The Long View

A Little Daylight

Witch hunts and 20th-century political purges followed similar trajectories. Starting from a small group of alleged miscreants, the accused persons would accuse more persons, who would accuse still more. The process would continue until the investigating judges or party leadership were accused, who would then shut the process down. Something similar may be happening with some aspects of the diversity ideologies that came to us from the 1960s, or at least with the institutionalized rent-seeking that interpreted diversity as collective claims against the commonwealth. This example comes from Britain, where the new government has discovered that its austerity budget may violate civil rights legislation passed by its predecessor:

Has Mark Hoban just become the first victim of the New Labour landmines? He was asked on the Today Programme whether the Treasury had conducted a formal study assessing the impact of the cuts on ethnic minorities. Hoban was speechless - as well you might be. But the assessment, he was told, is required under Harriet Harman's Equalities Act. Has it been carried out? He avoided the question and was asked it again. And so it continued, a la Paxman v Howard.

Again, that's a British example, but it is not without application in the United States, where the race to the bottom for securitized-mortgage standards was won by institutions seeking to comply with the Community Reinvestment Act. (Most of the bad loans were not made by businesses subject to that Act, but politicized lending practices did break the industry.) If the diversity industry tries to close down macroeconomic management, I really don't think that this is a fight that even all the class-action lawyers in the world could win. It is not too early for politicians, and even business managers, to put a little daylight between themselves and the late-20th-century diversity consensus.

Too little attention (though not none) has been devoted to the fact that the United States departed from the social democratic trajectory of the rest of Western Civilization over the past two generations chiefly because of the race-and-gender preoccupations of the American Left. The New Deal followed the classic socialist model of encouraging social solidarity through measures designed to increase income equality. The transfer payments used in part to equalize incomes were politically possible because of the social trust created by the policy of solidarity; so was the expansion and refinement of services for the general public. One may question whether these policies were economically optimal (they look a bit less ridiculous now than they did in 1980). In any case, the New Left abandoned this model and substituted grievance for solidarity. Originally, this move seems to have been motivated by the refusal to take any responsibility for making capitalism work, combined with the hope that demands on the system would cause it to collapse. That did not happen. Rather, the grievance system became institutionalized in the diversity industry. These measures reduced solidarity, so that not just new transfer payments but the mere maintenance of public services became very difficult.

And that's why the United States has a vampiritic pseudo-private health-care system; a system that the recent reform left regrettably intact, because the social trust no longer exists for a real fix.

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Speaking of unsustainable models, David Goldman points out that “Demographics and Depression” Becomes the Theme Du Jour:

That the aging world population needs to save for retirement, and an imbalance of savings with respect to investment opportunities reduces returns in capital markets, finally has dawned on the commentariat. Goldman Sachs just issued a report on demographics and the stock market, noting, “The rise in ‘prime age’ savers globally may also have played an important role in the story of the ‘savings glut’, putting downward pressure on global real interest rates. Here too, the demographic underpinnings of that story could intensify in the next 10-15 years.” There have been similar articles in the financial press and the client notes of Wall Street economists.

If you subscribed to First Things, you knew about this a year and a half ago.

As Justice Ginsburg pointed out last year, the United States has been running a mildly anti-natalist domestic population policy since the 1960s, dressed up as a privacy principle. One of the most interesting aspects of the current situation is that Griswold, the leading case in privacy jurisprudence, has now expanded into so many areas that it is paradoxically more vulnerable. Much of the gay-marriage issue is an extension of Griswold, for instance. It is much cited in Perry v. Schwarzenegger. Indeed, without Griswold it is inconceivable that any court could find that reproduction is irrelevant to marriage.

As with the diversity, it seems unlikely that the consensus on the natalism question can persist if it becomes apparent that it is inconsistent with economic management. When these matters come again before the Supreme Court, a Demographic Brandeis Brief might do the trick, perhaps submitted by a respectable amicus who makes Mark Steyn's arguments with less wit and more statistics.

It sounds strange to say so now, but this may turn out to be a matter of kicking in an unlocked door.

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I write like H.P. Lovecraft, if the analytical engine at I write Like is to be believed. A little Googling proved that many people had the same result. Troubador, posting at Parabasis, did the necessary research:

I pasted a number of passages for analysis.

I write like Mark Twain.

So does William Shakespeare.

Mark Twain writes like Leo Tolstoy.

Leo Tolstoy writes likes James Fenimore Cooper.

And H.P.Lovecraft writes like James Joyce.

(James Joyce also writes like James Joyce, so there may be something in it.)

These results seem squamous to me, and even eldritch.

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Regarding the proposed Cordoba Islamic Center for Lower Manhattan, a quick search of the online discussions of the matter finds many references to the Gun Powder Plot of 1605 by Guy Fawkes and other Catholic conspirators blow up to both Houses of parliament along with King James I. Curiously, these references are almost all in comment sections: there are few if any in the featured articles on websites. So, allow me to state what seems to me to be blindingly obvious:

The attempt to introduce a major Islamic presence into Lower Manhattan, a presence specifically linked by its proponents to 911, is very much like someone insisting on building a Guy Fawkes Memorial Catholic Center next to the Palace of Westminster in London. The proposal is not insensitive. It is unhinged.

Again, the wise public figure would put a little daylight between himself and the interpretation of this controversy as a civil liberties issue.