| Monday,
July 19, 2010 Nancy Pelosi is now saying that the reason
Obama's popularity is falling is that expectations were too high. Jimmy
Carter tells us that it's racism. The NAACP tells us it's racism that
motivates the tea parties and opposition to the government. Meanwhile my
newspaper headlines tell me that the Administration, without any
Congressional action, is completely revamping conservation and environmental
protection. No one is sure what all that means.
And small business investment falls, job creation is low, and the only
reason unemployment is falling is that the number of people seeking jobs is
falling. I wonder if Congress has considered that if you collect
unemployment benefits you have to be looking for work, so if we increase the
time you can collect unemployment it will attract some of those who
gave up seeking work because their benefits ran out, and thus bring
unemployment rates up again? Which is a long winded way of saying that
if you want more of something subsidize it. If you want less of something,
fine people for doing it. If you make it more difficult and more expensive
to employ people, you will get fewer people employed; if you pay people to
be unemployed, you will get more unemployed. If you pay people to be poor
for a living, you will get people to take that job: since they are employed
-- the job is collecting public benefits -- perhaps we should "reduce
unemployment" by taking them off the "unemployed" list? That should help the
numbers.
The government has lost the confidence of the people. The government
doesn't even have to read the laws it passes. It's all being passed along to
a bureaucracy that understands full well what is wanted.
The Ruling Class
My one-time colleague Angelo Codevilla -- he was briefly a Research
Associate at Pepperdine Research Institute when I was Managing Director --
has a long and important article in the current American Spectator magazine.
The title is "America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution".
Both parts of that title are important. You can find it here:
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/print
There have always been elites in America, and there have always been
local ruling classes and aristocracies; but it is only comparatively
recently that there has been "a ruling class" of the kind we have now.
Codevilla traces its development and some of the consequences.
This development was predictable and predicted. The authors of The Bell
Curve understood the phenomenon, and postulated some of the causes; of
course the development of the ruling class was well under way when The Bell
Curve was published, and interestingly enough the establishment, although
created in large part by the process described in The Bell Curve, soundly
and roundly rejected the book, its principles. and everything about it.
That's because the authors of The Bell Curve were not part of the ruling
class and never could be; and besides, part of their thesis was wrong. The
US hasn't become a meritocracy; but the pretense of creating one did bring
together the elements of the ruling class.
Some of this development was, if not predicted, at least strongly implied
in some of my earlier papers on The
Voodoo Sciences, all written long before the current crisis or indeed
before "the global warming consensus." And of course there's
The Iron Law. Codevilla's thesis isn't all that new (nor does he claim it to be) but this
presentation is done well. It's particularly relevant on what has to be
done.
The main thesis of Codevilla's article is that America's majority -- an
overwhelming majority -- is not represented by the Ruling Class and is
increasingly unhappy with it -- and the remedy is not merely turning the
Democrats out in November. The storm clouds are gathering.
<snip>Important as they are, our political
divisions are the iceberg's tip. When pollsters ask the American people
whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next
presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever
pollsters add the preferences "undecided," "none of the above," or "tea
party," these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans
trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call
themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only
a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters
that Republican officeholders represent them well. <snip>
Sooner or later, well or badly, [the national]
majority's demand for representation will be filled. Whereas in 1968
Governor George Wallace's taunt "there ain't a dime's worth of difference"
between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with only 13.5
percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a serious
contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39 percent of
Americans vs. 31 percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Clinton) simply
by speaking ill of the ruling class. Today, few speak well of the ruling
class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has
undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and
mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to
the American people. Americans' conviction that the ruling class is as
hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only
about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The
rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to
say so. <snip>
Codevilla also agues that the ruling class is busily dumbing
itself down. Having been created in theory as a meritocracy, it never really
was that, and is less so now than ever. I might note that the collapse of
the public school system works toward that end. We've discussed this in
previous essays, and coincidentally
there's relevant mail today. As to the consequences:
<snip> Beyond patronage, picking
economic winners and losers redirects the American people's energies to
tasks that the political class deems more worthy than what Americans choose
for themselves. John Kenneth Galbraith's characterization of America as
"private wealth amidst public squalor" (The Affluent Society, 1958) has ever
encapsulated our best and brightest's complaint: left to themselves,
Americans use land inefficiently in suburbs and exurbs, making it necessary
to use energy to transport them to jobs and shopping. Americans drive big
cars, eat lots of meat as well as other unhealthy things, and go to the
doctor whenever they feel like it. Americans think it justice to spend the
money they earn to satisfy their private desires even though the ruling
class knows that justice lies in improving the community and the planet. The
ruling class knows that Americans must learn to live more densely and close
to work, that they must drive smaller cars and change their lives to use
less energy, that their dietary habits must improve, that they must accept
limits in how much medical care they get, that they must divert more of
their money to support people, cultural enterprises, and plans for the
planet that the ruling class deems worthier. So, ever-greater taxes and
intrusive regulations are the main wrenches by which the American people can
be improved (and, yes, by which the ruling class feeds and grows). <snip>
There's a lot more, some of which you will have encountered
here, such as Adorno's influential book that few have ever heard of, and
other stuff from the Voodoo sciences, or our discussions of education.
The question is, what to do about it. A large majority of
Americans rejects the current ruling class. Codevilla (who came to America
from Italy unable to speak English as a youngster, and was thoroughly
assimilated by the time he was a graduate student) summarizes the task for
Americans this way:
[The] greatest difficulty will be
to enable a revolution to take place without imposing it. America has been
imposed on enough.
Amen.
===============================
Dr. Pournelle, You wrote "the iPhone 4 is a major
step toward the Pocket Computer Niven and I described in 1974 in The Mote
in God's Eye (alas not yet available in Kindle edition; we're working on
it)." Mote and Gripping Hand are both available, along with much of your
other work, in epub format from Baen, which works excellently on the
Barnes and Noble Nook. Read both of them on the beach last month. I also
read "Mission to Minerva", by the late James Hogan, this past weekend on
my Nook on the beach. I'm pretty sure that the Calibre e-book management
software will convert epub to Kindle format.
Kit Case
All true.
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