Suicide of a Super Power

Pat Buchanan has written about the demise of the European-American peoples beneath the trampling of northward trekking, Third-World immigrants.

"America is disintegrating. The centrifugal forces pulling us apart are growing inexorably. What unites us is dissolving. And this is true of Western Civilization....Meanwhile, the state is failing in its most fundamental duties. It is no longer able to defend our borders, balance our budgets, or win our wars."

Noman doesn't disagree with the overall concern expressed in the assessment, though he's more hopeful than Buchanan about America's righting its course, sooner rather than later.  But, Noman doesn't blame the problem on invading hordes from the south, frijole wolfing Telmarines.

Neither is he sure that the forces tearing the West apart are centrifugal rather than totalistic drawing us to the center of one world tyranny rooted in redistributionist, command and control--in brief, anti-freedom, anti-personal--ideologies.

Specifically, Buchanan decries the acceptance of a permanent underclass.  Noman thinks it's even worse than he suggests.  The Democratic Party's only game plan seems to be to expand this base indefinitely and to milk it for votes into perpetuity.

He highlights the lethal role of dechristianization in the process of decay.  It's hard to look at TV or movies and disagree with him.   This, however, is not the fault of immigration.

Moreover, Buchanan is altogether too dour about Catholicism's American prospects.

“Half a century on, the disaster is manifest. The robust and confident Church of 1958 no longer exists. Catholic colleges and universities remain Catholic in name only. Parochial schools and high schools are closing as rapidly as they opened in the 1950s. The numbers of nuns, priests and seminarians have fallen dramatically. Mass attendance is a third of what it was. From the former Speaker of the House to the Vice President, Catholic politicians openly support abortion on demand.”

Even the collusion of atheistic communism, Russian Orthodoxy, anti-Polish bigotry and historical antipathy could not extirpate Roman Catholicism from the Soviet Union.  Conditions are much more hospitable in the US despite Catholic baiting, self-hating Catholics, radical secularism and hangover prejudices from European history.

The Church's situation is much more optimistic than Buchanan sees, perhaps because he's looking wistfully at the past rather than hopefully at the future.

Noman wishes he were more apostolic and grounded more in our true hope: eternal salvation.

Parochial schools are closing.  But, alternative schools are arising to fill the needs of religious parents and children.  There are four such choices in Ann Arbor alone, in addition to four non-endangered parochial schools and a flourishing high school.

Many, not all, seminaries and parishes are filling with John Paul II vocations.  The Church emerged from the post-Vatican II dessert with firmer direction, better catechetical tools, and more elaborated social doctrine than it enjoyed when it entered.

The Holy Spirit doesn't make mistakes.  The Church, and all humanity, benefits today from a treasure trove of Papal teaching necessitated precisely by the gauntlet it has been forced to run.

Forms have changed.  So does life.  But, Jesus still lives in his Church, as does the Holy Spirit; the Father keeps watch, hears us and cares.  He sustains us in his being.

Fear not.  Set out into the deep.

Elsewhere, Buchanan writes that "white America is an endangered species" and that Mexico is moving north."  Noman takes his point about the freedom, prosperity and toleration that this mostly caucasion, Judeo-Christian nation has given birth to.  But, he is not so concerned as Buchanan about the potential Hispanization of American culture.

As Rick Santorum rightly pointed out in last night's Republican Presidential debate, Hispanics are largely faith-filled, pious, family-loving people.  He did not mention that they are also mother-venerating, but could have.

They are also largely Catholic, even when in opposition to the Church.  The Spanish joke has the atheist asking the evangelical missionary, "If I don't believe the Catholic Church, which is the one true Church, why should I believe you?"

America could stand to learn some things from our neighbors to the South, and doesn't need to lament their cultural influence.  As good as we are, we don't know everything.  Buchanan is the first to point out, moreover, that we have forgotten much of what we knew.

Naturally, Hispanics like all immigrants need to be assimilated to America's ways, ideals and beliefs: e.g., liberty, equality, opportunity, tolerance, exceptionalism, industry, responsibility, character.  Failure to do so is less the fault of Hispanic immigrants, like Noman's parents, who come to America with stars and stripes in their eyes and America the Beautiful in their hearts, than of the multi-culti frauds that refuse to inculcate them.

One need not assail immigration in order to fix a government-caused problem.

The following left Noman scratching his head, at least with respect to the American context.

“Peoples of European descent are not only in a relative but a real decline. They are aging, dying, disappearing. This is the existential crisis of the West.”

Is Spanish not a European culture, language and heritage?  If he means to say that Mexico, Guatemala and Argentina are not European, or Western, he is wrong.

Latin America is decidedly an offshoot of European civilization and religion, no less than North-America.  As such, it shares a broad cultural heritage with America that should neither be denied nor discarded. 

It troubles Noman, who is generally a fellow traveler of Buchanan's, that he means something racial--white, Anglo-Irish, Germanic--when he references things American.  It does not help to identify it as European, or Western, and to speak of the "non-Europeanization of America."

There is room for more in this country, and the Church, than the insular group he alludes to.  There is also room in the conservative movement and Republican Party.

Buchanan writes that "where equality is enthroned, freedom is extinguished.  The rise of the egalitarian society means the death of the free society."  He's mixing two things here.

Equality and freedom are not diametrically opposed.  Freedom is an equally shared property of the human soul.  It is a freedom to choose the good, or against it.  And social equality is a condition of the free society.

Thomas Jefferson made the connection in the Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The problem is one of definition--equality of opportunity, or of result?  if the egalitarian society means the latter, which many if not all on the Left believe, then equality is problematic and dangerous to liberty.  But, one need not discredit an ontologically undeniable and socially necessary principle to correct erroneous interpretations.

"The family is the incubator of inequality and God its author."  Amen.  But, God is also the Creator before whom we all stand equal.  He is not a respecter of persons.

That is the root of an equality more radical than any distortion that multi-culturalists can conjure up.  Buchanan is capable of more precision, which Noman hopes the book supplies.

“Historians will look back in stupor at 20th and 21st century Americans who believed the magnificent republic they inherited would be enriched by bringing in scores of millions from the failed states of the Third World.”

Noman disagrees.  Rather, future generations, historians included, will look back and bless the nation's adherence to first principles and noble ideals in troubled times.

The magnificent republic we inherited--and should defend tooth-and-nail in all its magnificence, regardless of blemishes--was bequeathed to us, inter alia, by the scores of millions from the failed states of the world.

As Emma Lazarus wrote, and Liberty proclaims:

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

George Washington wasn't a descendant of the Third-World.  But, Steve Jobs was.  Leonard Lauder, Estee's son, writes in today's WSJ that immigrants and their children founded half of Fortune 500 firms like Google and Intel.

There is no doubt that immigrant entrepreneurs and their children have fueled our economy. My mother is a prime example. Josephine Esther Mentzer was a daughter of Hungarian and Czech immigrants. Estée, as she was called by her family, was always interested in beauty and cosmetics and started selling skin care products to beauty salons more than 65 years ago. Her creativity and hard work are today embodied in a successful global corporation that provides jobs for thousands of people in the U.S. alone. 

Our story is hardly unique. A new report from the Partnership for a New American Economy has found that more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. These companies generate more than $4 trillion in annual revenue—more than the gross domestic product of every country with the exception of the U.S., China and Japan. 

One need not go back far to see how important opening our borders is to tomorrow's American businesses. Companies in the Fortune 500 founded since 1985 were more likely to have been started by immigrants than those founded before 1985. Think of such names as Google, Intel, eBay and Yahoo!, among other newly minted iconic companies, and then remember that they were started by first-generation Americans. 

In fact, more than a quarter of the high-tech and engineering businesses launched here between 1995 and 2005 had an immigrant founder. In Silicon Valley alone, the percentage of immigrant start-up companies is more than 50%, according to a report out of Duke and the University of California, Berkeley.

The broad brush with which Buchanan paints immigration simply doesn't do justice to the phenomenon.

He writes about the triumph of tribalism:

We may deny the existence of ethnonationalism, detest it, condemn it. But this creator and destroyer of empires and nations is a force infinitely more powerful than globalism, for it engages the heart. Men will die for it. Religion, race, culture and tribe are the four horsemen of the coming apocalypse.

Is he suggesting that we wage war on it, resist it, brace for it, or surrender to our own impulses for it?

America is not one of those countries naturally vexed with ethnonationalism.  We are not bound by ties of ethnicity, blood, land, history or culture--which in America is decidedly a small-"c" affair.

That is our advantage in this respect, despite its being a disadvantage in others, e.g., fewer commonalities.  In the countries he is referring to, Culture is King, and Capitalized.

America is bound by ideas, fidelity to ideals and adherence to propositions like the aforementioned: that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, chief among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

As for America's ability to engage the heart, Noman sometimes weeps with gratitude at the singing of the Star Spangled Banner or waving of our flag.  One need not be Hispanic to feel these sentiments.

The fact that some may not share them--at MALDEF, ACORN, Harvard or the White House, for instance--says nothing about America's power as an object of love, piety and devotion.

This is not to deny the fact that our free society is always susceptible to invasion by ideas and movements foreign to it, and to various deconstructionists who utilize the benefits that America so lavishly affords them in order to destroy it, or so alter it as to make it unrecognizable.

“Through its support of mass immigration, its paralysis in power to prevent 12-20 million illegal aliens from entering and staying, its failure to address the “anchor-baby” issue, the Republican Party has birthed a new electorate that will send it the way of the Whigs.”

Mass immigration (legal) is separate and distinct from illegal immigration.  Noman wonders if illegal immigration would be such a problem if legal immigration were sufficiently "mass" to satisfy domestic needs.

It is Buchanan's equation of the Republican Party with the "White Party" that gives Noman the heebe-jebees and strikes him as being singularly unhelpful, not to mention unsavory and wrong-headed.

Where doe's Herman Cain fit in Buchanan's constellation?  Marco Rubio?  Bobby Jindal?  Why should Republicans just give up on the communities from which they spring rather than try to win them over?  Because they're not sufficiently white, or European for Buchanan?

The new electorate can vote with the Republican Party, as well as against it.

Michelle Bachmann showed us the right way in the other night's Las Vegas debate by demonstrating with passion to women that she was more in touch with their feelings, fears and needs than feminists were.

Win people!  Don't drive them away by tightening the circle of belonging and poking sticks at those assigned to the outside.

With respect to borders, he writes:

“Are vital U.S. interests more imperiled by what happens in Iraq where we have 50,000 troops, or Afghanistan where we have 100,000, or South Korea where we have 28,000 -- or by what is happening on our border with Mexico?...What does it profit America if we save Anbar and lose Arizona?”

(n.b. that would have been a better quote if he'd linked Anbar to Ann Arbor.) 

The question of where our troops might be better deployed is one on which reasonable minds can differ.  Noman appreciates that the question is in play in the Republican Presidential debates due to the presence of Ron Paul.  But, outlandish talk about losing Arizona repels even people concerned for border integrity.

“We are trying to create a nation that has never before existed, of all the races, tribes, cultures and creeds of Earth, where all are equal. In this utopian drive for the perfect society of our dreams we are killing the real country we inherited -- the best and greatest country on earth.”

Noman agrees--with undoubted national pride, parochial naiveté and more than a touch of ignorant bliss--that America is the best and greatest country on the earth, indeed in the history of humanity.  That is what his immigrant elders always preached to this first-generation American.  Eleven years of living abroad only convinced Noman that they were right.

He subscribes to American exceptionalism--we are good, blessed, and maybe even destined.  America is "the last best hope of man on Earth."

To Noman's mind, trying to create a nation grounded in human dignity and the common good of any and every person regardless of accidents of birth is ideal rather than utopian, and worthy of the highest aspirations of the greatest country on earth.

He is willing to join Buchanan's protest against the multi-cluturalists, anti-capitalists, Christo-phobic secularists, and assorted grievance mongers whose strenuous exertions claw at the nation's vitality.

He is not inclined to share Buchanan's espoused sentiments, however.

Noman is willing to assume that the excerpts selected in Drudge's synopsis so shear flagrant money quotes from reasoned argument as to make them only seem the rantings of a disgruntled xenophobe.  For the sake of conservatism and the Catholicism that Buchanan evidently cherishes, Noman hopes that is the case.

He fears, however, that Buchanan's obsession with, and virulence towards, southerners and Third-Worlders says little about his objects of reproach, and much about his losing struggle against interior demons.

Noman prays that this is not the case, and for Buchanan and those whose loyalty he commands in case it is.

Please Shoot Somebody, We Need the Publicity

Noman had not heard of Donny Deutsch before Friday: a Gucci-goo, Bruce Willis look-alike and advertising executive who sidelines as a talking head on MSNBC.

That station is NBCUniversal's (formerly General Electric's, now Comcast's) everyday advertisement for all things Left.  On "Morning Joe," with Joe Scarborough, Donny said something that made him famous even among people who would rather gargle with castor oil than be subjected to MSNBC's programming.

Donny opined that what Occupy Wall Street needed was a Kent State incident, "a climax moment of class warfare somehow played out on screen."  Power on the people rather than to them.  It's just what a "visual society" needs.

He offered this Alinskyite sagacity without a hint of irony while donning a $5,000 suit, sporting a $500 coiffure, flashing $10,000 worth of orthodontia, and looking like a million bucks.  Class warfare, indeed.

Noman has heard tell about sex in the city among those struggling in Zuccotti Park's cafes.  So, "climax moment" might be an apposite choice of terms.

But, the "class warfare" description really puzzles Noman.  Just what classes are clashing in cities around the country?

Protesters are demanding that investment bankers pay for everything from their educations to their lattes.  That pampered sense of entitlement used to signify being in the 1%, but hasn't for decades in America.  It just signifies a Liberal chip on a 99% shoulder.

The police that protesters are trying to goad into behavior that might plausibly be broadcast around the world as brutality want the same as they do: for the federal government to bail out their positions, pensions and perks.

If anything, the much-commented-upon trust fund scions of equality (Bill Ayers types) are the bad guys of their own protest rhetoric.  The police are the good guys deeply ensconced among the middle class.

It's not that Deutsch wants anyone to die, mind you, though that certainly couldn't hurt ratings.  It's just that the movement needs a PR shot in the arm, so to speak.

Noman remembers Kent State well.  It's something that only a political animal, someone who had lost all human perspective, would evoke with hope.

It was a watershed moment for the counter culture, when the status quo decided that it simply wasn't worth killing the children in order to get them to behave, or love their country, or go to class.

There was a passion in the air that revolutionaries--the Alinskyites driving the Have-Some-Want-Mores to clamor for change--are always seeking to replicate in order to further their cause du jour.   This is what it looks like when it comes from the heart.  It doesn't need to be ginned up with sideline advocacy for climax moments.

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." (Mario Savio)

Stirring stuff, that.  Has the "operation of the machine become so odious" because 50% of the people--the taxpayers--are terrified by the nation's skyrocketing debt burden, disgusted with government's never-ending appetite, and simply tired of carrying the other, growing half in perpetuity?

Is it so odious that citizens might want to fund more of their own spending priorities through private channels rather than those of protestors, public unions, green hucksters, the President and his corporatist cronies through public ones?

The Tea Party, not Occupy Wall Street, is demanding freedom: from federal control at the threat of preventing the machine from working at all.  It is putting its protestors bodies "upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus" in order to make it stop.

Donny Deustch holds them in contempt.  He's advocating a Kent State moment to make it look like Occupy Wall Street is the good guy when it's just agitprop, a Statist tool.

The federal government spends $1.5 trillion more than it takes in on all sorts of government giveaways that didn't exist in the 1964-1970 period.  Federal outlays didn't even exceed $1 trillion until 1987.  (See Table 1.1)  They are presently at $3.5 trillion, and projected to reach $4.5 trillion by 2016.  Enough is enough.

 Since George Bush left office, nobody is fulminating about military incursions, even in Libya and Africa, which were entered into without debate solely at the flick of the Presidential pinky--the Democratic President's pinky, which evidently makes the critical difference.

OWS protestors feel so free that not only are they unburdened by taxes, they are unencumbered by a sense of responsibility to support themselves, and untroubled by the tug of conscience at obliging others to pick up the tab for their unboundedness.

In May 1970, demonstrations broke out across the nation's campuses to protest President Nixon's expansion of the Vietnam War into the Cambodian theater.  The Ohio National Guard was dispatched to quell dissent at Kent State.  Tempers flared.  Cooler heads snapped.  Bullets flew.  Some strayed.  Bodies fell.

Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, William Shroeder, Sandra Scheuer: four dead in Ohio.  Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Ohio.  Donny Deutsche wants to resurrect and relive this history in order to score PR points for higher taxes and more federal spending.

  

Protesters in New York are trying to comply with his request.  They marched on the houses of billionaire Republicans but had to pass those of billionaire Democrats like John Paulson and Jamie Dimon along the way.  Nevertheless, they're doing their best to provoke the police, who prove their human frailty by taking the bait every now and then.  

The fat hag in the video screaming "fascists" at the police got dragged off by her hair.  She got what she was there for: to provoke an incident.

The stimulus funded photographers were there to capture the moment, and professionalize it in the following video for the gaping masses.  Saul Alinsky would be proud of the community organization.

The chicks in skimpy tops went hysterical.  Some short-on-patience cop with frayed nerves pepper sprayed their evocative faces.  Bummer.  Now, they're committed Leftists whereas before they were just self-righteous white brats seeking cheap thrills by feigning grievance.

With just a little more egging, we might get a visual spectacle worthy of Donny Deutsche, and Nero.

For his part, Noman wonders if President Obama is capable of feeling guilt over setting this impending bloodshed into motion with his fiery, class-warfare rhetoric.  His guess is that Barack's ACORN training and Harvard Law education honed his social conscience at the expense of his moral one.

Charles Krauthammer also lays the responsibility for this travesty at the President's feet for scapegoating in order to hang onto power.

Exhibit C. To the villainy-of-the-rich theme emanating from Washington, a child is born: Occupy Wall Street. Starbucks-sipping, Levi’s-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters denounce corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs, corporate titan, billionaire eight times over. 

These indignant indolents saddled with their $50,000 student loans and English degrees have decided that their lack of gainful employment is rooted in the malice of the millionaires on whose homes they are now marching — to the applause of Democrats suffering acute Tea Party envy and now salivating at the energy these big-government anarchists will presumably give their cause. 

Except that the real Tea Party actually had a program — less government, less regulation, less taxation, less debt. What’s the Occupy Wall Street program? Eat the rich. 

And then what? Haven’t gotten that far. 

No postprandial plans. But no matter. After all, this is not about programs or policies. This is about scapegoating, a failed administration trying to save itself by blaming our troubles — and its failures — on class enemies, turning general discontent into rage against a malign few. 

From the Senate to the streets, it’s working. Obama is too intelligent not to know what he started. But so long as it gives him a shot at reelection, he shows no sign of caring.

Noman has a half-facetious suggestion for the New York City police and denizens of occupied neighborhoods.  Leave before you get cast as the bad guys in Donny Deutsche's morality play, or become collateral damage in some community organizer's scenario planning.

Do yourself and the taxpayers of the nation a favor by letting Occupy Wall Street have the place.  Make the insurance claims once they leave after trashing your neighborhoods, homes and lives.

They are on the Left.  Even though you might be, too, they are on the moveon.org Left.  They have PC priority because they are helping the President.  They are entitled.  It's fair.  Give up.  Resistance is futile.  You are out-organized.

They will never be blamed or held to account for anything they do, think or say.  You will be blamed for anything and everything that happens.  The blood will be on your hands even if it's your own blood.

After the inconvenience and trauma passes, the social engineers who opened Pandora's box will probably leave you alone.  Without hope of a teachable moment to flay the electorate with, they'll be onto the next grievance.

With luck, the Big Government avarice occupying our nation will leave the land like Sauron's spirit fleeing the evil eye.  You might even follow David Mamet's lead and convert to conservatism after some painful soul searching.

Regardless, you'll have more money left after taxes to support people and causes important to you, rather than those important to your political betters.

The Left's Nervous Breakdown

Noman loves James Taranto's Best of the Web Today, and today proves no exception to the rule.  Commencing with the defeat of President's Obama's American Jobs Act legislation in the Democratically-controlled Senate, he offers his analysis of hand-wringing on the Left.

Portnoy observes: "What I believe is happening is that the left is reading the handwriting on the wall and resigning itself to the harsh reality [that] the man they trusted to 'fundamentally transform America' is on the verge of being unelected." 

We'd go a step further. Not only does Obama's re-election look to be in serious jeopardy, but his presidency has been an almost unmitigated disaster for progressive liberalism, nearly every tenet of which has been revealed to be untenable either practically, politically or both. 

Stimulus Sr. discredited Keynesian demand-side economics--the notion that the way to produce employment and growth is through massive government spending. The real tragedy is that even after blowing hundreds of billions of dollars, Obama and many other Democrats failed to learn the lesson. 

ObamaCare proved a political fiasco, showing that there are limits to Americans' willingness to tolerate the expansion of the welfare state. Because most provisions have not yet taken effect, the policy disaster is delayed and may be averted if either Congress repeals it in 2013 or the Supreme Court strikes it down as unconstitutional next year. The latter case would mark a huge legal defeat for liberalism. It would be the first time since the New Deal that the court has recognized a serious limitation on Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce. 

Even something as small as Bank of America's recently announced $5-a-month debit-card fee is liberal policy failure. The fee is intended to recoup money lost by price controls on merchant fees included in last year's Dodd-Frank law. 

 

The administration's only major success has been in the area of terrorism. Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki are dead, and long may they rot. But their deaths were not the result of progressive liberal policies. Except in the area of interrogation, the current administration has largely kept its predecessor's antiterror policies, albeit often reluctantly. 

The power of unions has diminished, with Wisconsin, the first state to establish so-called collective bargaining for government employees, having abolished it. "Card check," which would have enabled unions to take over workplaces without approval by secret ballot, couldn't even get past a Democratic Congress. Neither could "cap and trade," the administration's plan to combat global warming--a phenomenon increasingly many Americans suspect is a hoax. 

We can think of just one area in which liberalism has enjoyed unambiguous success during the Obama years: gay rights. The Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010 would not have become law with a Republican in the White House. 

 

The left got what it wanted in 2008: a liberal president with a sweeping agenda and big Democratic majorities capable of enacting it. The result has been a great and failed experiment in progressive politics and governance. In due course, one hopes, the left will absorb some lessons--but for now, they seem to be suffering a nervous breakdown. 

That is one way to understand why so much of the liberal establishment is rallying behind Krugman's Army, as the "Occupy Wall Street" protests are known. Everything they believe in has failed, so they are turning nihilistic.

That's a devastating assessment, and one that is largely correct.  The last three years have been a reminder to the left, and the electorate, to be mindful about what it wishes for--"hopes for" might be more apposite.

Noman would take issue with Taranto only by adding one other area of unambiguous success: abortion politics.  With the passage of ObamaCare and recent HHS directives adopted pursuant to it, the President's personal interest in restoring funds to Planned Parenthood in New Hampshire, and recent skirmishes in which he has unequivocally entered the fray on the side of death, Moloch has never eaten so well in America.

The Left sees the intrinsic connection between the economic and the social issues.  It is the Right that prefers not to notice.

Liberals know that if they insist on or win nothing else, social victories will eventually result in government control over private initiative.  Any self-debilitating abuse can be wrapped in the appealing language of rights and freedom.  Dependence follows the erosion of character.

Whether by intention or outcome, Liberals tend to champion only freedoms that enslave and/or destabilize: e.g., sexual rights, drug use rights, children's rights to be free of parental control, procedure rights for criminals (at the expense of victims and society), free speech rights for communists and jihadists (but not for pro-lifers, or conservative students on campus).

Once the person, a social animal, is shorn from the familial, ecclesial and other communities that give him context, reference and support; once he is taught to demand his abstract individual rights in splendid isolation from others; once he is schooled to nurture grievance and a sense of entitlement; once his moral conscience is replaced with a social one; he will decline into dependence as surely as night follows day.

The State will be waiting to care for him and minister to his needs--at the cost of his resources, his soul, and increasingly of his intelligence.  As David Mamet writes, the Left cannot honestly evaluate the results of its actions.

In sum, the Obama Administration has dealt one winning hand after another to the culture of death.  It will take longer for fiscal Conservatives to understand that Leftist social policies have just as conclusively demonstrated--no less than the aforementioned economic disasters--the utter failure of the Statist agenda.

When the Right confronts the Left's social agenda with the vigor it does its economic one, the Left will really have a nervous breakdown.  For then it will have been deprived of its ace in the hole.

Rick Santorum demonstrated this beautifully at Dartmouth the other night (see at minute 16:48).  Asked about child poverty, he underscored the breakdown of the American family.  Five percent of children living in two-parent families are living in poverty.  Thirty percent in single-parent families are.  He connected the economy to its etymological root in the Greek word for family.

Noman was struck by he unease-cum-alarm on Charlie Rose and Julianna Goldman's faces as he passionately and intelligently made his points?  Santorum even triggered the angry disruption of an audience heckler (at minutes 17:44 and 18:08).

Noman thought they might be having nervous breakdowns.

Occupy America's Wallet

There is entirely too much to say about the phenomena of Wall Street protesters springing up across the land claiming to speak for 99% of the population.  Noman imagines that his first reply should be, please don't.

Though belonging to the 99%, he has nothing else in common with Occupy Wall Street.  He pays taxes; they don't.  He works in the private sector; they don't.  He thinks America is just great; they don't.  He bathes...  

Unlike the various students demanding subsidized education, and others insisting on free whatever-they-think-they-are-entitled-to, Noman doesn't believe that anyone owes him anything more than common courtesy, and space within the confines of common decency to be who he is.

The one constant in this metastasizing phenomenon has been the futile search for a causal nexus between the protester's actions, aims and the various injustices they point to in order to explain themselves.

One young woman on the radio was willing to risk her scholarship to medical school in order to protest 1.5 million homeless children living in America.  Granting the number, ad arguendo, Noman scratched his head trying to connect her risking her scholarship, going to New York to protest Wall Street, desire for higher taxes and more spending, and how any of it would address the problem of homeless children--or even had anything to do with it.

It was classic Liberal: clutch onto a tear-jerking problem and cite it righteously to demand the policies you favor.  If the reader, for instance, is against the policies, it is because you want the problem to fester.  You probably profit from it, too.

Add Saul Alinsky to this mix and hopeless polarization ensues.  You are a "Have" trying to keep power away from the "Have-Nots."  Moreover, you are "the enemy."

In any event, and at all costs, ignore the obvious causes of the problem, which would recommend policies that Liberals oppose and spent decades deconstructing.

For example, the primary causes of child poverty in the US are the breakdown of the family, especially in black, single-parent families, and the breakdown of traditional sexual morality.  Policies addressing these root causes would undoubtedly spur Occupy Maternity Ward protests, chants of "get your rosaries off my ovaries," and invocation of child poverty as the raison d'être for their outbreak. 

Noman might focus with justice on the rank hypocrisy angle.  For instance, Nancy Pelosi--The Speaker of the House who shepherded Hank Paulson and Ben Bernnanke's bailout of Wall Street through Congress over the objections of House Republicans (who voted it down the first time, and took a beating from the media and a Republican Administration for torpedoing the stock market)--is magically the scourge of Wall Street.

She called down God's blessings on the protestors saying: “The message of the American people is that no longer . . . will the recklessness of some on Wall Street cause massive joblessness on Main Street.”  Really?  Who will prevent it?  Government?  Her?

Perhaps Nancy forgot her role in the January 24, 2010 deal to increase Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's loan limits in high-cost areas from $417,000 to $729,750.

Packing in that last trillion-dollars-plus of sub-prime, Alt-A mortgage-backed debt before the system froze up from cascading defaults didn't work out too well for Main Street.  But, Wall Street and the GSE's sub-prime confederates loved it.  [n.b. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are "government sponsored entities," or GSE's.]

She also colluded with Chris Dodd and Barney Frank to omit the GSE's from Dodd-Frank's ambit.  Another big win for big finance at the expense of the 50%-of-the-99% who continue to pick up the tab for the 49%-Party's formerly government-subsidized, now government-owned, cash cows.

Noman supposes that it is Minority Leader Pelosi's theatrical outbursts, not governing actions--what she says, not what she does --that count.  Like her oft-repeated, yet never-substantiated (nor questioned by the mainstream media) accusation that tea party protesters spit on members of Congress, it is her words, not reality, that matter.  (They presumably did so as they picked up garbage leaving Washington, DC cleaner than when they arrived en masse.)

There is also President Obama himself, who despite talking protesters onto the streets and winking at them for encouragement is the leading recipient of Wall Street contributions among all politicians in the 1989-2010 period.  That's impressive, especially considering that he's been a candidate for less than a decade.  Nevertheless, he leads the pack of pols with decades more campaign experience, and expenses, reaping $16 million of Wall Street lucre into his coffers.

Then there is a matter that George Soros complained about recently.  The Government--President Obama's government, and before that Senator Obama's government with House Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid running it--injected capital into banks, effectively relieving them of their bad assets and allowing them to earn their way out of a hole.  This allowed banks to earn bumper profits, and pay bumper bonuses once they had paid off their TARP loans.

Banks have earned these profits on President Obama's watch in relatively risk-free fashion courtesy of access to Fed money at record low interest rates held down for a record long period, and capturing the generous spread on tight-money loans in the marketplace even while dragging their feet on lending to small businesses and to the middle class.

Noman doesn't want to dwell on any of that, however.  For now, he's happy just to sit back and enjoy the spectacle.

Taking the longer view, some kind of taxonomy would help to put the disparate pieces of this puzzle together, and describe it.  Aristotelian causation provides one; Michael Novak's tripartite components of modern political economy provide another.  A hybrid of the two ordering devices provides us with a map to survey the scene.

Aristotlte's four causes are the material (that out of which a thing is); formal (that into which a thing becomes); efficient (that by which a thing becomes); and final (that for the sake of which a thing exists).  While they apply specifically to physical objects, e.g., tables, they are useful, though less definitive, for analyzing non-physical phenomena.

Novak's three elements of the American political economy are the political system (which is liberal), the economic system (which is market driven), and the cultural-moral system (which is pluralistic).  Putting the two together, one gets the following matrix:

Cause/System	Political (liberal)	Economic (market driven)	Cultural-Moral (pluralistic)
Material (that out of which)
Formal (that into which)
Efficient (that by which)
Final (that for the sake of which)

Political:

Materially, these protests are a legitimate expression of 1st Amendment rights.  This is the way we do things in America, and it is to be welcomed, even if not appreciated.

That said, there is a question about whether conduct is law-abiding.  If not--and, let's be real--then the right is conditioned, curtailed by arrests, etc.

Additionally, the movement has caught on.  We can expect some manifestation of it to be with us throughout the election season.

The interesting, and troubling, prospect is of what will happen when opposing Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party throngs encounter each other in earnest on the streets.

Formally, these political phenomena are being shaped by narrators, talking heads like Barbara Walters who exalted that "it has spread to more than 250 American cities, more than a thousand countries," despite there being only 195 nation states in the world.

It bears mentioning that the mainstream chattering class, people like Barbara Walters, works for big media corporations.

Also worth mentioning is media's importance to Saul Alinsky's first rule of power tactics: "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have."  As Walter's cheer-leading indicates, there is no force comparable to media for creating illusions.

Otherwise, there is no unified narrative, as protesters clamor for everything from egalitarian utopia, to gay rights, to the freeing of convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.  Occupy Wall Street is decidedly a left-fest.  Its general message is "I want.  Gimme.  I'm entitled.  It's fair.  Tear something down."

Just as the Musllim brotherhood will shape the outcome of the Arab Spring despite the participation of idealistic protesters, Occupy Wall Street is already being shaped by the professional community organizers from SEIU, ACORN's successors, and others operating according to Alinsky's rules.

On this latter point, a look at Chapter 7 of "Rules For Radicals," provides an illuminating glimpse into tactics: e.g., "The real action is the enemy's reaction"; "The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength"; "Tactics, like organization, like life, require that you move with the action."

Recall that ACORN received access to $5 billion of community stabilization funds in the first stimulus bill, though its leader disclaimed any intention of availing himself or the organization of it; AmeriCorps received $6 billion; state employees unions received hundreds of billions of dollars in redistributed loot, as did recipients of transfer payments.

Despite high-brow protestations to the contrary, it stretches credulity--all but Liberals'--to maintain that none of this money is finding its way back into organized initiatives supportive of federal redistribution.

The trigger was President Obama's fiery oratory in support of a jobs bill that was legislatively dead on arrival but rhetorically alive with populist bombast to fuel combustable dispositions.

His speeches to the joint session of Congress and the Congressional Black Caucus bear special mention, though his every utterance since his return from Martha's Vineyard has defiantly fanned the flames of class warfare.  He is even proud of it.

Nor is the President alone.  Today, Vice-president Biden blamed an increase in the number of murders and rapes in Flint, Michigan--the communist city that drove GM away to its own detriment, and nurtured the chip on Michael More's shoulder as well as the scars in his soul--on Republican obstructionism.

Despite the VP's failure to establish causation (as opposed to correlation), and to explain when, how and why local police became the financial responsibility of every US citizen including those in law-abiding communities (as opposed to local citizens who generally pay for local police), the red meat will undoubtedly feed an Occupy Flint movement, and encourage escalating tensions elsewhere.

Finally, Occupy Wall Street is dedicated to greater federal spending and higher taxes.  It is a protest geared towards stimulating Congressional action along Democrats preferred lines, and establishing its fiscal (and social) priorities into law.

Note this contrast with the Tea Party movement.  Occupy Wall Street is dedicated to the use of government power to confiscate wealth from others in order to redistribute it to protesters and their preferred recipients.  The Tea Party is dedicated to the abstention of government power so that those who earn or have wealth can put it to their own preferred uses rather than surrender it to the uses preferred by government-favored third parties.

With respect to those who create wealth, their uses are far more likely to prosper society than the uses of politically connected cronies, e.g., Solyndra.

It takes a peculiar outlook, the Alinsky perspective for instance--i.e., "How can the Have-Nots take power away from the Haves"?--to consider Occupy Wall Street claims sympathetic, or to call a Tea Party leader a nazi for upholding the rule of law.

Economic:

Populist rage is the matter from which this movement springs.  It is easy to despise Wall Streeters (if one lets oneself, which is never advisable) who profited wildly from participating in schemes that nearly bankrupted the global economy.

This particular genie, however, once coaxed out of its bottle, can be devastatingly destructive and well nigh impossible to put back in.  Unstable minds are already at work drawing crude connections and making incendiary remarks.

One problem with Alinsky's tactics is that goading enemies into impolitic reactions can be done by anybody, not just the politically correct, which is already bad enough.

Lost in the protests is the nuance doggedly insisted upon by Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) dissenter Peter Wallison, who writes in today's Wall Street Journal that protestor's rage springs from a false narrative.

It was primarily the government's housing policies, specifically Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's engineering of the sub-prime bubble that bears the blame for our financial misery.   Wall Street was merely a willing accomplice, not its principle architect.

Research by Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer of Fannie Mae (now a colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute) has shown that 27 million loans—half of all mortgages in the U.S.—were subprime or otherwise weak by 2008. That is, the loans were made to borrowers with blemished credit, or were loans with no or low down payments, no documentation, or required only interest payments. 

Of these, over 70% were held or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie or some other government agency or government-regulated institution. Thus it is clear where the demand for these deficient mortgages came from. 

The huge government investment in subprime mortgages achieved its purpose. Home ownership in the U.S. increased to 69% from 65% (where it had been for 30 years). But it also led to the biggest housing bubble in American history. This bubble, which lasted from 1997 to 2007, also created a huge private market for mortgage-backed securities (MBS) based on pools of subprime loans.

Naturally, when one is trying to "pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it" ("all issues must be polarized if action is to follow"--a teaching whose classical expression Alinsky finds in Christ's dictum that "He who is not with me is against me"), nuance gets in the way.

Formally, the idea of a planned, targeted and government-directed economy drives this movement.  Command and control is its essence.

Noman finds this curious as the notion has been thoroughly discredited in management and organizational behavior literature, even in the military, for its suppression of private initiative, reduction of personal responsibility and dependence on centralized actors who cannot possess the omniscience required to make the system work efficaciously.

Ironically, protesters favoring government power over private initiative operate under the cloak of speech and assembly freedoms granted by the same constitution that protects commerce, in its body, not in an added amendment.

The economic trigger was the badly sagging fortunes of the command and control idea.   Despite Newsweek's famous 2009 cover declaring that "We Are All Socialists Now," we are not.

And with persistently high unemployment, skyrocketing deficits and debt, an impending double-dip recession and a proliferation of crony corporatism and corruption, there are daily fewer voices that confidently advocate for top-down economic power.

The discrediting of this economic panacea is all the more alarming to the President's Party as it is accompanied by the President's sinking poll numbers, doubts about his re-election, and concomitant fears of losing Congressional power, which was so opposrtunistically deployed against popular majorities, e.g., ObamaCare.  There is fear of payback, and even of merely justifiable roll back

The momentum to cut spending and lower taxes--a trajectory diametrically opposed to the Democrat's thrust--is on the ascent.  Repeated legislative and budgetary confrontations have only served to raise the profiles of smaller-government proponents such as John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan.

The final cause of Occupy Wall Street's economic thrust is Statism.  Under present conditions, this requires utilizing corporatist intermediaries such as General Electric, Dow Chemical, Pfizer and Walmart: public-private partners that, unlike Chamber of Commerce members, have grown comfortable in bed with the federal government.

Notably, these companies are not the target of protestors' rage.  That could change quickly should the government decide to dispense with their services.

There is nothing in the rhetoric or actions of Occupy Wall Street to indicate where, to protestors' minds, the limits to collectivism, if any, reside.


Cultural-Moral

Materially, the movement's moral impulse is grievance at perceived unfairness.  Income disparities are unseemly to many, and Wall Street is a haven for the exorbitantly paid and lavishly pampered.

Noman does not share Occupy Wall Street's aversion to economic difference, or think that there is no economically meaningful distinction to be drawn between an investment banker and a shoe-shiner.  So, he is not convinced that both should earn roughly the same pay for their efforts--something sundry protestors have suggested, and that he has heard from undergraduates for years.

This implicates at least a touch of self-interest--convenient moralizing, say, or easy virtue--given that protesters, unlike Warren Buffet, are not clamoring to pay more taxes.  Rather, they are demanding more benefits paid for by other's taxes.

The conflicts of interest inherent in the frustrated sentiments expressed have largely escaped protestors' self-examination, which does not excuse public sympathizers from Fed Chairmen Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to short seller George Soros for failing to recognize and acknowledge them.

Formally, the tendency is towards an equal distribution of resources.  It is an article of faith for some that equality of outcome will end injustice and suffering, and usher in heaven on earth.  The pedigree for this notion runs from Rousseau through Marx to Lenin.

But, will redistribution ever achieve its lofty aims?  Noman thinks not given the evidence of history, which leads to the opposite conclusion.

No system geared towards equality could ever ensure that everybody had something because it could never guarantee supply under demotivating conditions.  It could only ensure that nobody (besides the rulers) had anything.

Do you remember Liberals waxing eloquent about Cuba? The Soviet Union?  Nicaragua?  How has the equal distribution of resources worked in those worker's paradises?

Naturally, perfect equality proves elusive because those who effectuate the balancing, the Party, always reserves the lion's share for itself and its members.

What would be different should Occupy Wall Street and the Democratic Party have its way with the people's morals, and wallets?

The efficient cause of this movement is opportunity, specifically opportunism provided by our proximity to the financial crisis.  The relevance of occupying Wall Street as opposed to Beverly Hills, where arguably more millionaires and sub-prime/Alt-A mortgages might be found, is the financial capitol's psychological connection to the still-profusing economic wound.

Moreover, Liberals are so close, yet so far from consolidating massive gains.  The Wall Street Journal editorialized in January of 2009 about Democrats' 40 year wish list.  Today, this article serves primarily as a grim testament to Democrat's faulty prognosticative powers, and untrustworthiness to manage the nation's finances and affairs.

The adoption of the 40 year wish list in the first stimulus bill was followed by countless Liberal conquests including most notably, ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank.  All that remains to accomplish--besides establishing a blue state entitlement to red state taxes--is to pay for these spend-and-tax victories before capital markets definitively protest, and credit default swaps on the nation's debt render them Pyrrhic.

To Occupy Wall Street, these legislative triumphs make America more fair.  They redistribute money and power from the Haves to the Have-Nots.  The Have-Nots are entitled.  Consequently, taxes must be raised now, regardless of the consequences, or all will be lost.  Carpe diem.

Resentment, unemployment and malaise also trigger this moral response.  Things are not going well economically.  As it sounds less-and-less credible to blame the mess on the other guys the further they recede from memory, it must be the fault of systemic injustices.

When the going gets tough, the Left capitalizes on its opportunity for big change, even when its policies are the cause of the tough sledding.  Perhaps especially then.

Finally, the cause is the demand for social justice.  Who doesn't want that, you ask?  But, along whose, and what lines are we talking?

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre highlighted the problems besetting contemporary moral discourse and suggested means to surmount them in a landmark series of books commencing with "After Virtue" (1981) and ending with "Dependent Rational Animals" (1999).  The second of four books, entitled "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?" highlighted the incommensurability of moral positions predicated on disparate foundations, each rooted in separate and distinct historical epochs.

To the extent that mere words such as "social justice" and "fairness" bind listeners in their spells, it behoove us to discern the roots of their varying articulations.

Noman will attempt to ground those roots in varying conceptions of "Hope" in a subsequent post on the topic.