You know that the President is losing his support when even the most slavish of his lapdogs, those at The New York Times and the Washington Post, start suggesting that he is really a right winger in disguise. When the ideologues start to run for the exits and blame the actor and not the script, you know that the show is over.
President Obama would be doomed to mediocrity even if he were more of a leader, more intelligent, more independent, if he had more of that je ne sais quoi that his erstwhile supporters have suddenly discovered that he never had. It isn’t Obama who has failed, it is the current mindset of the nation, the assumptions and policies that have converted the idea of “progress” since the 1930s from a welfare state with industry to a welfare state without industry to a nanny state to a crumbling nanny
state. President Obama is a prisoner of the assumptions that brought him to power.
We have reached an end of an era and it just a question as to how long it will be before we recognize that fact and begin a search for a replacement. Before then, prosperity will return, but it will be based on a concept even more tenuous than its predecessors: real estate, dot-com commerce, subprime mortgages and the prosperity will last even shorter, and the recovery from its collapse will take even longer, than the previous collapse. Regulations will be passed and won’t protect us, politicians and their friends will get richer and the rest of us will get poorer.
At some point, someone in power will recognize what a lot of people already know: that you can’t build prosperity on politics, that redistributing wealth is different than creating wealth, even if done on a grand scale, that you need decentralized decision making, that you need real industries, not fake ones created by legislation, that political power only creates corruption, not a better world.
That someone, if he or she ever comes along, will be in position to determine the course of the American commonwealth for the next 70 years, until that course no longer serves the nation. Until then, we are stuck in the same stagnant intellectual air that existed in the 1850s and the 1920s. Does the President seem an empty suit? So did James Buchanan. Does he seem detached from reality? So did Herbert Hoover. President Obama can’t change this state of affairs nor will his successors be able to do so unless one of them wakes up to the new reality and tries to change the system, instead of trying to improve the old rotten system.
To some extent, this day of reckoning was built into the very basis of the New Deal. All of those crusty old Vermont farmers and those plutocrats with diamond stickpins in their cravats were correct in their predictions, just off a little in their timing. You can’t discourage wealth creation forever before you have to live off your capital and you can’t foster wealth redistribution forever before you start turning the country against itself.
And the winners of this era are certainly to blame for not knowing when enough is enough:
1. Public Sector Labor Unions – as the private sector labor unions have shut down our industrial base, aided by foreign competition and weak corporate management, public sector labor unions have been getting increasingly powerful since President Kennedy authorized their creation in 1961 and they have been irresponsible in the use of their power. Without the understanding of economic restraints that traditional labor leaders had, public labor leaders just think of wealth creators as individuals to be milked.
2. Lawyers – who have managed to increase their portion of the national paycheck without creating jobs or progress of any kind and who have managed to make litigation no longer a means to redress society’s victims, but a growth industry in itself.
3. Wall Street – which no longer sees its main task as fueling the growth of the economy, but as devising instruments which no one understands, developing a rationale for selling them to people and bailing out quickly enough so that someone else is left holding the bag during the inevitable collapse.
But all of these winners are only taking advantage of the structure of society. Eras can change by adapting to new realities and reducing the pain of social adjustments for the average citizen, but that isn’t happening today. All of the “reforms” proposed by Washington will only strengthen these groups and will not address the underlying problems. Why not? And, more importantly, who or what in a free society is to blame for an unresponsive approach to changes in circumstance? It is not wise to blame politicians, who only have to answer to the voters who elected them.
The primary problem is a matter of intelligence, of how society analyzes its problems and how this analysis gets disseminated. Phrasing the problem this way, you get the two obvious candidates:
1. Academia – academia has abandoned its traditional task of seeking the truth. As far as it is concerned, it has FOUND the truth and its only task is to broadcast it. This becomes more of a propaganda effort than the sort of careful analysis one used to expect from academia.
The recent release by hackers of thousands of emails from the world’s leading climate center is illustrative. It is hard to blame mankind for global warming as long as we have the precedent of the global warming of 1,000 years ago, when it became so warm that Vikings established farming communities so far north in Greenland that today such communities are buried under sheets of ice. So the “scientists” at this center not only engaged in selective data compilation to fake their results, but launched a blacklisting campaign against any scientist or publication which threatened to deviate from the party line. To call this McCarthyism is to slander Joe McCarthy. Tailgunner Joe, for all his faults, never destroyed a body of science by ruining the lives of people merely for following the best practices of scientific inquiry.
If academia has replaced self interest with what was once its primary purpose of studying the world, one should expect that its answers are not going to be helpful in deciding how the world is changing, nor can it be expected to craft the solutions that will address those changes. This isn’t the first time this happened. Academia didn’t think much of Abe Lincoln150 years ago and the abolitionist movement was treated something like the Tea Party is today. Similarly, in the 1920s, academia was lined up with the status quo, not the revolutionaries of the New Deal. Academia, for all of its advocacy of “progress,” tends to rely on a set of assumptions which make it the most conservative of institutions.
2. The media – similarly, the media thinks of itself as progressive, but tends to promote the status quo. This tendency is exacerbated these days by the fact that most newspapers are local monopolies and the broadcast media tends to be just fluff, relying on the newsprint media for any real reporting. The result is an absence of the sort of marketplace of ideas that makes intellectual output more reliable.
This failing is magnified by the self defeating bias of the press. When a Republican is in the White House, the media assumes the role of the accusing class, finding fault with everything, but they suddenly become the excusing class when a Democrat takes office. While this magnifies the errors of Republicans and conceals the faults of Democrats, it has the effect of giving Republicans the chance to fix things while letting Democratic initiatives spin out of control. Where would we be in Iraq if press criticism hadn’t forced President Bush to overrule his advisors and institute the surge? And wouldn’t Obamacare be less hated if the media had shamed the Administration into not issuing all of those waivers to its contributors? The ultimate irony of press bias is that it benefits those it opposes and undermines those it supports. Too bad no one at The New York Times is bright enough to recognize this.
But perhaps the era would be drawing to a close anyway. You can dole out an economy’s rewards to the politically useful instead of to the economically useful for only so long before society as a whole pays the price. We still don’t have the leadership to do anything about it yet and the ideas to create a new paradigm are still in the nascent stage. All we have is the Tea Party Movement and certain members of the radical left who know something is wrong and needs to be fixed and who are grappling for answers. For the next twenty years or so, that will be the intellectually exciting place to be.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
