It’s going to be an ugly 8 months

We can expect the left to continue with its new line of attack: the Right is a bunch of crazy, possibly violent nutters.  It’s all they have.  Obama has been steadily declining in the polls, the economy doesn’t seem likely to improve quickly, and the key legislative accomplishments of the Democrats are the stimulus bill and the health care bill, both unpopular.  Consequently we can expect the time until the November elections to be marked by increasingly desperate and inaccurate smears from the Left.  For example, the column linked above neglects both the IRS plane attack and the shooting outside the Pentagon, both carried out by loonies fed on the conspiracies of the far Left.

Health care and the eschaton

I’ve been trying to understand the proponents of the health care bill.  Moral fervor for the cause is derived from anecdotes about people who have suffered due to lack of coverage, with the presumption that such suffering would not happen under a better system.  Statistics extend this in argument, of course, but the basic motive is “these horrible things must be stopped.”  The presumption that health care in America is a mess (which I would not entirely disagree with) is quickly followed by the assertion the federal government can improve coverage and efficiency, either through regulation or a takeover of health care.

It’s this point that interests me–the almost reflexive faith in federal action as the panacea.  One can certainly construct a morally outraged case against government health health care by using disastrous examples from nations like Britain or Canada, and such has often been done in the course of the health care debate.  There seems to be no shortage of horrors in any health care system.  Both sides resort to comparative and statistical arguments meant to demonstrate that their preferred form will have fewer (though it has been interesting to see how many have been fazed by Megan McArdle’s proposed empirical benchmarks).  However, the average partisan (and I have to include myself in this to a fair extent) lacks the knowledge, ability, or even inclination to thoroughly set standards for health care and then evaluate them dispassionately.  That is, decisions are reached before we begin to parse infant mortality, life expectancy, etc… and it’s a rare person who will change their mind based on these.

Thus my interest in understanding the motives of those in favor of nationalized health care: what presuppositions induce them to instinctively reach out to centralized government as a solution?  Perhaps the best answer is the implicit reverse of the Marxist critique of religion.  In the famous phrase, religion is the opiate of the masses.  God is a projection, and religion a way to keep the oppressed masses in line by holding out the hope of heaven.  Present misery is seemingly less important given the promise of eternal bliss.  Religion is an illusion concocted to keep man from addressing his real problems.

This may be reversed by an Augustinian critique of Marxism: the promise of earthly utopia is a fraud designed to distract men from what matters most (the fate of their souls) and to keep them from realizing what limited goods they may within the earthly city.  The City of God is subsumed within the City of Man (the eschaton is immanentize in Voegelin’s famous phrase), and government takes on a sort of divinity as the lust for justice (see Rebellion within the Brothers Karamazov for the best description of it that I’ve seen) blinds men to their own limited and fallen nature.

Christianity looks to God for ultimate justice and comfort, when that is abandoned man will seek them within his own institutions.  The central government, as the most powerful force around, is naturally the chief receptacle of this displacement.  Consequently, government is endowed with expectations that it cannot meet, such as the belief that it can effectively run the health care of 300 million citizens.

Keep people as pets

I think that E. J. Dionne is trying to be magnanimous in this piece, but the subtext is that the only good conservative is a dead conservative.  Like others on the Left, Dionne concedes the value of a conservative movement as a check upon the excesses of Progressivism, provided, of course, that said conservatism is impotent.  And composed of the dead.  He name checks Buckley, Kirk, and Irving Kristol, but no living conservatives like George Will, Ross Douthat, or even David Brooks.  And these conservative greats are pulled from their graves primarily to cudgel the current Right with.

Oddly enough, he is self-aware of his our ridiculousness, acknowledging early that conservatives “are rightly suspicious that when those on the left recommend a “proper” role for the right, they usually want a tame creed that doesn’t really challenge any of the progressive fundamentals.”  At the end he notes that he may have just done this himself.

The problem is that he does not allow conservatives any room to maneuver.  A conservatism of Buckleys and Kirks may be intellectually impressive and personally charming, but it would be a very small movement.  If conservatism is to be more than an occasional polite questioning and criticism of progressive projects it needs political muscle, a point that Buckley and Kirk understood quite well as they shaped a political movement.  Progressives are unlikely to reconsider their follies because Jeeves-like coughs issue from a few intellectuals and pundits.

And great conservatives have always known this.  Edmund Burke not did write and pass around an academic treatise on the problems of the French Revolution, he wrote some of the greatest pamphlet ever written, eventually urging unceasing war upon the revolutionary regime.  The struggle to overturn Roe v Wade could hardly be confined to a few law review articles.  The struggle against the Soviet Union needed more than peer-reviewed papers in obscure political science journals.

Perhaps in an aristocracy or monarchy conservatism may get by with a few prudent court advisers, but in a democracy, conservatism must be at least somewhat populist or else it will die.   Dionne admits the necessity of conservative ideas (suspicion of innovation and grand schemes, respect for tradition and custom, and belief in a fallen and fairly fixed human nature), but disallows the simplifications and compromises necessary to put them into practice.  The Tea Party folks may lack some urbanity and decorum, but conservatism needs their votes, donations, and time.  Glen Beck might be an oaf (I don’t pay enough attention to him to provide a definitive opinion), but he’s knocked a few particularly foul leftists out of positions in the Obama administration.  The “I <3 capitalism” crowd might have a couple philosophical screws loose, but they provide often invaluable help against statism.

Dionne complains that parts of the Right have become utopian (which is true enough), but is it any less utopian to refuse to work with Rush, Hannity, the Tea Party, and Sarah Palin?  Dionne’s beloved health care bill only made it through on the basis of bribery, intimidation, and the rest of the usual unsavory congressional repertoire.  Does he really want to start comparing the relative virtue of the means used by conservatives and progresssives in practical politics?

In the end, the honesty of Dionne’s column depends on whether any effective conservatism could ever be pure enough for him.  I don’t think any could, which means all the theoretical deference to conservatism is just hot air.

Vice deputy assistant condom enforcement officer

With Obamacare about to pass, I think the best comments might come from Mark Steyn’s column yesterday.

On Thursday, the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board voted to set up a committee to examine whether condoms should be required on all pornographic film shoots within the Golden State.

California has run out of money, but it hasn’t yet run out of things to regulate.

For a government regulatory hearing, the testimony was livelier than usual. The porn star Madelyne Hernandez recalled an especially grueling scene in which she had been obliged to have sex with 75 men. The bureaucrats nodded thoughtfully, no doubt contemplating another languorous 18-month committee assignment looking into capping the number of group-sex participants at 60 per scene. In future, if a porn actress finds 75 men waiting for her on the set, they’ll be bureaucrats from Sacramento’s Condom Enforcement Squad…

One can make arguments for permitting porn and for banning porn, but there isn’t a lot to be said for the bureaucratization of porn. Hard to believe there will be dull, bespoke California bureaucrats looking forward to early retirement on gold-plated pensions who’ll be getting home, sinking into the La-Z-Boy and complaining to the missus about a tough day at the office working on the permits for Debbie Does the Fresno OSHA Office….

California is bankrupt: The dependent class and the government class that issues the checks to the dependent class have squeezed out the poor boobs in the middle who have to pay for it all. Everybody knows this. But a state that already has a Bureau of Home Furnishings cannot restrain itself from setting up a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation — or, anyway, an impact study to study whether the Bureau of Impact Studies should study the impact of a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation.

And I naively thought that liberals believed sex was a private act between 2, 3, or 76 consenting adults…  The connection to Obamacare is not that it currently seeks to follows California in regulating condom use during porn shoots, but that it will firmly put the federal government’s long, grubby fingers everywhere.  When the government pays for your health care, nearly everything you do becomes of regulatory interest.  The managerial class will get to issue whatever orders they like, and they’ll be protected by vast layers of bureaucracy.  This ostensible reform will only compound the problems of the American health care system, and that’s a feature, not a bug.  It’s meant to lead to single-payer health care, at which point going to the doctor will be like going to the DMV: you do what they tell you and take what they give you with no recourse.  There will, naturally, be no accountability.

Some on the left like to talk about the nation as a community and the consequent duty of us all to care for the weak, vulnerable, etc…We’re all in this together.  But a nation the size of ours can never be a community.  For instance, in a nationalized health care system, the rules and regulations governing your health care will be made by people you will never meet or talk to.  They’ll be able to police just about anything they want, with no way to hold them to account.

The politicizing of homosexuality

The whole canceled prom/lesbians/lawsuit thing has moved to the top of the news cycle on CNN at least.  As stated before, I’m on the side of the school: if they don’t want a lesbian couple attending with one of the girls wearing a tux, they should be allowed to enforce that rule without a bunch of federal judges and legal busybodies sticking their noses into a minor local concern.  Having federal rules and oversight on high school prom attendance policies is precisely the sort of soft tyranny America already has too much of, and it’s hypocritical coming from the same folks who proclaim their fondness for multiculturalism.

But that low-hanging fruit aside, there’s a point here that I neglected earlier.  No one seems to have cared much until the prom, which demonstrates a central dynamic in the politics of homosexuality.  There’s not much appetite for breaking down bedroom doors and hauling homosexuals caught in flagrante delicto off to face charges.  Yet there’s much greater resistance to gay marriage, or in this case, two lesbians attending prom together.  And this is as it should be.

There is a proper live and let live tolerance in the first.  I believe homosexual acts are sinful, but ferreting out and punishing them all isn’t on my political agenda.  I’m content to let alone that which is kept reasonably private, and contrary to what is often portrayed, this was often the model of the past–no need to investigate the nature of the relationship between every pair of spinsters or confirm that all confirmed bachelor roommates were straight.  Not all sin is a threat to state and society.

However, the gay rights movement has progressed while proclaiming that homosexual relationships are interchangeable with heterosexual ones because men and women are essentially interchangeable.  This is a public and revolutionary challenge to state and society, and consequently merits a public and official response.  The differences between the sexes are among the most basic experiential realities of human existence.  They are fundamental facts of everyday life.  Society and the state presume them.  Thus, two lesbians attending prom together must be understood as the dramatic throwing down of a gauntlet; it announces a challenge to the entire existing social order as it declares for all to see that men and women are interchangeable.

The theorists of the gay rights movement understand this quite well.  However, their strategists realize that it won’t sell, so they deliberately obfuscate.  The trick is to constantly shift between homosexuality as a matter sex acts and homosexuality as a public identity that denies essential differences between the sexes.

The health care contradiction

I suspect that a good part of why the health care reform bill has tanked so badly is that Americans have noticed the basic contradiction in the case for reform.  The first argument is moral: health care is a right and therefore the government must ensure that everyone has all the health care they need.  The second argument is technocratic: health care will be run more efficiently by the government.  These cannot be reconciled.

The contradiction can be glossed over by arguing that technocratic efficiency will lower costs and therefore allow more people to be covered with the same amount of cash.  Paying doctors, nurses, hospital support staff, drug companies, med tech companies, private insurance companies, etc… less could save some money.  Preventative care, the other great proposed nostrum, might also save some (I’m skeptical on this point: screening everyone at risk for Condition X could very well cost more than simply treating those who actually develop it, though early detection could improve their prognosis).

Interestingly, there is already an odd manifestation of this sort of “preventative care” and it is very expensive and wasteful, but Obama and the Democrats have no interest in reforming it.  Defensive medicine is grotesquely costly, as doctors order everything because omitting one and therefore missing something, no matter how unlikely it was, will get them sued and ruined–and besides, neither they nor the patient is paying for all the extra tests.  Of course, tort reform is a non-starter among Democrats, but the dynamic illustrates the ruinous costs of providing everyone with the best health care.  Giving everyone all the tests and treatments they might need is unsustainable, and viewing access to health care as a moral right doesn’t change this; national bankruptcy is unmoved by pleas of moral rights.

Naturally, there will have to be rationing, as there is now.  The technocrats think that they can do it more effectively and rationally than the current system, but then as now, health care as a right stops at the bottom line.  This is why Palin’s line about death panels struck such a chord (and nerve).  While they won’t be called death panels, somewhere in government health care someone will produce guidelines as to which cases to treat and which not to, which tests to order for whom, etc…  In any system that is not to go bankrupt, rationing is inevitable, but this gives the lie to the “health care as a right” claim, as well as raising the question of why anyone would want the government doing the rationing.

It could be replied that everyone has a right to basic health care, and the government should provide this, while leaving the rest to the private sector.  Uncle Sam will keep you alive, but won’t buy you a hip replacement.  The problem with this is that it’s very expensive to keep some people alive–keeping a 90-year-old alive for a few more weeks often could easily cover the cost of delivering a dozen babies.  Again, there’s the conflict between the right to health care and keeping costs down, and Americans have realized that the Democrats will have to sacrifice one or the other in the long term.

Reality was in fact out to lunch

And it’s quite the epic. From the Daily Mail: “Staff in sports clubs who warn women not to lift heavy weights could be prosecuted under new equality laws. Insinuating that females are not as strong as men could be considered ‘unlawful sex discrimination’ under legislation set out in Harriet Harman’s forthcoming Equality Bill.”  The law even notes that, “A general stereotype about men and women is that in terms of physique, most men are stronger than most women.”  This stereotype is, of course, entirely correct, but Labour has never let reality interfere with its progressive ruination of Britain before.

Anti-vaccine loonies lose

In a victory for science and sanity, it was found that the vaccine-autism link was bunk, which will hopefully spare us a round of slimy trial lawyers cashing in on the grief and ignorance of distraught parents.

The myth of multiculturalism

Ostensibly, the Left is gung-ho for multiculturalism.  For example, set foot on most university campuses and you’ll be inundated with departments, centers, programs, organizations and other such devoted to promoting multiculturalism, usually with awkward acronyms for monikers.  But it’s all a lie.  In substance, this multiculturalism consists of apologies for barbarisms that are comfortably far away, and an interest in different food, clothing, music and hues of sexual partners at home.

Further evidence of the phoniness of the multiculturalists may be seen in this report.  The school district of a small town has canceled prom after the ACLU tried to force it to allow two lesbians to attend together.  Don’t expect any outrage from our multicultural mandarins at this attack on community self-government and local culture by a national organization and its allies in the federal courts.  If the Left were really multicultural, they’d let small towns in Mississippi discriminate against homosexual couples at the prom, since that’s certainly part of their culture.  But the Left wants multiculturalism without the culture.  It wants to watch traditional war-dances where the dancers doff the grass skirts and don jeans afterward, rather than going off to spear the neighboring tribe. It wants to see a quaint rural community, without the mores that help bind that community together.  It wants to dabble in various religious practices without actually believing in any of them.

In short, the Left’s multiculturalism is just a variation on the stereotypical ugly American tourist.  They want to see the sights, but they want it all to be comfortable and familiar as well, and they’ll complain loudly if they don’t get it.

What Machiavelli is good for

I’m not a Machiavellian.  I think that the charge that Machiavelli was a teacher of evil is correct (more on this below).  However, I also think that he is necessary reading for anyone involved in politics.

The value of reading Machiavelli is in his blunt assessments of the realities of politics.  Politics is filled with real bastards.  To pick a couple recent examples, consider the bizzare former congresscritter Eric Massa, the latest in a long line of political perverts.  Or then there’s our president, buying a health care vote by appointing another congresscritter’s brother to the bench.  Venture abroad, and it gets even nastier.  To do any good in politics, you need to be able to deal with these perverts, crooks and thugs.  Machiavelli can help prepare people for that by impressing upon them the real nature of politics.  It is ugly, if you get involved you will get dirty, and your inner pervert, crook, or thug might start coming out more.  But there’s no other option but withdrawal.

My essential critique of Machiavelli is that he encourages acts that are not only conventionally evil, but (if I read him correctly) will be experientially known as such by the perpetrator.  The stated justification is that they are “necessary” and this might seem to allow for a comparison with the Augustine’s judge in book 19 of City of God.  However, there is a good deal of difference between the two.  Augustine’s judge is compelled to his grim duties by his ignorance, and for the purpose of preserving some little order in human society.  While Machiavelli’s prince may begin with a similar position, he quickly moves beyond it as he seeks glory, conquest and expansion.  He too is ignorant, uncertain of whether his evil acts now will have the desired effect in the future, but Machiavelli encourages him to rush ahead.  Success may be half dependent on chance, but Fortune is a bitch who likes it rough (Machiavelli’s image, not mine), so it’s best to charge and ravish her.  Thus, the Prince is encourage to rashly attempt all evils in the hope of success.