politics

I'm finally climbing out of the worst headcold I've had in three years, and although I'm still not at my ever-best, it's time to continue the series here on politics without a) naming individual candidates, and b) anger. Point a) is a requirement I've placed on myself; you needn't feel thus constrained. Point b) is in force for both of us, and so far (reading the comments on LiveJournal) I think it's working extraordinarily well.

Today, I'd like to go back to fundamental principles and ask, What is government actually for? We don't teach anything about the ideas behind government in this country anymore, because any time one tries, his or her tribal opponents yell, indoctrination! This is largely due to the sad fact that there are two theories of wealth locked in eternal warfare: The position that wealth happens by luck or corruption and must be redistributed; and the position that wealth happens by work and must be retained by the worker as his or her property.

The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle. Minor wealth is usually obtained by work. Great wealth is almost always more luck than anything else, at least in developed nations where corruption does not completely dominate government. (I use “wealth” in the technical sense here, as owned assets of any kind, without any implication of scale. A man with a quarter has some wealth, even if he's starving to death.) It seems pretty clear from my reading of history that wealth tends to concentrate over time until wealth concentration makes societies unstable. This is one point (among many others) that Will and Ariel Durant make in their superb little book, The Lessons of History. The redistributionists have history on their side. But…you can't redistribute what you ain't got. (Marxism tried to do this, and killed 100,000,000 people in the process.) So the fundamental purpose of government is this: To establish and maintain the conditions necessary to keep the rate of wealth creation ahead of population growth. Put another way: Government needs to create a framework within which people can work to support themselves. By “framework” I do not mean government jobs, which exist only by siphoning wealth out of the private sector. I mean things like maintaining civil order and a stable currency, respect for private property, allowing trade with other nations, and defense from attack. I could put a number of other things on the list, but those are the biggies.

It's a complicated and subtle business. Total freedom does not maximize the rate of wealth creation; I've read that in many places. There's a sweet spot where a certain amount of regulation, read here as limits on economic freedom, yields the highest rate of wealth creation. Alas, there's no tag on the graph to mark the spot—and the location of the spot changes unpredictably. There is, however, a huge hint: Maximizing economic opportunity for individuals (as opposed to public or private corporate bodies) probably leads more directly toward the sweet spot than anything else we could do. This includes access to markets, choice of education, career, and workplace, and freedom to create new businesses (and thus jobs) with minimal interference.

What troubles me about modern politics is that the forces controlling both sides are opposed to expanding the economic freedom of individuals. Both sides look to government to expand their power, and power is really what politics is about. On the left, the tendency is for the aggregation of power of governmental and semigovernmental bodies at the expense of individuals. On the right, the tendency is toward aggregation of power of large corporations against individuals and especially against entrepreneurs. The right/left mapping to political parties breaks down here: The most rabid Republicans I know are small business owners, who are willing to work for little or nothing when starting out or when conditions get bad. The big corporate people I know are much more nuanced in their politics, and many admit to being Democrats. This seems obvious in retrospect, but it took a fair bit of time for me to figure out: Big corporations fear startups far more than they fear government. (Like recognizes and begets like: The bigger a corporation is, the more it actually begins to look like a government.) Governments and corporations both strive toward monopolies; governments of force, and corporations of markets. Without limits, those monopolies work against the well-being of individuals, and they grow unless explicitly checked.

The depressing thing about this election cycle is that neither party seems especially interested in economic opportunity for individuals, and especially in job creation. The Democrats are basically owned by Big Labor and the tort bar. The Republicans (what's left of the party, at least) are beholden to certain large corporations who want protected markets, and a relative handful of conservative social organizations that are mostly religious in underpinnings. There's not a whiff of populist sentiment on either side. Many people who would otherwise lean Republican are disgusted and will vote Democratic just to kill the cancer of the last eight years.

There's opportunity there; the Republicans could win (long-term) by losing. It's interesting to look back and see that when the Democrats have taken control of all three elected branches of government, they don't hold it very long. If the Republican party is ever reborn with a genuinely populist message, they could well put the Democrats back into the broom closet for another twenty years. Much collateral damage happens as the pendulum swings, but I don't think anybody knows how to keep political parties from abandoning the center, which these days means respect for the primacy of the individual against moneyed interests at either extreme of the left/right axis. The party that takes the center and keeps it will rule until they forget why they came to rule.

I see from my notes that I could go on for another several thousand words, but that's all I want to deal with tonight. And tomorrow, mon dieu. I wish I could just jump directly to Wednesday.

By conscious choice I generally don't talk about politics, having realized by degrees over a couple of decades that politics makes you stupid. Yes, it does. I'm amazed at the number of highly educated people I see in the blogosphere screaming anathemas at one another over a candidate's campaign promises, or some perceived slight of a partisan icon, etc. etc. The sheer quantity of raw hatred makes me want to pull the covers up over my head, even when I'm out in traffic and hear it on the radio, miles away from my comfy Sleep Number bed. I don't know most of these people, but I do know a few, and I need to remind one and all that anger is how the Emperor enslaves you. (You'd think that watching the full Star Wars saga 23 times would have taught people that much, at least.)

But I'm now annoyed enough to suspend my suspension, and for the next seven days I will indeed talk about politics, but with a wrinkle: I will not mention any candidate by name. (Could you do that too? Dare ya!) Politics is not about specific people or parties, but rather the ideas surrounding governance, and much could be discussed today that is not being discussed, because far too many of us have taken up our spears, smeared on plenty of colorful gonzoberry juice, tossed our intellects up on the rack over the mantle, and bumbled out the door to scream tribal insults at anyone who dares disagree with us. (Tribalism itself is an interesting psychological issue that I will return to after my self-imposed political embargo resumes.)

Why seven days? Because seven days from today I go back in for more oral surgery, and at that point it will all be over and I will pull the covers up over my head.

_ . . . _

So. Have I read the latest candidate platforms? Have I evaluated the various promised tax cuts and health plans and other goodies? Of course I have. Have they persuaded me to vote one way or another? Get real, people: Such things are rubbish. Nothing a candidate says or does after they declare candidacy is the least bit useful in making voting decisions. Here's why:

• It's legal to lie. And politicians never lie, right?
• It's legal to change your mind after taking office, even if you didn't consciously lie during the campaign.
• There is no penalty for failure.

All this being true, candidates can be expected to say whatever they think will get them elected. The worst we can do is vote them out of office at some future date, after which they can safely sell their memoirs to Random House and get rich on the lecture circuit, irrespective of the number of deaths and lost jobs directly attributable to their time in office.

All this seems pretty obvious to me. But there's a fourth item that one would think a semester of high school civics would have made clear:

• Presidents are not kings. We are not ruled by presidents. We are ruled by political parties.

Once a single party holds all three elected branches of national government (and for the Senate, “holding” means a filibuster-proof majority) that party pretty much governs alone. Lacking such blanket control, we are ruled by “the politics of the possible,” which is a glorious way of saying, “whatever both parties can compromise on.” There is a strong argument for divided government as a way of minimizing the damage that single-party rule can easily cause, and that argument is one of the things that informs my voting decisions.

Another and more important thing I do is look at what a candidate did and said (in government or outside of government) before he or she declared candidacy. Voting records matter greatly. The political culture in which a candidate grew up is also pertinent. One can learn a fair amount about a candidate by looking at who their friends are, what their religion is, where they went to college, where and in what industry they worked prior to working in government, and so on. The key here is what the person was like before election to office was in the picture. With long-time career politicians this is tricky, but it can still be done.

The final factor, of course, may be the most important of all: Look at where their money is coming from. The first thing that any candidate does after election is pay back big campaign donors with political favors that make the world safer for them. The little guys don't matter at all. The big-money donors basically own both parties and candidates. I hear a lot of tribalists deny this, but it's true. It's how the system works. We're about to see it happen again. Just watch.

By the grace of the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, tonight we may know who will face off against John McCain this fall. Many were saying that by tonight we may know who our next President will be, but even though Big Media long ago declared Obama the King of the Universe, our Great Pretender has been caught saying the same stupid condescending things about rural whites that the educated white elite used to say about urban blacks. Hilary's gotten herself caught in a few gaffes herself, but she's not the naïf that Obama is and has kept herself closer to the center. It's still a tossup between them. Tonight may nail it, but it may not.

I don't do politics here very often, so I'll offer a few notes on the race so far and be done for another month or two:

• There are clearly no such things as “private remarks” or “this is off the record” anymore. We've taught our young people for years that politics has no rules, that outright hatred of whole groups for political reasons is completely acceptable under the banner of the First Amendment and “political speech,” and that it doesn't matter how you do it as long as you win. Those striving for elected office these days have to be very careful what they say and where they say it, because the blogosphere is full of people who will gleefully publish it and by doing so make it eternal. The Internet never forgets. Better to just shut up and quietly stand on your record, if you have one.
• Something I've noticed in talking with political independents for many years is that independents don't believe campaign promises. They understand completely that lying is legal, and that the only way to judge a candidate is to look at his or her record in detail (including—or especially—where their money is coming from) and then extrapolate linearly into the future. When you give stirring campaign speeches full of promises, you are reassuring your base, not persuading the center to move in your direction. Independents call BS on anything candidates say since they first declared themselves.
• There is a difference between what people say to friends (and to pollsters) and what they do in the privacy of the voting booth. It's something like caucusing in the months leading up to the election: People will say the things that they think they are expected to say (like “I'm voting for Obama!”) to avoid unpleasantness and conflict within their inner circles. This is a survival tactic if you live among political tribalists from either side of the spectrum. On election day, the magic of the secret ballot makes it possible for “survival centrists” to vote their true hearts, knowing that no one will catch them out in any lies made earlier to keep their scalps intact.
• The American electorate is still very closely divided, and it doesn't take a lot of votes to tip an election. Nobody has anything sewn up.

Some final speculation pertinent to this last point: Many across the political spectrum have already written off John McCain, but that's a mistake. McCain is not seen as a “real” Republican in some quarters on the right, but Republicans are better nose-holders than Democrats, and come November McCain will get their votes irrespective of the Democratic nominee. McCain has cleverly kept his VP spot open (and generally kept a low profile) and probably will until he is absolutely sure what he's up against. Having played the race and gender cards intensely for a couple of years now, the Democrats have legitimized this kind of tokenism in the public eye. McCain could easily win against Obama by partnering with either a black or a Hispanic. He could win against Hilary by partnering with a woman of any color. In either case, it doesn't matter who. It's sad that it's come to this, but that's how American politics is now played, and both political parties had better be ready to reap the whirlwind in unexpected ways.

And so the whole wretched business begins again, as the anointed tribal elite in Iowa gather tonight to caucus (which comes from an obscure Kickapoo Indian word meaning “to put tribal defectives in a dark room and order them to run around in circles acting like idiots”) six months early or possibly four years late, depending on your perspective.

It's well known that I hate politics, and so don't talk much about it. I don't talk much about dark green leafy vegetables either, but that doesn't keep some knuckleheads from holding that they are the keys to eternal life. But I bring up questions now and then that no one else seems to be asking, like this one: Why does Iowa get to be first, and winnow the slate of candidates before anybody else gets a shot at them?

Here and there you may possibly see the question posed, just before the anointed elite and Big Media tut-tut and say that that's the way it's always been. (Which, by the way, was a major argument in favor of retaining racial segregation.) They then change the subject. More rarely, someone with more guts than sense dares to answer the question, generally by declaring that Iowa is somehow special in a demographic sense. Special? Hey, we're all special today, right? (Ask any third-grade teacher.) You hear the term “microcosm” a lot, generally from people who don't know what it means. As the Wall Street Journal reminded us this morning, the only Iowa caucus winner in recent memory who went all the way to the White House was Jimmy Carter.

In truth, there's nothing special about Iowa that isn't special about Nebraska, Wyoming, or South Carolina. The current primary system gives people in early states power over the choices of people in later states, and that is not a good thing. This leaves us two other alternatives: 1) Have a single national primary in all states on the same day to select November's candidates, or 2) try something else.

Alternative #1 would be better than what we have now (which is simply idiotic) but there's a strong argument against it: Without that early “momentum” obtainable in small states like New Hampshire and Iowa, the big states would select the candidates. This is a reasonable objection, and basically the same one that sustains the Electoral College, which is neither as good nor as bad a mechanism as many people think. (It could use improvement, but let's forego that discussion until November.)

What else can we try? Well, one mechanism seems obvious to me: Assign each of the 50 states a random number from 1 to 50, and then run primaries on 25 consecutive weeks, in which the states that pulled 1 and 2 hold primaries the first week, those that pulled 3 and 4 the second week, and so on, with the states that pulled 49 and 50 primarying (is that a verb? Hey, everything else is!) last. If by some fluke larger states pull small numbers in 2008, it's likely that smaller states will get the same fluke in 2012. But for the most part, it'll be a good mix, and most important of all, not a predictable one. No candidate would be able to snatch momentum by spending months studying the idiosyncratic specialness of Iowans or New Hampshirians and then pandering to that specialness. They'd have to be able to pander to the specialness of any state at all, or (better yet) give up pandering completely and stand on their records.

Such a Randomly Ordered Sequential Primary (ROSP) could make the Giant Pander an endangered species. Now that would be special!