Debating Leftistanis on Radio

Before I presented on my radio show the essay entitled: “Journey Into Leftistan,” also available on this blog, a man I stage in the essay contacted me through Facebook. John Wolfe offered to debate me on my radio show. ( “Facts Matter” comes on on Sunday on KSCO Santa Cruz, 1080 AM. It’s from 11 am to 1 pm. You can catch it on-line while it’s going on.)

Mr Wolfe’s offer was serious and I treated it lightly at first. I shouldn’t have done that. It happened because whenever I converse with someone who calls himself a “progressive,” I can’t control the devil in my that pushes me to toy with with his mind and try to make him cry. I shouldn’t. I will try to not do it in the future. Of course, I can’t promise anything, because of the same devil, obviously. In spite of all, I had most of the day to consider Mr Wolfe’s offer. I have decided to decline it. The reasons are listed below.

1     My radio station, KSCO, is right in the middle of Santa Cruz, one of the worst sixties time warps in the world. I am guessing my listeners don’t need more left-wing exposure. I am guessing they cannot avoid leftist viewpoints if they try. Why, we have the University of California at Santa Cruz on our hill! Angela Davis is a (quiet) full Professor of “The History of American Consciousness”there (o rretired from it). If you don’t know who she is, that means you are wonderfully young and possibly innocent. Look her up. It will be fun, I promise.

If a handful of my listeners tell me that my perception is mistaken, that they would like me to debate Mr Wolfe on air (if nothing else, for the sport), I will retract my decision.

2   Mr Wolfe and I almost certainly have irreconcilable differences with respect to basic values. I believe that the best way to avoid incipient violence is to threaten the would-be aggressor with overwhelming force, with much greater violence. I and the police forces of all civilized nations are on the same page about this. Mr Wolfe has shown on his Facebook that he is in favor of “proportionate response” to aggression. It means that if someone throws a stone through your window, you are only allowed to throw one stone through his window, if that.

If I debated Mr Wolfe on my show, I am pretty sure that our value differences would quickly bleed into the debate. That would be a waste of time for all, especially for the listeners. Values come from experience filtered through judgment. They never change through discussion.

3  Mr Wolfe has shown on his Facebook that he has access to a multitude of facts that have never reached my ears. This, although I confess to listening to National Public Radio several hours each day. That’s in addition to reading the WSJ, and Le Figaro every day, plus the Weekly Standard, plus Atlantic Monthly, and watching tons of American cable network television, and watching the French-language network TV5, also every day. And, of course, I rush to Al Jazeera in English on-line every time something new happens in the Arab world.

Given all this, I would have to ask Mr Wolfe to name his mysterious sources for his facts, and then, I would have to check them out. I am technically and intellectually incapable of doing this while on the air. Not doing so would be taking the serious moral risk of helping Mr Wolfe spread false rumors. Of course, I believe that facts matter, not a little, a whole lot. Incidentally, I am not calling Mr Wolfe a liar. I just know that many people, especially reformers, find whatever facts they need wherever because their bullshit detector is permanently on the “off” position.

4     If none of the above had any validity, I would still have to wonder whether it’s appropriate to give a tribune to someone with Mr Wolfe’s inexplicable emphasis. Here is what I mean: Mr Wolfe is obsessed with Israel and its misdeeds, real and invented. Even if everything Mr Wolfe and his friends alleged about Israeli atrocities were true, even if he they had left some out, even if there were twice more real killings by Israelis than they allege, the fact would remain that Israel in its whole existence would have killed fewer Arabs than Saddam Hussein in one average year. I am completely sure, Mr Wolfe never lifted a little finger to denounce Saddam Hussein’s massacre of Arabs. Mr Wolfe’s obsession is in itself objectionable even if he is right on everything. He would have to give me a legitimate reason for his obsession with Israel before I would give him the mike.

He might surprise me and do just that. I would enjoy making a tight U-turn on this one. In the meantime, no, I don’t want to give special airtime to “progressive” Mr Wolfe. If he bothers to call my show, as he could have done today, I will certainly bring him right to the head of the line, if nothing as a courtesy to someone who calls from far-away Tennessee. And, of course, he can use as much space as he wishes in a comment on this blog to this posting and to the one that preceded it.

Union Busting!

Governor Walker of Wisconsin is striving to midwife a new legal order corresponding better to present economic reality than the old one does. Union busting was a moral crime in 1911. Today it’s a tool of progress.

Some historical reminders:

In 1911, industrial workers doing painful and dangerous work were also badly paid. They organized in a second wave of labor unions collectively to bargain to improve both their working conditions and their pay. Their adversaries were owners of privately owned companies and stockholders of publicly traded companies. Stocks were concentrated in few hands, ownership of private companies in even fewer hands. Only fairly prosperous to very rich individuals owned stocks. In 1911, labor unions were organizing the miserable and the merely poor to extract from the rich a bigger share of what they produced together. Theirs was largely a fight between the poor and ill-treated, on the one hand, and the rich, on the other.

Reel forward 100 years. In 2011 most union members are public employees, including teachers. They are better paid than workers in the private sector. If you combine all benefits, of all kinds of workers, public sector workers earn twice more than the other guys, on the average. It could be because they, the public employees, are somehow more qualified than their private sector cousins. Somehow, you don’t hear the unions make that claim. Or maybe, they work  longer hours or simply harder!

Most public employees, especially teachers perform work that is not especially painful or dangerous (some do: cops, firemen, prison guards.) In addition, most public employees have tenure in fact: They are extremely difficult to fire. It used to be the case that they had tenure instead of the right to belong to unions and to strike. Now, they have both. It does not look fair. Furthermore, they often have a monopoly in fact: If I don’t like the building inspector who tells me what I cannot do with my own house, I don’t have the option to go to another. Public employees’ performance is unlikely to improve much, whatever they do, because they are protected from the improving effects of competition.

Digression: university tenure is completely different: It’s a very competitive process, including in public universities. In public schools, I think all you have to do is hang in there, keep your nose clean for a few years and you become immune to firing.

A lot has changed since 1911. Public employee union claims are always actually a dispute with taxpayers. Union members who make more money are extracting money from those who make less money. The situation has turned around 180 degrees from 100 years ago. From the poor against the rich, it has become the rich against the poor.

In the private sector, unions are still competing with owners, stockholders, but now, the stockholders are Mr and Mrs Everybody, not a bunch of rich people (over 50% of American households hold stock or bond) Interestingly, the largest share-holders of American companies are … labor union pension funds.

The privileges won by union members in the public sector are now great enough to threaten to bankrupt states and cities.

Under these current conditions, union busting has become a public safety duty.

Unions are losing the public relations battle, I suspect. “Union busting” does not inflame as it used to. The words remind you of a historical movie. Similarly their nasty habit of restricting the term “working Americans” to teachers who earn $60,000 a year and to firemen who make $100,000, does not sit well with carpenters and metal workers who earn $30,000 in a good year. Thanks to the Wisconsin confrontation, I, myself, discovered that a lackluster high-school teacher in NY could retire at 55 and die having earned much more than I retiring at 65, and live better in the meantime. (I am a retired university professor. I can’t help but remember that many of those high-paid, spoiled public-school teachers are my former “C” students. I said, “many” not “all.”) The solidarity loaded terms, such as “union busting” and “American workers” used to trigger automatically, does not go far nowadays. I think it’s mostly counterproductive. Nonetheless, they can’t stop, on television or elsewhere. As usual groups are prisoners of their own language. They cannot see beyond it. That’s how they lose, at least, in peaceful societies such as ours.

Many of the union and pro-union demonstrators in Wisconsin are both honest and honestly blind and deaf. Their indignation is not feigned; it’s not cynical. A pleasant-sounding Salinas city worker called my radio program yesterday (3/6/11 on “Facts Matter” on KSCO Santa Cruz 1080 AM, Sundays 11 am to 1 pm.) He told me politely that I was probably mistaken, that I was probably thinking about the overpaid muckymucks, his bosses, not of ordinary city workers like himself. Of course, I asked him a few questions about his situation. I did not ask his name or what his job was, nor his salary. He volunteered that he earned less than people doing the same work on the outside. I believed him. Then I inquired about his retirement benefits. It turned out that he will be a able to retire at 55 with 60% of his pay guaranteed, forever. That’s beginning in his job at the age of 25. He had not thought through the fact that he might likely live off his retirement benefits for as many years as it took him to earn them. He appeared not to have realized that at 55 most people work, that he could take another job and possibly end up with 160% of his current pay, at least for a few years. He did not seem to be aware that private sector workers of all kinds today wonder if they will be able to retire at 67. The guy, again, obviously a nice person, had not thought about the rest of us who pay his salary and his benefits. That’s what happens when you are protected from life and live among others who are equally protected.

A harsh-sounding few words about the teachers: Wisconsin students don’t perform well overall. I know it’s not necessarily the teachers’ fault. Other factors matter for sure. But, I am left with the following inescapable inference: Either, they are not good teachers by and large, or teachers are not very important. Either way, they can join the rest of us and accept some sacrifices.

PS   For all this, I am in favor of the right to collective bargaining, not a right protected by the Constitution, but an important right nevertheless. The reason is that I think one cannot expect an individual, or a small group, to stand up to a large bureaucracy that employs him or it. That’s true whether the bureaucracy is a government entity or a private company. Recourse to the courts is difficult and expensive for everyone, especially for the individual(s) seeking redress. Fairness requires unions although they promote unfairness right now.

Read my essay on this blog: “Karl Marx Was (almost) Right.”

A Blueprint for a Communist Take-Over

I spend much time on my blog and on the air (“Facts Matter” Sundays, 11 am-1pm on KSCO Santa Cruz 1080 AM) debunking conspiracy so-called “theories.” (They are never real “theories.”) My main point is that any 26-year old upstart with a blog, any graduate of a third-rate college, even any alert janitor, can earn fame an fortune by revealing any half-way serious conspiracy. But, but, as I have noted before, there are tacit conspiracies. They are not really conspiracies in the usual sense but shared cultural understandings of how the world world and specific shared goals. To put it another way, four horses don’t have to confer to pull together. Somehow, this reminds me of communism.

A reminder: Communist parties and authoritarian Marxist movements under various other names have generally taken power guns in hand or thanks to the guns of others. There are two exceptions: the Czechoslovak Communist Party between 1945 and 1948 and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1979-1980. I leave the latter example mostly aside for the time being although it’s well worth reading about it. 1948 Czechoslovakia was the most literate, the most developed and the most industrialized of all the countries that fell to communism. Please, make a mental note of this.

The story of the Communist take-over of Czechoslovakia is interesting as a non-military scenario. I am completely sure that no American communists under any name, will take over the US through a military putsch. This country’s armed forces comprise people who have taken an oath to defend the Constitution, not any particular President or any particular Congress. There are only reasons to believe that they take their oath seriously. Unlike the case in military coup-type countries, the US rank-and-file are neither hapless draftees nor the sons of starving peasants who can be trained like fierce attack dogs. Instead, they are better educated, mentally healthier, and more religious than the general population.

So, the relevant intellectual exercise is this: How would a small, radical group with a collective ideology go about implementing a Czechoslovak kind of take-over of this country? I mean by using the conventional political process, including formally valid elections.

Here are some of the things such a small group of revolutionaries would do:

First of all a small group of dedicated revolutionaries would have to practice “entrisme” successfully. This French word refers to the practice of softly entering into a variety of non-political organizations in order to take control of their levers of command. Trotskyst groups everywhere have been using this strategy to gain an influence extremely disproportional to their tiny numbers. (A French Prime Minster for several years was a “former” Trotkyst. Similar infiltrations took place in Germany.)

Leftist entristes are opportunistic. They will grab anything they can, even the Little League if need be. In this country, you would expect their chief targets to be: labor unions, quasi-religious mass movements with ill-defined beliefs and goals (such as many environmentalist groups); some churches, and voluntary associations intended to relieve various forms of human misfortune. The latter constitute especially attractive targets because they are chronically short of funds to do all the good they sincerely wish to do. They can thus be bought with small government largess and at the cost of few pangs of conscience.

It would use legal means and nearly-legal means to erode popular attachment to constitutional government. It would do so by means of myriads of small breaches that would generate tolerance much the way one can develop a tolerance for bee venom and other poisons. It would do so also by bribing a fraction of the population with arguments of the following form: Whether it is completely constitutional or not, many people, including yourself, find themselves immediately better off thanks to this government measure.

It would use, annex and exploit the existing national culture. It would produce, groom. construct a savior resembling something in the culture. If this took place in India, the providential leader would seem like the avatar of a beloved and familiar Hindu god. If it took place in Russia (again), the providential leader would remind one of Peter the Great, a somewhat brutal but effective ruler. If it happened in a genuinely Christian country such as the US….

It would exploit the national culture in another, more refined way. It would use indubitably shameful aspects of the national history to mute the criticality of many in the educated classes, beginning with academics. A fraction of the upper strata (which have generally more formal education than the rest) would thus support the radical group out of a sense historical shame.

It would develop and apply quickly economic policies designed to turn large numbers into government dependents. Government social services in general achieve this end. Services the provision of which induce mass impoverishment do it faster. Creating a large new entitlement that the country cannot afford generates masses of government-dependent people in three ways. Directly: what the government gives it can take away. Indirectly because shrinking real incomes make people feel vulnerable and more desirous of government help. Directly again: In a poor economy offering little opportunity for personal success, government jobs look more appealing than they do in a booming capitalist economy.

It would intimidate economic groupings and associations that oppose the take-over with threats of precisely directed tax hikes and massive fines.

It would prepare the general population to tolerate large-scale, extra- judicial repression by trumpeting the small deeds and alleged seditious intentions of tiny and insignificant fringe groups, armed groups if possible. It would actively infiltrate such fringe groups. In some cases, it would create them. (In every society, there are small numbers of excitable individuals who can be incited fairly easily.)

Finally, if the target country were a superpower as the US is, the leadership would do its best to ensure that it’s less feared and less respected internationally.

Here are more government actions typical of attempts to socialize an economy not limited to communist coups:nationalizing segments of the production apparatus and gaining control over banks and other financial institutions.The GMtake-0ver does not amount to much economically but it opens the way for the crucial idea of government-owned industries.Bailing out failing banks plays the same role.

This program for dictatorship would be the all the more successful if the revolutionaries had media support. I means media as in newspapers, conventional television networks. and the movie industry.

Do I suggest that President Obama is the leader of a communist revolution? I am less and less willing to say categorically “No.” That’s in part because he seems to have come from nowhere, as if he had been invented by central casting. There are important parts of his biography that don’t ad up. As a retired university professor, I am especially perplexed by his unwillingness to divulge his undergraduate grades. What if he had a C- GPA at 22, like both Pres. Bush and Senator Kerry? Would anyone really care? For how long would it be news? Those who are inclined to think so already know he is an affirmative action wonder. What is the real reason for this stubborn dissimulation of presumably trivial facts? I can’t stop wondering.

Yet, the President does not appear intelligent enough or well educated enough to play the part of a Lenin. (The leader of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution was both very intelligent and very cultured.) But he might just be a fairly moderate figurehead manipulated by a small group of well financed extremists with a well understood agenda. Lenin called people like Obama “useful idiots.” Large numbers of mild liberals would follow stupidly because their power of analysis and their mental habits do not incline them to criticality. Also, many are cowards. When the Red Army put the German communist party in power in East Germany, the local social democrats followed like sheep. (German Social Democrats in 1950 were pretty much like the core of the current Democratic Party in this country today.)

Note: The claim that President Obama is not very cultured is not a gratuitous insult in the mold of  the old Bush Insanity Disorder on the left. I reached this evaluation after listening to many of the President’s speeches (too many). It’s obvious that he often stumbles on ordinary words, like someone who never read beyond the assigned reading. On a recent occasion, I heard him repeatedly refer to Navy “corpsemen, ” as if the Navy had personnel specializing somehow in corpses, in cadavers. The fact that it happened several times, that he never caught himself, also does not speak well of his intelligence.

Paradoxically, the scenario above makes sense in Marxist terms. (Like nearly anyone who has read Karl Marx beyond the few easy pages of the Communist Manifesto, I am not quick to dismiss Marxism as a mode of analysis.) Marx never anticipated that a communist revolution would first explode in backward countries like Russia and China. He was thinking more in terms of Germany, and even of Great Britain, the USA of their time. It’s notable that the few Marxist analysts of the failure of communism everywhere argue precisely that it was never intended for poor and backward countries. Face-to-face, at scholarly meetings for example, they will tell you that communism has not failed because it has never been tried. It’s a program for an advanced, rich country, they claim.

Ethnography of Liberalism : I

There used to be an academic discipline called “Ethnography.” It was an inherently humble endeavor, the description of others, of usually exotic, far away, little-known groups. I mean head-hunters of Borneo, and Pygmies from central Africa. Ethnography had little pretension to “explain” as does modern Anthropology for example. I am engaged in a continuous study of the Left. I am doing daily, indefatigable ethnography of that quaint but interesting tribe.

In spite of my public identity as a conservative (listen to my radio show: Facts Matter on KSCO Santa Cruz 1080AM, every Sunday from 1am to 1pm, also available on-line), I am proud to say I have good entries into the liberal world of my small ultra-liberal and “progressive” town. I don’t know the liberal establishment and I think it does not know me, or it ignores me. I am in daily touch with the rank-and-file though. (I will not blow my cover by telling you how. You will have to take my word for it.) Because of my previous life in academia, I also know liberals. and even progressives, outside of my immediate area. I am talking of people with whom I have personal contacts at will, not National Public Radio.

Old-fashioned ethnographers used to exploit “native informants.” Those were local indigenous people who were willing to talk, trustworthy and who, the ethnographer had reasons to believe, were well informed. Lately, I have been having short and long-distance conversations with a younger man, a very moderate liberal, a liberal-leaning centrist, you might say. I have known the man for along time. He is intelligent, very hard-working and resourceful. He has even demonstrated an entrepreneurial bent. More importantly, I know him well enough to be sure that he prizes his personal credibility. My liberal friend is a valid native informant. I am not building a straw-man to burn later in triumph.

I asked him to give me the real reasons why he voted for Obama. He gave me many. We had several longish email exchanges. At first, he had trouble understanding “reasons,” confusing them with “motivations.” Then his reasons did not stand up to superficial examination. It turns out, he voted as he did because he wanted to believe in “change we can believe in.” He also spoke a great deal of President Bush’s “idiocy.” Upon closer examination, there was no “idiotic” act or pronouncements he could think of. There were only several statements of moral distaste for war and hesitant confessions of run-of-the-mill snobbery (See my essay on this blog: “Are Liberals Just Snobs?” posted 02/1610.) My friend did not say so himself but I got the feeling that he allowed the late-night shows, with their squeaky, creaky humor, to summarize his political positions. (I am not sneering; remember that I described him as hard-working person. He has a lot on his plate) Hence the non-sequitur regarding Pres. Bush’s alleged “idiocy.”

My native informant – who may have voted for Bush earlier – seemed to have voted as much against the non-running Bush as for Obama. He is quite capable intellectually to parse the difference between Bush Republicanism and the McCain brand. I am certain he did not do it. When the chips were doing, he chose to not think things through.

Then, the conversation drifts to health care, of course. He tells me point-blank that he is for the public option. That’s because his younger brother cannot afford health insurance. My native informant is a self-made man, I know this for a fact. I am obviously a self-made man, I know for a fact that he knows it. He should know that his reasoning has no moral currency. I tell him I think he should buy insurance for his brother. I ask him what reason he could possibly have to ask me to pay for his brother’s insurance. The conversation stops. I think I know why but I am just guessing: He does not want to take the giant step that consists in recognizing that the government has no money except what it takes from us, from me, among others, and from the coffee-shop waitress who earns nine dollars an hour.

In the end, I think it all boils down to feeling good irrespective of consequences. My friend is not short of intelligence; he is educated well above average; he is well informed about the way business works. He just insists on listening to his inner child more than to his reason.

I know what it’s like although I am conservative and a libertarian. I have an inner child too. It’s just that, every so often, I take the little wimp out and beat his ass.

Watch for more Ethnography of Liberalism on this blog soon.