The Presidential Election: The More Things Change the More they Stay the Same

The election of 2008 has a lot of firsts, the first serious African American contender, the first serious female contender, three incumbent Senators running against each other and so on. Yet despite all these novelties the most striking thing about this election is the way in which American politics have returned to familiar patterns.
The Democrats are as divided as ever living up to Will Rogers old saying that he belonged to no organized party because he was a Democrat. Instead of taking advantage the Republicans’ weakness the Democrats are busy trying to destroy each other. Obama and Hillary and their partisans seem to be doing nothing but the Republicans job for them. If John McCain wins the presidency it will largely be the Democrats’ doing and if that happens they deserve to loose.
The Republicans have reverted to type by choosing a tired old war horse as their standard bearer. As in 1996 and earlier the Republicans believe a combination of inoffensiveness and military glory real or imagined will over come a lack of popularity.
The Republicans are living up to their heritage as the party of the bloody flag whether it be the flag of the Civil War, World War II, Vietnam or the Iraq War. The Democrats are living up to their heritage as a party of factions who are constantly at each others’ throats.
Nor are the politics themselves that original this time around, Barack Obama is being attacked because of a sermon given by his pastor, a five year old sermon. A similar thing helped Grover Cleveland win the presidency in 1884. Hillary’s race baiting and class warfare politics targeting working class whites is simply George Wallace’s 1960s populism regurgitated. Obama’s intellectualism and reasoned approach is simply John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier or Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom. Obama’s charm offensive of reasoned rhetoric spiked with folksy jokes and jabs is simply Ronald Reagan repackaged for a liberal Democratic audience. John McCain’s populist blather is simply the insurgent politics of Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ross Perot and it hasn’t been dusted off.
Still the candidates interest me, Hillary Clinton is quite simply the sleaziest and slimiest self serving worm to appear in our political culture since the age of those jackals Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Like LBJ and Tricky Dick, Hillary is scum she will stab you in the back, then slit your throat and steal your wallet for good measure. Her husband was bad, she is worse.
John McCain well I think he is as a low a form of life as Hillary perhaps lower. Okay I’ve heard the stories of military glory and they speak to me of incompetence and single minded self preservation. A third rate fighter pilot who attended Annapolis and got his officers’ commission and pilots’ wings because daddy was an admiral. He was a lousy fighter pilot who got himself shot down over North Vietnam and a self serving weasel who was able to survive and thrive in a Communist prison camp good training for the US Senate. Like his fellow vet, John Kerry, McCain bought his way into the Senate by marrying a rich girl and using her money to buy votes. In the Senate, McCain distinguished himself as one of the Keating Five, he took money from the savings and loan shark who stole old people’s life savings. Later he emerged as a champion of campaign finance reform. Worst of all McCain has showed himself to be a pathetic little toady who does whatever the media tells him to get a sound bite. I don’t want such a man in the White House, he’ll start a war in order to make the evening news.
McCain will pay for this when the whispering campaign against him starts. I can hear it now, “that McCain guy, he was in that Commie prison camp right? There’s only one way he could have survived there and that’s if he was a Commie himself. Notice how he’s been really friendly with them since he got back.” Okay it’s not original and not new but it’ll work, especially with all the guys who were wading through the mud in the jungle and trading bullets with the Vietcong while McCain was getting his picture taken with Jane Fonda. My guess is that the Democratic political operatives have already organized the Patriotic Veterans Against John McCain and John Kerry has already signed up as honorary chairman. Notice that all of this seems disturbingly familiar didn’t we hear it about four years ago but it worked?
So nothing is new in American politics except for Barack Obama brave young reformer and champion of the common man who came from nowhere. Oh wait a minute was that Grover Cleveland’s act and that was 124 years ago in 1884...

The Age of Austerity

Over at what maybe the last outpost of intelligent political thought left, the American Conservative, Nicholas Von Hoffman has made an intelligent observation in his latest screed “Red State.” Rising energy prices, the collapsing value of the US dollar, the shrinking market for US government securities and the collapse of the US real estate market will probably usher in an era of private and government austerity in the US.
This doesn’t mean we’re going to face anything like a new Great Depression but an era of diminished expectations and spending. Americans aren’t going to be standing in breadlines they’ll simply be spending less. That is Americans will be buying their coffee at McDonalds rather than Starbucks, shopping at Wal-Mart, taking the bus rather than driving and vacationing in Florida rather than Tuscany.
Particularly hard hit by the era of diminished expectations and austerity will be government. Government simply won’t be able to do everything it’s done in the past. On the federal level that will probably mean massive cutbacks in our military forces, our international commitments and foreign aid. On the state level it will mean more potholes in the highways and on the local level fewer hours at the library and fewer cops on the streets. Government services we take for granted will either disappear or get shifted to private industry. Already in Colorado we have privately operated toll roads and talk of placing toll booths on free highways.
Hurt most by the new austerity will be the poor whose government benefits are always cut first and restored last. It will be the schools in bad neighborhoods that will have the leaky roofs and old textbooks. The rich will be able to send their kids to private schools with new textbooks and patched roofs.
Democrats and Republicans alike will be hurt by the age of austerity for both parties exist largely to distribute government largess to their supporters. Without government largess to dispense the politicians will have little to do. The political battles will get more vicious and bitter because the spoils are drying up.
The politicians will have little control over the situation because they won’t have money to spend. This doesn’t mean they won’t try to deal with the situation, all sorts of crackpot ideas will come forward new kinds of taxes, adjustments to the money supply, government loans, the gold standard, tariffs, Keynesian economics and God knows what else.
So how do we deal with the coming age of austerity and the suffering it’ll generate? Two things that won’t work will be forced austerity in the form of government imposed austerity such as rationing or prohibition and political leaders trying to set an example of austerity. Rationing and prohibition only promote the black market and conspicuous consumption by limiting freedom and turning the items prohibited or rationed into forbidden fruit that the public will want more. Leaders who try to set an example of austerity are always seen as jokes, hypocrites and failures, remember what happened to Jimmy Carter after he appeared on TV wearing a sweater to emphasize the fact that he had turned down the Thermostat at the White House? He became a symbol of political failure and remains so.
The only kind of austerity that works is the natural austerity of the free market because it is the only austerity that rewards thrift and hard work. More importantly, the free market always punishes greed and avarice. If we leave the free market alone and let it work the age of austerity will be painful but it’ll be necessary.
So should average Americans worry about the age of austerity that is coming? Not it isn’t going to be average Americans who suffer in the age of austerity but government and those who profit it. Average people aren’t going to be on the bread line instead it will be the politicians and the bureaucrats.

How Likely is a World Made By Hand?
By Daniel G. Jennings
I really enjoyed James Howard Kunstler’s wonderful book A World Made By Hand. This entertaining novel is a tale of everybody life in a future America where technological civilization has completely collapsed forcing people to grow their own food, make their own clothes, govern their own communities and rely on horses for transportation.
The novel is very entertaining, touching and quite funny at moments. Kunstler is a brilliant satirist especially when he describes the efforts of a group of trailer park residents to entertain themselves without television and stereo systems. They put on a show that includes Heavy Metal played on homemade instruments, play acting of porn movies and episodes of the Sopranos and torture.
Still a nagging question comes into the back of our minds? How likely is the world described by Kunstler to come to pass? My answer is not likely at all, yes Kunstler’s thesis that our civilization faces a Great Crisis, a Long Emergency because of the depletion of oil will probably come to pass. Yet Civilization is always facing crises and emergencies, World War I, Communism, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, nuclear proliferation, and many others and guess what it usually survives. The depletion of oil is a crisis that our civilization will survive probably by a combination of free market economics, technology and good luck.
Kunstler postulates a couple of other factors that combine with oil depletion to form a perfect storm of crises to bring down America. They are a massive epidemic, the Mexican Flu and nuclear terrorism. The last great epidemic didn’t even slow our civilization down. The Spanish Influenza Epidemic of 1918 killed more people than World War One and it didn’t even slow civilization down. Indeed the decade following the Spanish Influenza, the 1920s was marked by decadence, unparalleled technological advance and economic growth.
Kunstler also imagines that nuclear terrorism will bring our economy to a halt. That might be possible, but nuclear terrorism itself is not likely. The possibility of terrorists getting their hands on a nuclear bomb is unlikely. Terrorists aren’t likely to build a bomb because they lack the massive industrial infrastructure needed to build one. They might steal one, of course that would require an organization and a criminal genius out of a James Bond movie. Hijacking a plane is simple, overrunning the kind of military base where nuclear bombs is kept would require hundreds of highly trained and heavily armed commandos, planes, scientists and technicians. Even at its best Al Qaeda couldn’t help to put that together. One tank or a platoon of infantry men could wipe them out.
Then of course there’s the other nightmare scenario the terrorists might buy a bomb from some corrupt post Soviet Russian. Okay, Russia has fallen back but not that far back. The Russian nuclear arsenal is still under the control of the Russian military and secret police and they regard its safety as their national honor. Russians maybe many things but they are honorable and they will protect their nation’s honor. Any Islamic terrorist who comes within a thousand feet of a Russian nuke would either A) be dead or B) get sold a box full of radioactive waste and a GPS tracking device that will lead Delta Force straight to his hideout.
Even if terrorists could wipe out a couple of our cities that wouldn’t bring down our society. During World War II Germany, Russia, Japan and several other countries suffered far worse damage than what Kunstler depicts and they quickly recovered their technological civilizations and became more advanced technologically. Similar developments occurred after our own Civil War in which large areas of the South were completely destroyed. Indeed postwar destruction probably accelerated technological progress in the United States after the Civil War and Europe and Japan after World War II.
Yes, terrorists are going to wreck a lot of havoc in the years ahead, indeed I’m surprised there hasn’t been a major terror attack on the US since September 11. But I’m not too worried about nuclear terrorism. The terrorism I’m worried about is the old fashioned kind that involves guns and bombs or the new kind of terrorism that involves computers. Cyber terrorism will be incredibly dangerous and destructive and in ways that we can’t imagine but it won’t bring down civilization. Cyber terrorism requires modern civilization and the networked tribes that profit from it want civilization to continue. They succeed by manipulating civilization not by destroying it.
There is one crisis Kunstler mentions that could bring us down and that is the crisis of the spirit. That is we simply give up on civilization and let it collapse, that is a possibility it’s happened before. The Romans, the Arab Caliphate, the British Empire all gave up at the moment of greatest triumph, the Chinese retreated from the world when they were at the pinnacle of their power. We have the tools to save ourselves from this crisis the question is do we have the brains, the guts and the courage to use them? Of course if we do give up the Chinese will simply take over and we Americans will end up like the British, second citizens in a world we made.
So terrorism, oil depletion and epidemics aren’t going to bring our civilization down. They will change it beyond recognition but I seriously doubt we’ll end up living in a World Made By Hand.