The Clintons Can Multi-Task

This week’s G-File http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439184/clinton-foundation-corruption-hillary-clinton-bill-clinton-love-power is about the Clintons and corruption (but I repeat myself). In it Jonah Goldberg makes the case that the Clinton Foundation wasn’t primarily about the money and our focus on pay for play is evidence of a corrupted view of corruption. While acknowledging that the Clintons are not averse to wealth Goldberg argues the Foundation "was about keeping the Imperial Court in Exile well-tended to for their return to power."


Wellllllllllll, up to a point. I take Jonah's main point to be that the Clinton's corruption is centered on power not money and on this he is certainly correct. But it doesn't follow that all of their activities are similarly sourced, that there is a necessary unifying theory of corruption at play here.

Putin, Arafat, your pick of South America strongmen were in it for the power but that didn't keep them from amassing wealth. And this accumulation didn't just happen but was rather the result of their deliberate actions to live in a manner appropriate to their station.

I take it that the Clintons in the course of fundraising in Manhattan and Hollywood came upon the idea that there were a lot of things they'd like to have and that falling back to something like the lifestyle of their Little Rock days was positively distasteful. And it isn't hard to imagine that Bill and Hill in mixing with people who were not all that impressive but who had a lot more money than they did came to feel a bit cheated in the wealth department. The Clinton Foundation was the most efficient, politically acceptable way (working to help in Haiti!) to monetize their position of power in a way that would be completely in their control.

Yes, the foundation also helped to keep their political entourage together, but I don't agree with Goldberg that this was the central motivation. Those people weren't going anywhere as any Lanny Davis to Hillary email should make clear.

As Mel Brooks noted "it's good to be the King." First on the list of reasons why is power, but the palace, the jewels, the best food and fashion also make the list. I think the Clintons are capable of diversifying into the pursuit of wealth as well as power. The email scandal was about power, the Clinton Foundation is mostly about making money.

Building a Cathedral and American Politics

Ever wonder why the left is always falling head over heels for their nominee. Or how Tom Friedman can have a, no masterpiece was written by committee, attitude towards American democracy. In 2008 Barack Obama, a man whose resume could fit on a credit card, was FDR and JFK wrapped into one glittering package. His election would halt the rise in the oceans and redeem the American experience. The too easy answer is that this is just power worship. The allure of getting to tell other people what to do. But a less cynical explanation is hiding in plain sight. Hiding in fourteenth century Florence to be exact.

At that time the elites competed with each other by building cathedrals rather than big governments and the grandees of Florence were a bit over-extended. The crossing space of the cathedral--a little over 144 feet--exceeded the technological know-how for building free standing domes. A hundred years after construction had begun, when the dome could no longer be put off, a competition is held to find a solution. Brunelleschi wins and his solution for a free standing dome is still an engineering marvel.

Here in the Western democracies we are now in the position of holding semi-regular competitions called elections to find the person who can put 'a roof' over the vast government that we've created as monuments to our humanity, our capacity to care. And it isn't at all surprising that progressives, far more invested in the government project, are far more invested in finding an 'architect or engineer' to complete the project. Thus, the extravagant celebration and hopes attached to the election of Barack Obama and before him Bill Clinton.

Nor is it surprising that our political Brunelleschies are looked for in the ranks of the relative unknowns. If the known, experienced politician had the solution wouldn't we have seen it by now? The one thing we can deduce from our familiarity with establishment politicians with all of their government experience is that they don't have the answer.

The analogy also suggests why the conservative argument that ambitious government programs have failed and can't work seem to persuade only other conservatives. Even if the progressive can be persuaded of failure he will tack on a 'not yet' qualifier. Here it has to be admitted, the conservative is working against American optimism. Hayek's knowledge problem is just a big data application from being resolved. Like the Florence Cathedral the pursuit of the outsized goal doesn't require a ready solution as one is sure to turn up if we just keep the faith.

It was Patrick Moynihan who observed that "somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from a lifetime of experience what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government to do good." The remark is truer today than when he made it as is the gap between our commitments and the revenue to pay for them. And so the outsized hopes pinned on political candidates continue and the more acute our problems become, the wilder and more frantic our search for a miracle worker.

　

　
　

Why The Politics of the Impossible? OK, I'll Bite

“People routinely say with apparent certainty serious things that are if not patently false at least highly uncertain. And there is no debate, no confrontation of facts or analysis. The things people say are not meant to be measured on the scale of truth. They are only the signs by which one indicates which team one belongs to, like the ‘identification friend-or-foe’ signals that warplanes emit.”

-Herbert Stein, 1989

At The Federalist today [link at the bottom], Mark Hemingway notes that progressives are now calling for the confiscation of guns in America and have established the goal of eliminating gun violence and he asks why, given that neither the tactic nor goal has any real chance of being realized? Now as The Heminator isn’t your typical Oregonian to be found naked in a field, I take it his question is one of them rhetoricals, but why let that stop me from chiming in with an answer?

I would start by pointing to Kenneth Minogue’s The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life. Minogue’s thesis is that traditional morality is gradually being replaced by the “political-moral.” Instead of moral concerns and markers like honesty, trustworthiness, humility, duty to be moral is now associated with voting for the right politicians and supporting—publicly of course—the right causes. Participate in an ad for ending gun violence and you can cheat on your spouse, steal water for you lawn, and treat the help shabbily.

Next, I would point to Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos which suggests by way of example that the things we typically designate as tragedies have a positive aspect. Yes, the storm that rips through your town destroying everything that’s in its path is bad and a tragedy, but it also makes life exciting and provides a break from the every-day tedium of our lives. The Percy Formula—copyright @LMandrakeJr, LTD—stipulates the more impossible the cause the greater its value. Pick a finite goal like stopping the XYX Development or building a park in the East River Area and soon you’ll be back in the existential emptiness of not having a cause. That the cause is eternal is a feature, not a bug.

Finally, I would argue that what Hemingway has noted is symptomatic of what Michael Oakeshott (the philosopher, not the welder) defined as rationalism in politics. Oakeshott maintained that our current politics were thoroughly rationalist and went on to describe some of its characteristics:

“He [the Rationalist] is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary, or habitual…He is optimistic because the Rationalist never doubts the power of his ‘reason’ to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion, or the propriety of an action.

He does not recognize change unless it is self-consciously induced change.

The politics it inspires may be called the politics of the felt need; for the Rationalist, politics are always charged with the feeling of the moment.

And the ‘rational’ solution of any problem is, in its nature, the perfect solution. There is no in his scheme for a ‘best in the circumstances’, only a place for ‘the best’; because the function of reason is precisely to surmount circumstances.”

Later, in a different essay in the same collection Oakeshott memorably sketches his alternative view of politics:

“In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbor for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behavior in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.”

It is the politics of intimations rather than certainty, of tacking rather than proceeding “as the crow flies”, of incremental rather than ‘comprehensive’ reform. Yes, please!

Stop Trying to ‘End Gun Violence’. It’s Not Going to Happen, Mark Hemingway  http://thefederalist.com/2015/12/11/stop-trying-to-end-gun-violence-its-not-going-to-happen/

 

More a Tribe Than a Political Party; reaction to Hillary's Benghazi testimony

I don’t normally pay attention to campaign slogans, but the Obama-Biden slogan “Forward” was so lame that it couldn’t be ignored. Coupled with the complete lack of inventiveness was the unaware conceit. For the dirty little secret of Progressivism, at least in its current form, is that it is anything but a forward looking ideology. At its core, I would argue, that Progressivism is a rejection of the modern and a pining for the unity of the pre-modern and for those invested in politics, the Democratic Party is more of a tribe than a political party.

This conceptual framework was brought to mind yet again, by Jonah Goldberg’s last G-File where he comments on Hillary’s Benghazi testimony and in particular the reaction to it. From it, and much before, Jonah makes two observations:

“When the truth is inconvenient to the villains of the tale, the pursuit of truth is celebrated as the ne plus ultra of their vocation. But when the truth is inconvenient to people they like — or beneficial to people they don’t like — it really isn’t all that interesting or important.”

And

“But whenever there’s an unavoidable choice to be on one side of the cultural divide or the other, the MSM will stand with the Democrats because, at the end of the day, they are Democrats and they think Democrats are normal people.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426015/hillary-clinton-benghazi-hearings-lies

This is spot on and follows from the party as tribe. Hillary is the all but certain new leader of the tribe. The first principle is that no harm shall come to her, because the interests of the tribe are paramount.

The political party as tribe aspect is evident in the complete disdain for the give and take of politics evinced by the President, and by the frequent calls to get beyond politics. For as the philosopher Michael Oakeshott points out:

“Politics, from one important point of view, may be said to be the activity in which a society deals with its diversities…This is why we are apt to think that a genuine tribal society, which certainly has rules and customs, is not one in which politics is likely to appear. Such a society may have the necessary unity but it rarely has the necessary diversity.”

And here we are reminded of Efraim Podoksik’s contention “that what is claimed is that Oakeshott’s central concern is the idea of modernity understood as inescapable fragmentation and irreducible plurality.” It is intermittent and situational, like the times when these characteristics of the modern work against those who embrace modernity, but at its core the progressive, the Democratic Party enthusiast, is in opposition to the fragmentation and plurality of the modern. And much of the heat and contentiousness of our current affairs stems from the attempt to bring the wayward individualists and current modern world of a past time dominated by the ordered unity of the tribe.