Lessons of 2008
Monday December 29, 2008
Categories: Varia
From Robert Samuelson's column today: It's the end of an era. We know that 2008, much like 1932 or 1980, marks a dividing line for the American economy and society. But what lies on the other side is hazy at...
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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1. Adam Smith knew this in 1776 when he wrote/released his masterpiece.
2. Russia, in the long run, is demographically dead. China is where the focus should be, and is where Russia's focus really is. All the nonsense about sending ships to Latin America is just kabuki. Russia can not maintain a blue-water navy for much longer, especially with the collapse of the energy sector ( their main source of income )
3. The newspaper is dead now. I get all my updates, including articles for the next days edition for free from an AP app on my i-phone. Tell me why I should subscribe.
China is demographically in trouble too with it's long standing one child policy. It has an overabundance of males who lack mates.....look for war in Asia under these circumstances. It will soon have more elderly than young who must be supported. Perhaps then they will turn to a one elderly policy and force euthanasia. Who knows. Chinas is the wild card.
It is possible to "sow democracy" at the end of a gun. Democracy imposed is not democratic, casting a ballot is not the same as having or making a choice.
The GOP is conservative.
As for newspapers, the paper part may be true, but written/printed journalism will go on. It's far easier to edit and send text than video/audio streams.
1. You will never be able to control greed. However, you can minimize it's damage through regulation.
2. Russia is not a threat, long term. China is where the threat lies.
3. Until this year, I was a voracious reader of newspapers. Now, I read them on-line. The only time I read a newspaper is when one is given to me in a hotel that doesn't have web access. Unfortunately, it's usually USA Today, which isn't a newspaper as much as an AP Clipping Service.
4. Dogs rule.
5. The Culture Wars are dead... for now. In the next few years, Gays, Guns, and God have significance in national elections.
6. The GOP better come up with some new ideas other than: A) Tax Cuts, B) Immigration, C) Cutting Programs, or they'll be in the wilderness for a generation.
I'm not sure what to title this, but the thought that conservatives like myself could vote for an ultra-liberal like Obama, not just reluctantly but enthusiastically, certainly shows that 2008 is a watershed moment in politics.
Perhaps it is as simple as competence and intelligence trumping ideology.
1. Do you actually believe that we have a "self-regulating" economy? That there are not reams and reams and forests worth of government regulations on every conceivable economic activity, from corporate boardrooms to neighborhood yard sales? (And if you think your yard sale wasn't regulated, I recommend you check with your local government office to see how many rules you might have broken with your attempt at a free market.)
In fact, rather than "deregulating" the economy, the past eight years have seen a near-doubling of the rules that business must follow. Yes, the sub-prime crash was horrible, but it was caused by government regulation ("You will make loans to 'disadvantaged' peoples, regardless of their ability to repay"), not by the lack thereof.
2. Good for Russia. That said, neither Russia nor China are much of a threat to the U.S., given the inefficiencies of their managed economies, and their dependence on a conscript military. The American people face far more serious threats to their freedom from their own government.
3. American newspapers are already dead; what we are watching is the decay of the corpse.
Lesson number one would have to be the demonstrable incapacity of the American establishment to learn anything at all, so accustomed are its members to viewing reality as just so much inert matter to be manipulated in the service of their interests. So the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq stipulates that American forces be removed from the cities by a set date? Naaahh, we'll just redefine those forces as something else, and keep them there! Pullout by 2011? No, we'll renegotiate! Empire forever! So the Imperium encountered a bit of blowback in the Caucasus. No matter. That merely demonstrates that our policy towards Russia is more necessary; we must expand while Russia is weak, and when Russia is strong, we must... continue to expand! You might think that the collapse of the financial markets under the weight of excessive leverage and unregulated trading in arcane derivatives would leave participants chastened. Many of them believe that neither their models nor their practices were at fault. It was merely cyclical, you understand, and they anticipate revving up the engines of unproductive, but lucrative, speculation as soon as circumstances are propitious.
Lesson number two would be the persistent vegetative state of the GOP and the conservative movement, which collectively refuse to acknowledge the world-historical abyss of failure that has been the Bush administration's foreign policy, and even now endeavour to rehabilitate The Decider, despite the fact that it was foreign policy, above all other political considerations, that handed the Congress and the Presidency back to the Democrats. This is scarcely to mention the intellectual coma from which issued such "solutions" to the economic crisis as more capital gains tax cuts, as though the problem with the markets was a dearth of capital, and not an excess of capital ceaselessly pursuing speculative gains and wagers. Must we talk about the low burlesque of Joe the Plumber, and what that episode represented about the dissociative mental afflictions of the conservative movement?
Lesson number three would be that the Democratic and progressive lefts are no less prone to fantasy and projection than their conservative Others, having invested enormous quantities of Hope and other forms of flapdoodle in the Obama campaign, despite Obama's having telegraphed all along, via his remarks on foreign policy, and his coziness with the financial elite, that he would represent the Eternal Return of the Same. He wasn't Bush, apparently, and that was sufficient for them, though scarcely worthy of the exaggerated hopes and pretensions that, once again, demonstrated our democracy to be a carnival of the absurd.
Lesson number four would be that Christ Himself could return to Earth for the express purpose of proclaiming that the CRA did not, of itself, precipitate the financial collapse, and legions of those who profess to follow Him would apparently prefer to accept His fallibility on that account that to concede that deregulation, understood broadly as the belief that markets would be self-regulating in respect of "financial innovation", was at fault. Where your treasure is....
Treebeard: Just for purposes of perspective, I'll just pass on the observation of somebody from Germany with whom I was speaking a couple of weeks, who said -- "Only in America would Obama be considered a liberal. In Germany, he'd be classified as pretty far to the right."
Richard
"This article of conventional wisdom, at least on the Right and among New Democrats,..."
Thank you! Thank you for being more specific about the 'both parties are at fault' argument. The problem has been economic conventional wisdom based on free-market fundamentalism.
I hope that one day you will clearly state the role of 'Modern Conservatism' in pushing these ideas into our conventional wisdom. Meanwhile, progress is indeed progress. :}
America will one day elect a (half-)black candidate, just, as with Augustine's plea for chastity, not yet.
Among Democrats, Clintonism practiced by the Clintons - perceived tacking by Mrs. C. to the center, and pandering to the White Working Class, the "most important electoral demographic", will win the nomination. Sailing the blue as in '92 is the key to America's cup. "Experience" (read "familiarity") and "vetting" for 3am calls on the Batphone will trump any untested upstart.
Among Republicans, acting in the belief that America is a center-right nation, that the median voter is a perpetually pissed-off 55-year old white man from the suburbs with a wife and three kids who yells at the TV news over his Miller and nachos, that past performance by Rovean strategeries is a guarantee of sustained momentum rather than the unbankable luck of a two-time hitmaker, and that the Swiftboating Spirit of '04 [read: the oh-so-secure-in-himself "Dr. Jerome Corsi, Ph.D."] will never die, will trump unsleeping change in economic and financial affairs, culture and demographics and world affairs, will turn the trick of holding the White House for the GOP by the thin wafer proferred Mr. Creosote by his fern-jumping waiter in Monty Python's Meaning of Life.
That the Washington press-pundit-pack can see the political future even a week hence more clearly than the one who cuts my meat at the grocer's [or on my TV tray before persuading me unto ingestion that my spoon is an airplane and my mouth a hangar].
That the ideo-electoral labels hatched when men wore the sort of hats we recall from the Jack Ruby photo, when Pittsburgh passed the half-million mark, every dust-bunny under your bed sported a hammer-and-sickle, and the back of every TV set was cousin to the World's Biggest Toaster in glowing hot orange before its switched-off front shrunk to a tiny white dot, will continue to matter.
That, thanks to a new and occult blend of space-age polymers, duct tape and a battery of techs in Bangalore working for papadams and a zooful of trained and self-expiring! CAPTCHA monkeys, the Beliefnet comboxes will become a model of smooth dreamy futurist bliss not seen since the 1939 World's Fair and ads from old Truman-age issues of Mechanix Illustrated.
Some dreams never die; we'll always have Dallas, and Baton Rouge*, ah gare-own-tee...
*"The favorite blush of drum majorettes since 1956"
Lesson number four would be that Christ Himself could return to Earth for the express purpose of proclaiming that the CRA did not, of itself, precipitate the financial collapse, and legions of those who profess to follow Him would apparently prefer to accept His fallibility on that account that to concede that deregulation, understood broadly as the belief that markets would be self-regulating in respect of "financial innovation", was at fault.
But to admit that some factor(s), other than governmental ones like Frannie, CRA, & the Fed, might possibly have contributed to the current financial crisis, is to admit the possibility of market failure. Which would, of course, undermine the position of anyone arguing in favor of deregulation. Can't have that.
The War in Iraq can be conducted successfully along counter-insurgency lines. The remaining national-political issues in Iraq are beyond the purview of the U.S. military, which can be forgiven for passing them off in light of doing most of the heavy lifting to this point. From now, what will be, will be.
Just seconds after blowing from the back row my fusillade of spitballs above, I find this:
The Worst Predictions About 2008
http://news.yahoo.com/s/bw/20081229/bs_bw/dec2008db20081224028134
Happily, everybody ends up rubbing his crimsoned glutes in fin-de-l'annee sadder-Budweiser thoughtfulness, from Barney Frank to Screamin' Jim Cramer to Strummin' T-Bone Pickens. To adapt the late comedian/Cajun chef Justin Wilson, "Lock the doors, Max, we not lettin' the neighbors have any of this Schadenfreude!"
My favorite:
"10. A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win, the title of a book by conservative commentator Shelby Steele, published on Dec. 4, 2007.
"Mr. Steele, meet President-elect Barack Obama."
New Year's Resolution, as of 2:40 pm EST: master the Art of Closing Properly HTML Italics Tags, lest your careless crystalline refraction of white light unto polychrome lead readers to a prism sentence...
I disagree with your first contention. The free market will regulate itself, it's just that nobody wants to live with that regulation as it will be harsh, especially after years of government interference and easy money.
Re: Russia, in the long run, is demographically dead.
In the long run, anything can happen. There's absolutely no reason to believe that today's demographic trends will endure as a permanent reality over the generations and centuries. As the Chinese sage said, This too shall pass.
Re: It has an overabundance of males who lack mates.....look for war in Asia under these circumstances.
Actually no. Those only sons are too precious to their parents to risk in warfare. Look rather for social unrest and perhaps revolution in China.
Re: ...an ultra-liberal like Obama
Obama is not showing himself to be any kind of ultra-liberal (he isn't a Barbara Ehrenreich clone for crying out loud!) In fact, it looks like we're going to see a fair amount of continuity with the better-conceived policies (yes, there were some) of the Bush years.
Re: In Germany, he'd be classified as pretty far to the right."
Also an exagerration. By European standards Obama is a centrist. Europe is not as far Left as many people think. What fools people in these matters is that Euriope has a stronger and more vocal Left than the US has (and a much smaller and fairly quiet far Right). However European policies in the main are not all that far from American policies, with allowances for cultural and local differences.
Richard,
Point well taken. Thanks.
I also enjoy the irony, considering how much Germany has changed. Bismarck's empire it ain't. But that kind of conservatism and American conservatism are certainly different.
RE: the free market does not self-regulate.
True, but we will soon re-learn the lesson that govt planners also have the capacity to sin.
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