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Friday, November 05, 2004
Mud Pies
Your Curmudgeon learned how to cook from his father, a master of the art by virtue of his chosen trade. In the years since, it has been your Curmudgeon’s pleasure (?) to teach several other children the rudiments of cooking. Both processes have involved quite a lot of spoilage of ingredients through ignorance, carelessness, or lack of skill. Colloquially, the products are known as “mud pies.”
We all know what real mud pies are, of course. It’s plain that no special understanding or aptitude is required to produce one. It’s equally plain that the production of real mud pies is the province of the very young, who can be trusted only with ingredients of no value. Older children, who’ve acquired some interest in more difficult endeavors, move their efforts into the kitchen, where the costs of spoilage are real.
Yes, this is about the election. Why did you doubt it?
The American electorate is taking quite a beating from the foreign press, from our own Old Media, and from our domestic Left. The general tenor of the comments is that by re-electing President Bush and strengthening his margins in Congress, we’ve demonstrated that we’re too stupid to know when we’re being played for fools. Our intellectual deficiencies are apparently so great that we can’t see them for ourselves; hence, the gracious assistance of Europe and our domestic left-wingers in pointing them out to us.
The invaluable John Hawkins has presented a round-up of the pithier domestic comments. Here are a few of the choicest:
- “My progressive friends: I know you are disheartened. So am I. A record turnout should have ensured a Kerry sweep. And there’s no doubt that we will never know whether the Ohio vote count was legitimate. One thing is certain, however: Bush is still not the legitimate president of the United States. He ran on an incumbency he never earned.”—Ted Rall
- “Americans did not vote for fascism - but the fascists now control all three branches of our government: the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis warned against the rise of an American fascism in “It Can’t Happen Here”. Well, it can - and it will, unless we stop it now”—Bob Fertik
- “First of all, this election was definitely rigged. I have no doubt about it. It’s a statistical impossibility that Bush got 8 million more votes than he got last time.”—Mark Crispin Miller
- “This much has changed for me in the past few hours, after raging at 51 percent of the people in this country. To be honest, I didn’t really care much about the feelings of that 51 percent—I far more cared about rectifying our terribly tarnished image throughout the world. (As my Italian friend just wrote to me, “The fact is four more years of aggressions, lies, destruction of social systems all around the world, are just too much. It’s medieval. I’m scared.") Now, however, I realize that we have to treat our own country as a foreign country, with whom our relations are strained beyond the point of communication.”—Heidi Julavits
- “I know you don’t want to hear it. You can’t face one more hung chad. But I don’t have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it’s my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry”.—Greg Palast
It appears that, by the Left’s judgment—and who would know better than those titans of the intellect?—we made a big, costly mud pie on Tuesday. We rejected their counsel—a healthy fraction of them are sure they know why, as well; it was homophobia—and will now face a thick torte of fascism for our dessert. Clearly, we can’t be allowed to putter unsupervised in the kitchen of our own democracy.
Hugo Chavez would purely love it. So would Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.
Leaving aside the subtle point that calling a man stupid is no way to get him to listen to you, the Left’s plaints about the election are of a piece in another important way: they are perfectly congruent with its philosophy of governance and social order. Its regnant ideology promotes the idea that a “wise minority” ought to decide practically everything for everybody: where we ought to work and live, how much money we’ll make, how much of that money we’ll be allowed to keep, what we ought to be allowed to spend it on, what personal pleasures we ought to be allowed, whom we may approve or disapprove, and what we’re allowed to say. It’s no stretch to go from there to having that “wise minority” decide how we ought to vote.
No, they don’t yet have all that power. As of Tuesday, it will be denied them for at least another two years. But they’re working on it.
In contrast, the dominant ideology of the Right is that we ought to be allowed as much autonomy as the social fabric can stand. We can live and work where we please, earn what we please, keep the greater portion of it, spend it on what we please, do whatever stupid, risky things please us, and choose our associates and opinions as we please. If granted the maximum sustainable personal latitude, Rightists reason, each of us will likely succeed at what matters most to him. Ask government’s permission before making a decision that’s entirely within the purview of a healthy, independent adult? PLEASE!
Some other factors are common on the political Right. We’re more religiously inclined than the Left, though the majority of us don’t press it upon uninterested others. We’re also more inclined to privacy about certain things, most conspicuously sexual behavior. And we’re disinclined to make large changes to venerable institutions and traditions without clear and convincing evidence that those changes are urgently needed to avert a disaster. But these are attitudes rather than principles; they don’t condition our political decisions, but rather harmonize with them.
The Left thinks we’re making mud pies...but what of the Left’s record in the public sphere? Oughtn’t that to be a legitimate subject for discussion when our intellectual potencies are being compared?
Your Curmudgeon thinks so.
It would be unfair to hold the American or European Left to account for the disasters brought about by their ideology when it was applied in the Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Guinea, Guyana, Suriname, Tanzania, and so forth. After all, they’ve told us over and over that those experiments were corrupt, that the dictators of those countries never understood “true socialism,” that Marx explicitly postulated an advanced capitalist society as the necessary precondition for socialist transformation. Let’s allow them that escape hatch, at least for now.
Still: When given power in the advanced countries of the West, what have they achieved, and at what cost?
The whole of socialist ideology reduces to one tenet: Put private property, most particularly the “means of production,” under political control. Nationalize as much as possible. If outrightly seizing the “means of production” is infeasible, then regulate it stringently, a la Hitler and Mussolini. Regulate the people as well; if the people have too much latitude, it won’t matter who owns the nation’s capital stock. Ignore dissent when it’s possible; suppress it when it’s not. And guard the borders! To allow an outflux of population would give the game away—most especially if those voting with their feet head toward capitalist countries. If you can’t retain the population by force, at the very least use capital-flight laws to make it terribly costly for anyone to leave.
To someone of your Curmudgeon’s tragically limited intellectual powers, this looks like a recipe for a mud pie: a grotesquely swollen, massively inefficient State sector and the impoverishment and utter regimentation of the private citizen. But how has it worked out in practice? In advanced countries since World War II only?
- Sweden
- Germany
- France
- Great Britain
- Netherlands
By your Curmudgeon’s lights, the Left has created mud pie after mud pie. It’s wasted one thriving industrial economy after another, and from them produced nothing but bitter concoctions of anger and dependency. It’s for you, Gentle Reader, to judge according to your own tastes.
But we’re too stupid to evaluate such things fairly or accurately, aren’t we? That was the opening salvo of this tirade. Leftist planners and social engineers can foresee the consequences of their work much better than we can. Our judgments, based as they must be on inevitable, regrettable near-term distortions as the system cleanses itself of the barbarities of a competitive capitalist order, are inadmissible. We’re incapable of taking the long view.
That’s the Left’s gospel. It allows Leftist commentators to say things about how we proles have failed to understand our own best interests once again. Of course, how we could fail to learn after being shown so many examples of the beneficence and abundance of the Omnipotent State is a puzzling matter, but if they just keep screeching at us about how clueless we are, surely the message will get through eventually...won’t it?
Perhaps your Curmudgeon is too much the Pollyanna. He sees good stock in almost everyone. Being a believer in human adequacy, he also believes in the rightness of freedom. He fears the State even when chained to its indispensable functions: national defense, the courts, and the maintenance of foreign relations. He prefers private mud pies, whose makers’ pain at their losses limits the waste they incur, to public ones funded from the larder of coercion, which can grow without limit.
It’s otherwise on the Left. As numerous commentators have said, Leftists don’t see themselves as the subjects of the Omnipotent State, but as its masters. They look forward to becoming commissars. That their satisfaction from their elevation might not compensate the rest of us for the loss of our liberty and property fails to move them.
But do they really like mud pies that much? Giant mud pies? Is that the Left’s notion of political haute cuisine?
Your Curmudgeon would ask the media potentates of Europe, but he fears that those tall-hatted chefs, so consumed with their critiques of our Judeo-Christian capitalist / imperialist lunacies, would snort away the question as beneath their notice. After all, they dismiss it when it emerges from their own people.
Your Curmudgeon has had enough contemptuous dismissal—and enough mud pies—for one lifetime. He reckons that most Americans out of grammar school would say the same.
Comments
I’ve been thinking for the last 24 hours or so about one of the themes of this post… and how it relates to why I’m a Conservative and (since they roughly align for now) Republican.
Maybe some day I’ll even get around to writing it up and posting it.
Maybe
Posted by Dave on 11/05/2004 at 11:24 AMI agree with all of this. Indeed, contempt and juvenilization of the Red State electorate and the President himself were so palpable in Democrat dialogue that Republican strategists scarcely needed to turn a hand to exploit it, though they and their proxies did so masterfully in the few cases where it rose out of schoolyard “nyaah-nyaah” into cynical imputations of dishonor.
The question I would put to you is this: Republicans control the presidency, Senate, Congress and the judiciary. But these Republicans represent—both in themselves and pro their constituencies—a broad range of attitudes and opinions, some quite extreme. The hard-fought campaign, won by only a small majority, cost hundreds of millions of dollars; and that accumulation of money represents promises made—explicit and implicit—that cannot lightly be broken.
Diversity of opinion and the quid-pro-quo of campaign financing tend to militate toward the center. Ultimately, “the business of America is Business.” So the mass of domestic and economic policy enacted over the next X years will doubtless be calculated to enhance the capital economy and build the consumer market for goods and services. Since no consumer is a bad consumer, I’d expect this policy be contrived to keep some eye out for the poorest Americans and insure them both discretionary income and opportunity. This is morally right and economically pragmatic.
Still, I wonder about extremes at the fringes of this centrist thrust. About those who would raise the rights of property to the level of monopoly. Those who would dismantle the entire social safety net. About hard-ass social Darwinism, radical “assimilationism,” “not-in-my-backyard-ism,” “English-firstism” and other punitive-isms. About protecting the environmental commons from exploitation. About issues of privacy and “law in the bedroom.” About the side effects of overturning Roe v. Wade, liberalizing gun laws, and reassessing things like prayer in the schools and religion in the workplace. About the overthrow of organized labor and the subversion of consumer rights.
In short, I’m afraid of the collaborative tyrannies of capital and of what used to be called the “moral majority.”
In theory, I shouldn’t be. In the context of increased freedom and capital availability, the market should provide solutions for what I perceive as problematic (e.g., a voucher-based school system should let me seek secular education for my kids), or permit me to contrive solutions. Right? And in the context of “least government” and decentralized authority, it should be possible for me to find or found a community of like-minded fellows wherein to practice my peculiar mix of secularism, intellectual elitism, moral license and schweinerei, with or without off-road vehicles and large-bore handguns. (grin)
Why am I convinced it won’t quite work out this way? What about the mass of Americans inclined or co-opted into following the line of least resistance, or disempowered to the extent that they can’t do otherwise? Will they end up victims of social Darwinism in an America where Darwin, creationism and ‘Intelligent Design’ are taught in tandem?
Posted by on 11/05/2004 at 03:10 PMWith a few exceptions (and a lot of those exceptions have been on the _left_ end of the political spectrum, rather than the right), Bush has governed as a moderate so far. The Congressional balance of power hasn’t shifted so much as to give him license to really go crazy (except, of course, with the spending...), and a Republican president and senate getting to choose Rehnquist’s replacement really doesn’t alter the SCOTUS balance of power at all. And the Constitution has been under such strenuous bipartisan attack for so long now that it seems hardly worth worrying about one party doing more damage to it than the other.
For me, my problems with the administration fall into three categories:
1. Things Bush and the Republicans in Congress have done concerning areas in which Democrats in control would have done similar things, but even worse. (Free drugs for old people, even more federal involvement in education, et al)
2. Things Bush & Congress have done concerning areas in which Democrats would be approximately the same, or at least certainly not better by enough to really care about. (The USA PATRIOT Act, for a start...which received broad support on BOTH sides of the aisle. McCain-Feingold falls into this camp too.)
3. Things in which the Bush policy was worse than I’d expect of Democrats, but the Bush policy was overturned by SCOTUS. (The indefinite detention of American citizens on American soil without trial.) And frankly I’m almost certainly overestimating the Democrats’ regard for the 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendments by assuming they wouldn’t do exactly the same if they’d had power.
I have SERIOUS objections to ALL of these things. But because the Democrats have demonstrated repeatedly that they’re no better about some things and a lot worse about some others, I have no belief at all that the world would be a better place today if Gore had won in 2000, and no belief that the world would be a better place in 2008 if Kerry had won this week.
I’m nervous about a politically undivided government...but Bush doesn’t seem to have done much damage with the one he’s had for the LAST two years.
Posted by on 11/06/2004 at 03:34 AMI’m not immune to the concerns that Matt and John have on an undivided Fed. Correct me if I’m wrong… but this is the first time we’ve had a Presidency, Senate, and House strongly dominated by one party in quite some time, recent history speaking.
Of course, IIRC, the last times it hapened, it was dominated by Democrats… which kind of led us to where we are now.
This is an experiment, in the real world labratory of means testing. It follows naturally that some aspects of the experiment are going to cause us to bite our nails to the quick while we wait to see how it works out.
We gambled a *LOT* on this race, and for this outcome. Now we get to wait and see what kind of child we’ve birthed.
Posted by Ironbear on 11/06/2004 at 08:58 AM
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