” I might be thought off as a comic extremist although the statement is as true as can be.

I taught for thirty years in the social sciences, broadly defined. You would think I had plenty of opportunities to explain capitalism. In fact, I didn’t. I was seldom able to spend any significant time on the topic because another academic specialty was supposed to do that particular job, economists were. In my experience, they mostly fail; they routinely fail in a big way. I guess that economists are rarely interested in explaining the nuts and bolts and the basic definitions of capitalism. I think they think it’s beneath them. Or else, they don’t understand how far removed the concept of a market is from the intuitive experience of ordinary people.

Once, only once, Brother Fate gave me a chance to do something significant about the problem. It was fluke but it happened. I was offered the job of writing the entry “Capitalism” in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology – 6^th Edition (make a note of the edition). I did exactly what I wanted within the space allotted: Definitions and nuts and bolts and historical references. All was based on the assumption that the reader needed to start on the ground floor. When the time came to write the paperback version, there was a new Managing Editor, a well-connected, upstart, mere graduate student who proceeded to tell me that what I was writing about capitalism didn’t “correspond to what he knew.” The man was a real scholar at heart! The problem of course was that I had written in the hard copy edition an objective description, including some of the historical achievements of capitalism. And, unlike all my predecessors. I had done no kowtowing to the ghost of Karl Marx (now dead more than a hundred years and thirty years). It was unheard of, it was a gross mistake that someone in American sociology could write an entry that did not perspire poisonous sweat against capitalism. As I said, it was fluke that I was able to do it. That was one time; it felt really good. I decided then that winning against terrible odds even once was good enough, I withdrew from the paperback edition. I told the upstart editor to commit an anatomically impossible act on his own person. I felt too old to engage in a war against what I knew to be a vast conspiracy. It’s a conspiracy of leftists and of liberals who are extremely tolerant of leftists’ prejudices although they know better.

Those who know me among readers of this essay, tell me: How often have you heard me use the word “conspiracy”? And of course, I don’t mean that there was a conspiracy against me, personally. There is an ongoing left-wing conspiracy to keep the discipline of sociology and several of its derivatives with eyes firmly fixed on the year 1850 (Not a typo: 1850). And this is not a dig at old Charlie Marx himself. Marx was a creative thinker at least and he did not know what we know now: 1 Capitalism works; 2 Nothing else works.

© Jacques Delacroix 2012

Donkeys and Capitalism and the President’s Finger: Sunday Morning Haphazard Thoughts

This morning, I watched a French documentary on the equivalent of Animal Planet. It showed a middle-aged guy who has been walking around Europe with his donkey, like Robert Louis Stevenson did on a smaller scale in the 19^th century. After several years, the thought struck the French hiker that there must be people who don’t have the use of their legs who would enjoy doing the same. He is developing at his own expense a contraption, a special paraplegic-friendly cart, that can be drawn by a donkey.

In my town of Santa Cruz, there is an organization that puts wetsuits on variously handicapped young people, some severely handicapped, to make them experience the approximate joys of surfing. The kind of generosity of spirit these two stories illustrate, and the imagination, also the individual economic capability to follow through, tell us what’s a good society. The differences between France and the US pale before the differences between those kinds of society and others.

I would bet you, there is no such private endeavor anywhere in China, or in Russia, or in Cuba, or anywhere in the Muslim world. I stand ready to be corrected, naturally. I will publish any credible correction.

That’s the seldom-told story of real capitalism, of course. It’s the side of capitalism people who live in feudal societies and in semi-socialistic societies, and in societies that are a little bit of both have no way of knowing. It’s also the side of capitalism that home-grown leftists perversely refuse to see. It’s a major reason why leftists have to lie so much: If capitalism does everything better, including compassion, what’s left of our collectivist dream, they ask themselves?

Capitalist societies in fact give a better life to everyone and especially to the weak and defenseless. They do this by providing the highest standard of living for ordinary people and by being associated with a high degree of personal freedom. Combine personal freedom with escape from abject poverty and you get imaginative generosity toward the vulnerable, like the generosity of the Frenchman with a donkey. And yes, despite a hundred years of leftist folklore poverty makes you narrow-minded and stingy.

 

On to the domestic end-of-reign. The President first announces that he will give another speech, a speech on jobs, no kidding! Then he says it will be delivered on the same night as a long-scheduled Republican presidential debate. When criticized, he backs out and schedules it on the same night as an important televised sports event. Then, he backs out and schedules for yet another night.

Does this sound live an evil Machiavellian political genius to you? To me, it sounds like the actions of a clueless man, of a man at sea, of a man isolated, with no one to give him advice. I have said from the days of the campaign that Barack Obama is much more incompetent than evil. He had never accomplished anything in any of his several careers before he was elected; he still has not. Even if you are a deluded liberal and wish to credit him for the ObamaCare 2,000+ page law, you probably shouldn’t. If it survives it will be the Pelosi/ReidCare.

The President has become a pathetic figure. He acts as if he had been abandoned by all who had any sort of adult credibility. That would include many public figures I dislike intensely because I am a conservative and because I am intellectually honest. It looks as if there were no one left to guide his steps, no one to hold his hand.

Speaking of hand: His is still the hand that has the finger that could press the button. I am worried he might get pissed or confused and nuke Dallas.

The Gulf Spill and the Hidden Vice of Capitalism

Here is one aspect of the Gulf spill no one seems to be talking about. It concerns the same thing that conservatives commentators, libertarian journals, and economists seldom take into consideration: Persons in the upper management of large corporations are not necessarily very intelligent and few are well-educated. That is the hidden vice of capitalism. For once, I am speaking as an expert. (Go ahead, check my vita linked to this blog and then, re-check the facts on Google. Make my day!)

The BP-caused oil spill – going on for more of a month as I write – is also a public relations disaster for the corporation. As I said earlier ( “The Louisiana Oil Disaster? Posted 5/21/10), we are still missing the moving photographs of thousands of dead, soiled aquatic birds. There is in and around Plaquemines parish a group of stake-holders that is becoming increasingly vocal: The fishermen. I heard some on NPR on 5/25/10 complaining that BP has mostly ignored their wishes to “volunteer” to help. It sounded true and it sounded incredible to me.

Whatever happens, BP is going to be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly for more than a billion dollars. The fishermen whose livelihood and whose future appears to be threatened by BP’s negligence number in the hundreds. I doubt that there are a thousand of them altogether. At the risk of sounding cynical, I will say that they are the only easily identifiable group of human victims who tug at ordinary Americans’ hearts. It’s easy to imagine that most Louisiana fishermen don’t have a doctorate in solar energy science, for instance; it’s easy to recognize that few can readily switch to another occupation. That they may want to transmit their legacy to their children is also understandable from an emotional standpoint. Finally, the tens of millions of American who fish recreationally will have no trouble grasping that the Louisiana fishermen may love their occupation and the lifestyle that goes with it. I am skeptical myself about the extensiveness of the damage. I don’t hope it will become Obama’s Katrina. Yet my heart goes out to those unknown fishermen deprived of both livelihood and, it seems right now, of a future.

That’s why I find it incomprehensible that BP has not taken the following simple measures: Gather everyone who claims to be a fisherman and is in a boat that moves under its own power. Give $100 a day to very crewman, $150 to every captain, and another $200 for the boat. I think the total cost would be under $200,000 a day or six million dollars for a month. And yes, there would be graft and cheating.

BP could simply tell the fishermen that they are “on call,” to be deployed at four hours’ notice as needed. Almost all would cooperate because the urge to do something in a crisis is irresistible. The shirkers would not be missed and they would be shunned by their neighbors. Tempers would subside. The locals would be turned from louder and louder claimants enjoying the world’s sympathy into allies of BP.

Why does not BP do anything so simple, you wonder? Back to my opening comments. The upper levels of big corporations are replete with people with mediocre minds. That this is not well-known is the fault of ignorant journalists and of devious business schools. (Disclosure: I taught in a business school for more than twenty years.) In fact, the evidence that CEOs of big corporations, for example, do anything that is both useful and important is slim and ill-founded. I mean by the latter that the empirical evidence in support does not begin to reach the level of rigor expected in the social sciences in general. The quality of the evidence does not even come close to what one expect routinely in the social sciences that concern themselves with business specifically. I know this because I refereed for such journals and submitted my own research to them for thirty years. ( There is a column on the technical topic of scholarly refereeing somewhere on this blog.) Warning: I stopped taking interest in that kind of research about three years ago. If some great, well-executed study has appeared on the topic since then, I might not know of it. If you know of one such, please, let me know that I may correct my ignorance. In summary” The myth of the god-like captain of industry prevails. It prevails without much successful challenge because it’s a myth, precisely, the founding myth of capitalism.

How can such a disturbing, dismal view of corporate governance be correct? There are two, explanations; they are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they overlap. First, academics in general don’t receive well innovations that may undermine scholarly reputations built over a life-time. There is some good in this because many innovations are, in fact, frivolous, the products of passing fads. Yet, scholarly innovations with impeccable credentials, the very credentials the fortress defenders claim to respect, also have difficulty gaining a foothold. Frequently, when they do gain a foothold, they are restricted to a ghetto for a generation or more. Evidence in favor of the idea that CEOs are omniscient and omnipotent need not exist. Any evidence that they are not is guilty until it proves itself innocent, over and over again.

The second explanation is crass: Most or all business schools derive a significant fraction of their revenue from private donations and endowments. Donations, other than bequeaths by the dead, are always decided on or reviewed by CEOs or by their creatures. The unspoken consensus in business schools is that there is no need to bite the hand that feeds you, even if it feeds you only dessert. Why antagonize the people with wallets in hand with research and publications that minimize their importance and suggest they may not be all that bright? This state of mind does not result from any conspiracy. It needs not be expressed. It’s part of the culture of business schools. In support of this thesis is the well-known fact that the richest business schools turn out the most iconoclastic research Stanford University comes to mind where the mindset goes like this: You want to bequeath us what? Thank you, we are busy right now. If you can call tomorrow, we will try to find you a spot in the line of donors.

Its’ chic nowadays to downplay the relevance of academia and academia has done much to earn this contempt. The fact however is that business schools teach vast numbers of undergraduates, and only slightly smaller numbers of MBA students. They instruct ordinary people, journalists, teachers and teaches of teachers. Almost anything anyone in America knows about business come from or is heavily influenced by this teaching. What business schools teach matters in the long run although in diffuse ways.

While it might be used that way, this short essay is not an argument for government intervention or supervision. The perception that government bureaucrats know anything at all is even more questionable. After all, they have been running the US Post Office for 230 years!

Stupid Infiltrators and an Abysmally Under-Informed Smart Student

I told you so! I did on 3/31/10 (in “A Fucking Liar?”) I said that the next tea party would include infiltrators that would work to make the movement look like the stereotype promulgated by the biased, lazy press. Here it goes, from Associated Press, not usually considered an organ of the crazy right wing:

“Opponents of the fiscally conservative tea party movement say they plan to infiltrate and dismantle the political group to make its members appear to be racist, homophobe and moronic.

Jason Levin, creator of www.crashteaparty.org, said Monday the group has 65 leaders in major cities across the country….”

I am only a little bit worried. First, there is an excellent chance the announcement is a hoax or a simple publicity stunt. (AP rarely checks out its facts.) Second, Left-radical activists are not very smart. They don’t know much beyond breaking McDonald’s windows. They are also grossly under-informed because they rely on one far-out source of information only, if any. So, if they ever get there, the infiltrators will probably do something really stupid. They will shout “Down with the nigger!” or “Kill Obama!” in the middle of a crowd of respectable middle-class ladies, or carry a misspelled sign denouncing “fagots.” They will promptly be shouted down and thrown out. I say I am a little worried because it’s not that difficult to arrange to have a cameraman ready to capture the split-second moment for the benefit of the New York Times and MSNBC (that both believe that some stories are too good to check).

Note: Dear FBI and Dear Secret Service: I am describing here what I speculate infiltrators of the tea party movement will do. I am not advocating (NOT) the assassination of the President. For one thing, it would be a long-lasting catastrophe for the conservative movement if there were any attempt on the President’s life.

All the same, the tea party movement ought to be implacable in chasing away anyone pursuing anything but its own narrow, well-defined goals.

As always, I am concerned about the people in the middle who decide in fact the results of elections. And I stay in touch with young liberals. (I tell old liberals I have nothing to say to them, that they are not worth the effort because they will soon be dead.) I spend a long time talking with a left-leaning young man recently and learned a lot, or remembered important things that had slipped my mind.

First, let me describe it lest I am accused of setting up a straw man. He is a 22-year old college student at a reasonably good university. He gets very good grades, an item of information I am not inclined to ignore because I am a former professor. (Briefly, I believe that some students who received bad grades are smart people and I also believe that students who earn high grades regularly are always at least reasonably intelligent and that they have character.) The young man is also a hard worker; I know this for a fact. Finally, he possesses an intelligence well above average and he is intellectually serious. (He does not play games when he discusses an issue; he prizes his credibility.) This young paragon of virtues also voted for Obama and pretty well supports anything Obama does or says. He is a perfect foil for me.

My conversation left me impressed with what he did not know. Two things stick to my mind:

1 He seemed to be under the impression that the CEO of a publicly held company is the guy who owns the most stock. He seemed surprised and incredulous when I told him that there is no rule that any CEO should own any stock in the company he manages.

This young man knows little about the workings of capitalism. He seems to be informing himself on his own, in part by taking the trouble to talk to people like me. Yet, at this point, there is no way to count on him to way the pros-and-cons of government control of the economy.

2 He was skeptical also when I informed him of the idea that the US Constitution limits the power of the Federal Government to what it explicitly mentions. He does not know we have a deliberately negative constitution. He was further astonished when I tried to point out to him that the Constitution intends for the federal Government and the individual states to be different entities with separate powers and separate jurisdictions. My friend did not seem to know any more in this respect than many Frenchmen of my acquaintance who believe that the President of the United States appoints the governors of each state.

I am just reporting a conversation that’s still fresh in my mind. The report is not about a young man I subjectively judge better than average but about our educational system and about our media. The conversation helped me understand better the air of unreality I often catch in the commentaries of Obama supporter, as if they were aliens. Some or many are.

Next: I like this young man. I am going to blackmail or bribe him into reading our very short constitution. I am also thinking of persuading him to sue his high-school for fraud.

Pop-Quiz About World Politics for Those Born After 1980

The questions below are all True/False. Correct answers soon on this blog. (It’s stupid to cheat on an ungraded test!)

The Berlin Wall was built by the (Communist) German Democratic Republic to stop West Germans, citizens of the other, capitalist German Federal Republic, from taking refuge in their orderly, prosperous socialist country.

The Berlin Wall was built by the (capitalist) west German  Federal Republic to prevent its own citizens from emigrating to the socialist East Germany (to the GDR).

The Berlin Wall came down as the result of a peace conference that included the GDR (Communist East Germany), the west German (capitalist) Federal Republic, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

Jimmy Carter was President of the United States when the Berlin Wall fell.

Race in America Right Now

I live in Northern California where Indian restaurant food and French restaurant food taste alike. That’s because the first is Mexican Indian food and the second is Mexican French food. All the cooks are Mexican. That’s an interesting economic fact. That’s not the whole story by a long shot. America is a great country where menial jobs have for generations led to entrepreneurship and in time, to dignified economic independence. So, Mexican cooks sometimes become Mexican-American restaurant owners.

In my town, there are dozens of Mexican restaurants and taco places. One full-fare restaurants stands among all others. It’s located downtown. It’s spacious and clean. The food there is reasonably good and moderately priced. The restaurant is also perfectly organized for the kind of fare it serves. Scarcely more than five minutes elapse between the moment you place your order and the moment it’s brought to your table. The table is cleaned within one minute of your leaving it so that the next customer does not have to wait.

This Mexican restaurant does not belong to a junior college drop-out, aging surfer as is often the case around here. It was launched and it is staffed by Mexicans immigrants and by their grown children and their buddies. You might say that it’s a great American entrepreneurial ship with a wholly Mexican crew.

One day, I noticed there an old Chinese man bent over a broom, laboriously sweeping the restaurant’s floor. It would have been hard not to notice him in the middle of the team of young, fairly loud Mexican workers. Discreetly, I inquired from the Mexican manager, who the old guy was. “We have been warned,” he declared mysteriously.

Apparently, the California bureaucracy in charge of such things had counted racial heads in that obviously successful, proudly Mexican establishment. It must have been decided that an all “Latino” crew violated some law or other. And twisted arms to force greater “diversity.” I would guess there aren’t two hundred permanent residents of Chinese extraction in the whole town. There are other Asians but who do you count in that category for “diversity” purposes? There are plenty of Indians but I think they don’t count. Is it because of a particular historical experience, real or imagined, their ancestors did not have? Or is it simply because they don’t look right for the part. Would Filipinos count then? Often they have brown skin but they also sport somewhat slanted eyes, although, in general, less markedly slanted than most Chinese.

I am getting confused although I have good credentials as a social scientist.

For twenty years, I drove on a narrow but fast mountain road to and from work to cross the chain of hills that separates living from working. At the top of the hill, overlooking a grandiose panorama there is a restaurant. There has always been a restaurant there, always facing the same problem: By the time they reach the summit, drivers want to gun their motor to fifty miles an hour to be home sooner. The compulsion is almost irresistible. It kills whatever impulse there might be to stop for a snack, and especially for a drink. Since there is speeding on that road, it’s often crawling with highway patrol. (Bless their heart!) That’s one more reason to not stop.

Seven years ago, a Korean restaurant replaced whatever other kind was there before. It struggled for two years. Then, the owners threw in the towel, realizing that native-born Americans don’t stop to eat exotic food on their way from work. Neither are they likely to drive up twenty minutes from either side of the mountain for a formal dinner at a restaurant of unknown reputation leaving behind on both sides towns with a wide variety of eating places.

I am more curious about food than most people, I am sure. (I used to be a Frenchman, that’s why.) Yet, I never stopped to sample the Korean fare at the mountain top although I must have driven by a couple of thousand times. This Asian enterprise just failed, I would venture.

A youngish Iranian couple took over and turned the place into a shish-kebab restaurant. They were obviously recent immigrants. The husband staid in the kitchen and said little. The wife served in the restaurant where she spoke sufficient but hesitant English. I know because I stopped there for breakfast with my daughter on a Saturday morning, when the traffic was light.

Although there were no other customers, the fried eggs were late in coming and cold upon arrival. The proprietress did not look right to me. I would not say she was dirty but she lacked the scrubbed-up, coiffed, and made-up appearance one expects of a female breakfast waitress anywhere in America. The room was decorated with a profusion of plastic flowers, reminding me of a discount funeral parlor. There was no music. The silence in that restaurant was deadly. The bill was on the high side, as one might expect maybe in a “scenic” restaurant.

Driving back, week by week, I could read the couple’s growing desperation in the ever increasing size of the signs they put up to draw speeding drivers’ attention and interest. The last sign was built squarely on the side of the restaurant. It advertised, “Best lam-shops in California.” It was as tall as the restaurant building and a third as wide as it was long. Steadying it in the wind must have required good carpentry skills. Then, the sign disappeared and the place looked deserted. This other set of immigrants from a less-developed country had lost its battle, apparently.

Nowadays, there are often dozens of cars in the parking lot. On nice weekends, it’s nearly full of motorcycles. The new owners have invested in a new large sign they placed on top of the building. The restaurant is now called, “ The ‘X’ Road House.” It sports a massive redwood sculpture of a bear, or of an eagle. I don’t even remember what the subject is. All the same, it cries out, “Redneck.” Rednecks will get out of their car and off their bikes for a bacon omelet with other rednecks.

Whites: 1; people of color: 0. Smacks of racism, right?

I hear the following news on Fox News, that cesspool of progressive sentiment: A privately owned swimming club in a white town in Pennsylvania abruptly canceled its contract to give access to its pool to a summer camp with many black children. It seems that everyone cries “racism.” Nothing is less obvious.

First things first: Depriving children of bathing and swimming they have been promised is crappy behavior. The swimming club decision-makers deserve a special place in Hell for this action, whatever their motivation.

The victims’ minders and all commentators I have heard assume the motivation is good old-fashioned racism, in the manner of Alabama circa 1940. It disturbs me that no one seems willing to consider other explanations. I think it’s because people are afraid of where it would take them. Racism may be involved but it’s also a lazy and cowardly explanation. It lets all of us who are not racists off the hook.

Here is a ready alternative: The lazy press gave no details about the social identity of the black children who fell victim to this decision.

Suppose many of them, even some of them, were the children of ghetto mothers who have never worked and who have had four children from three different men, none of whom is around. Suppose further these children live normally in the midst of drive-by shooting over drug turf. If both my suppositions are correct, is it possible that the children’s behavior would be judged much more disruptive than is considered acceptable in a middle-class suburb?

Low tolerance toward disruptive behavior may say something about the intolerant but it’s not racism. It ‘s not the same as past racial segregation. And yes, there is still racial prejudice in America, amazingly little considering this country’s history. Recently, an entertainer who was a also a freak and almost certainly a drug addict received a more grandiose national funeral than Abe Lincoln. It’s a mathematical certainty that most of the mourners had to be white although the deceased was black (or still kind of black, a little, anyway).

I am referring above mostly to white racism. Judge Sotomayor is a racist, of course.

I don’t know if any of my speculations above about the black children in the pool incident is correct. They are all plausible, however. It would have been easy for the lazy media to investigate and report. There are always alternative explanations to a given behavior. Deciding that one is correct without examining the others is bad social science. It’s also irrational and intellectually dishonest.

It disturbs me that liberal and progressive low-level intellectual terrorism seems to have won in America. I don’t like a world where some thoughts may not be thought and hardly anyone breaks the rule.

Pres. Obama is in Ghana as I write. I think he chose Ghana because it’s one of four or five democratic countries in sub-tropical Africa.

He is trying to burnish his image as the first really black President without getting splashed by the genuine self-inflicted horrors of the African continent.

Black Africa watchers are up in arms about his inaction concerning aid to Africa. His budgets decrease aid to Africa in general. I think that part of the world needs aid less than it needs honest ways to make a living. That requires trade fairness. American agricultural subsidies are killing African agriculturists in world markets. They can’t compete against cotton, for example, that earns money before it’s even come out of the ground.

The President owns both the bully pulpit and absolute majorities. The press believes he walks on air, like Jesus, except more graciously. The Republican Party is busy trying to sort out its (heterosexual) sex scandals. Why doesn’t the President do the obvious against a practice – subsidizing large farming corporations – that has no ethical justification whatsoever? It’s certainly not good capitalism.

This is a real question.

CHECK MY ARTICLE WITH NIKIFOROV ON ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION FROM MEXICO, IN THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW (VOLUME 14 NUMBER 1, SUMMER 2009)

Fascism Explained

Note: Posted earlier. I think this piece needs a new airing. (I added some remarks at the end, following the President’s speech in Cairo.) Besides, I am busy trying to concoct a posting in French. Doing the accents on my keyboard is a bitch!

The aim of fascism as a political movement is to substitute for individual self-confidence based on skills and achievements uncritical trust in a leader or in an organization. Fascism as a form of government has no objective. Invariably, it ends either in misery or in a catastrophe.

The word “fascist” has been so overused – entirely by Left-leaning people, – that is has become an empty insult. I am guessing that most Americans alive today only know the term as a nasty epithet, perhaps with vague references to Italy’s Mussolini. This is too bad because fascism is a real socio-political phenomenon that took over a fair number of developed societies in the middle-part of the twentieth century. Fascism is also alive, under other names, in and out of power, in the semi-advanced but chronically stagnant societies of Latin America. I think that the fascist temptation is always, forever present in the background of modern societies, including democratic societies. (There are more discussions of contemporary fascism further down in this essay.)

I am addressing this brief description of fascism to my younger contemporaries, in the US and elsewhere, because fascism has become relevant to the current American situation. I am not trying to shout an alarm call as I would with a fast spreading forest fire, for example, just helping inform the curious and intelligent but justifiably ignorant as I always try to do on this blog. (I also do that on my radio program, every Sunday,on KSCO 1080 AM, Santa Cruz, 11AM-1PM.)

Much has been written about two aspects of the best known fascist movements and regimes. First, there have been many books about the most visible leaders of the most visible fascisms, especially about Hitler and Mussolini. These works have focused on the personalities, the families and the psychological antecedents of those leaders and, to a lesser extent, on the leaders’ inner psychology while they were in power. Second, there have been a number of notable studies of the immediate followers that is, on the large numbers of ordinary people who joined explicitly fascist organizations, such as the infamous SS in Germany. There is current resurgence of interest in the long-lived Spanish brand of fascism, under Francisco Franco. (Franco achieved his dictatorship after a bloody civil war. Yet he governed Spain peacefully for more than thirty years.)

To my knowledge, it’s difficult to find much about the more passive supporters of fascist movements, the great bulk of them. This is an important question because the foremost fascist party in history, the Nazi Party, came to power through largely constitutional means. Many ordinary Germans who were probably nice people supported it. It’s difficult to think about it because of so many movies but initially, supporters of fascism are sweet-faced and pure-hearted. It seems to me many Hitler and Mussolini supporters were hoodwinked, in part because they were too lazy to think of the consequences of their choices.

To make a long story short, the Nazis won the largest number of votes in a regular election, assumed government power and proceeded to eliminate democratic rule. Nazism was brought to power by the naivety of some and by the passivity of others. Mussolini’s Fascist Party seized power with considerable popular support. The short-lived but devastating French version of fascism, was formulated and led by a general and war hero to whom the democratically elected representatives of the Republic handed power willingly.

The less known, less flamboyant, but much longer-lasting Portuguese brand of fascism was invented by a mild-mannered professor of economics. Although he was installed after a military coup, he was for practical purposes, little opposed by Portuguese civil society for most of his rule. He led Portugal to the lowest economic rank in Europe, pretty much to Third World status. Similarly, Fascist movements came to power mostly peacefully in Hungary and in Romania in the late thirties and early forties. After WWII, General Perón of Argentina implemented a successful fascist program with the assent of the broad mass of Argentineans. He was even able to pull it off twice. He left the country in a shamble from which it has not recovered, thirty years later.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a conventional fascist state installed originally by a broad mass movement. It has limited political representation. Economically, it conforms faithfully to the historical fascist experience of initial success followed by a continuous descent into poverty. This, in spite of massive oil revenues. Its apparatus of repression includes draconian laws, summary arrests, trials without protection for the accused, capital punishment for a broad range of non-homicidal offenses, and prison murders. It looks completely familiar though the repression is done in the name of religion.

So, let me correct a common mistake: Fascism is not a political ideology imposed by force from above. It’s a mass movement. It requires both mute consent from some and a high degree of enthusiasm from others.

All fascist regimes ended in blood and disaster or in whimpering economic disgrace because they showed themselves unable to provide more than the bare necessities of life. Given the dramatic ending of the more dramatic fascist regimes, again, such as Hitler’s and Mussolini, we tend to ignore this prosaic truth: Fascism is a recipe for prolonged poverty, at best. That’s when it does not end in total economic ruination as in Germany. The end of Spanish and of Portuguese fascism were negotiated affairs conducted under Army pressures. Spain’s and Portugal’s economies began taking off immediately after the transfers of power to democratically elected government that lacked any economic experience.

Fascist economic programs never work.

In power, fascist parties invariably attempt to concentrate the levers of the national economy in a few government hands. They do so either by nationalizing outright the means of production, or by forcing employers and employees into the same state-controlled organizations. Often, they cynically call these organizations “labor unions,” or “trade unions.” This mode of organizations is technically called “corporatism.” The word does not imply that corporations have power but the reverse: The government or its agents make the main decisions for corporations. Of course, corporatism is the complete negation of capitalism which requires all-around competition. That includes the competition of owners and controllers of capital with workers. All-around competition is inherently messy. It’s the converse of a well-trained army marching in lock-step, for example. Fascists hate disorder.

Technical note: Nationalization, the government take-over of a company owned by stockholders almost never requires a majority of the shares of ownership. Under current laws, in the US, the control of 15% of the shares is usually sufficient. Frequently, it takes much less than 15% ownership for a government to dictate a corporation’s policies. That’s because the stock is usually widely dispersed, with the largest stockholders owning a very small % of the total.

Fascists concentrate economic control in the name of orderliness.

Fascist governments and fascist movements detest capitalism.

A fascist movement always preaches national unity. Fascists begin by deploring unpleasant partisanship. In the name of national unity, fascist parties seek to weaken open discussion. They use words such as “bi-partisan,” and “overcoming our differences,” repeatedly and until they appear to describe what is obviously desirable. The American practice of democratic governance by contrast is based explicitly on confrontations followed by negotiations, one issue at a time, between often-changing coalitions. When it comes to power, the fascist party abolishes competing political parties. It may do so by absorbing them or by persecuting them and murdering their members. The same fascist government often practices both forms of elimination. Thus, the powerful German Communist Party pre-1933, ended up partly in Nazi concentration camps, partly in the Nazi SS guard.

Fascist politics require the elimination of competing voices.

Fascist movements are often headed by providential leader, one who presents himself a a savior from a grave crisis, real or imagined ( real or imagined, and sometimes made up). The best known fascist leaders such as Hitler, Mussolini, and Perón, have also been charismatic. This is not absolutely necessary, providential is enough. Salazar of Portugal, a rotund, short man, was as lacking in charisma as anyone. Franco was downright sinister, even to many of his followers. Yet, personal charisma certainly helps a fascist leader achieve power. It helps his credulous followers suspend their sense of criticality.

Fascist success requires the unchecked veneration of leadership.

Fascist movement are usually not content to suppress dissent. They demand the sincere submission of individual wills to the benefit of a greater collective good. That’s because only inner submissions guarantees a long, unchallenged rule. The fascist movement imposes this demand first on movement followers and then, on all citizens.

Fascism places the collective (real or not) much ahead of the individual.

The muzzling of the press, serves both to eliminate the voicing of dissent and to achieve the submission of individual wills. A society with no press though is not the most desirable goal of a fascist government. Fascism seeks to whip up mass enthusiasm. So, the best situation is one where the press speaks in a unified voice in support of the fascist party, or of its leader. What is true of the press narrowly defined, is true of other mass media as well. Thus, Hitler, actively encouraged the development of a German cinema entirely to its devotion. So did the French fascist regime between 1940 and 1944 (with active German Nazi help, by the way.) Enthusiasm helps ordinary people bear burdens and it helps them suppress their pangs of conscience when they witness immoral actions.

Fascism requires the uncritical enthusiasm of many to achieve power, and more so to keep it because of the progressive impoverishment it causes, and also to gain toleration for its bad actions.

In some important historical cases, there is not much muzzling to be done because much the bulk of the mainstream media is already supporting the providential leader, before he comes to power. That was the case in Germany in and, to a lesser extent in Italy. Mussolini himself was a journalist, presumably with ability to manipulate the press rather than suppress it. Having the movie industry endorsing unconditionally a fascist leader would prove invaluable in a contemporary society because of the superior ability of movies to engage the whole person’s emotions along with intellect. Also, it’s likely today that many more people watch movies than read newspapers. This is especially true of the young.

The intelligentsia, the educated class, or a large fraction of it, invariably plays a role in the ascent or legitimation of fascist ideas. Martin Heidegger, then and later, an important German philosopher, became an active Nazi directly upon Hitler’s accession to power. In the case I know second best, that of France, foremost novelists, such as Drieu la Rochelle, and Louis Ferdinand Céline, were early and ardent supporters of fascism. Marcel Déat, a noted philosophy professor with the best academic credentials turned politician, was one of the most effective collaborators in the Nazi occupation of France. (It’s also true that many more French intellectuals supported the totalitarianism of the Left, instead. So?)

Fascism gains intellectual respectability from the endorsement of conventional luminaries and professional intellectuals.

Given their insistence on national unity, fascist movements must appear respectable to the political center, the main abode of respectability. The great American sociologist Martin Seymour Lipset famously called fascism, “the extremism of the (political) Center.” Hence, fascists cannot afford to suppress opposition openly by illegal means. Once they are in power, they change the laws so that anything they wish, including the mass murder of the mentally- ill and later, the attempted destruction of all Gypsies and all Jews within their reach, is made legal. Before they reach power however, they must appear civilized to avoid unnecessarily alarming ordinary middle-class citizens. In order to pursue both ends, fascist movement employ goons, organized extremists toughs whose actions they are able to condemn when expedient.

Fascist movement commonly employ goon associates to wreck democratic elections by putting unbearable pressure on electoral organs designed for a civil transfer of power. In a normal democracy, it often takes a small percentage of the votes cast to win an election. Thus, pressure tactics are often successful. Fascist movements sometimes sacrifice their goon wing once they are in power. Hence, Hitler liquidated his strong-arm SA guard in 1934. that is, after he had gained the chancellorship (more or less the presidency), when they had outlived their usefulness as a tool of street terror. Hitler may have had only a hundred or so SA leaders assassinated. The bulk of the SA rank and file learned to stay down. Many were incorporated into the other and rival strong-arm branch of the Nazi movement, the SS.

Fascists use extra-legal methods to gain political power, in addition to legal methods.

Fascist regimes are never conservative. They are revolutionary or radical reformists with an agenda of social justice. These words mean always and everywhere, “equalization.” There is some confusion in history books on this issue for several reasons. First, the head of Spanish fascism, General Franco had a Catholic agenda that looks culturally conservative on the surface. In fact, Franco tried to restore his own archaic version of Catholicism in a country where religious practice had gone down to near-zero levels among the men. Thus, Franco was not trying to conserve anything but to go back to a largely illusory, invented past.

An other source of confusion in that in several European countries and most dramatically, in Germany, big business circles eventually did lend their support to fascists governments. Two reasons for this. First big business leaders were then afraid of a Communism which had not yet demonstrated its incompetence as a solution to anything except the good life.

(More below on the relationship between fascism and communism.) Second, the owners and/or managers of large business enterprises are often natural collectivists. They tend to abhor real, unfettered competition and to prize workplace discipline. Fascist regimes protected them from the one and provided the other to perfection.

I believe that liberal scholars in the West have deliberately fostered the confusion, the idea that conservatism and fascism are two positions on the same axis. I don’t have the space to develop the bases of my belief here. Yet it’s a critical belief I developed during thirty years around liberal and left-wing scholars. Fascists and big business leaders love neatness above all. They detest the give-and-take and the frank competition of the market.

In summary: Fascism abhors the idea of the individual will of ordinary citizens. In this, it is the complete opposite of classical conservatism which recognizes only the individual. Fascism’s main achievement everywhere and in every epoch, is to make ordinary people poor, dependent and afraid. Fascism is not imposed by force. It wins through the support of the uncritically enthusiastic.

This is just and introduction. It’s easy to find good material to read on fascism. Or, you might just decide finally to read the great short book you pretended to have read in high school but never did get around to read first to last page: George Orwell’s “1984.”

On another posting: The relationship between historical fascism and communism. (Hint: Same damn thing!)

Addendum 6/11/09

Why are leftists and their friends so often anti-Semitic?

It was not just Hitler, Stalin also tried to deflect the problem of his country on to “the Jews.” That happened after the Nazi extermination camps had been discovered, largely by Russians soldiers.

Melanie Kirpatrick had a piece on Hugo Chavez’ persecution of Jews in Venezuela today.( “The Politics of Intimidation,” WSJ, 5/1/09). Hugo Chavez is one of the heroes of the Hollywood Left. In the same issue of the WSJ, an American Professor writes from Beirut, Lebanon about official Lebanese anti-Antisemitism. He reports that the television series, “The Nanny” is banned in Lebanon because the heroine Fran Drescher is Jewish! The real reason is that Lebanese have to appear as friends of the Palestinians (although they probably killed more Palestinians  over the years than Israelis did). The Palestinians are the other darlings of the Left. Anti-antisemitism is transitive! (Look up that word, knucklehead.)

I know, I know, most American Jews vote mostly on the Left. They espoused Obama as if he were the long-awaited Messiah. After the Cairo speech, they are not so sure. This does not tell me anything about the Left. It tells me about human folly and obduracy.