Category Archives: Contemporary Life

       The simplest understanding of “divided government” is that is a formula for policy paralysis. The election results (in which it can be said that the Democrats O-bombed) that gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives and left the Democrats a majority of the Senate means that no major initiatives will pass, the White House will become increasingly frustrated (and vindictive), and the national mood will darken.

       But the simple understanding is not necessarily accurate. Divided government might be the most efficient and popular configuration as it retains and emphasizes the checks and balances that are the heart of the American government. Bret Stephens (Wall Street Journal) said it well – in a different context – that “disunity is not just the reality for democracy; it is the premise.” Why is this form of government ideal ?

      History bears this out. Whenever one party has controlled all branches of government (including, in a pragmatic sense, the Supreme Court) that party has sought to run roughshod over the populace. FDR, with huge majorities in Congress in 1937, looked to pack the Supreme Court that had been rightly hostile to the excessive government intrusions of the New Deal. (He succeeded anyway – after the 1935 Supreme Court rejection of several New Deal programs – when one judge changed his mind, followed by the retirement and replacement of another.) Carter was a personal and professional disaster notwithstanding his huge Congressional majorities. Obama is a more egregious example, because his attempted re-making of the American economy, health care system, energy policy and profligate spending were accomplished with scarcely any Republican votes – and sometimes with none at all. And in the early 2000’s when Republicans controlled both executive and legislative branches, they too had a sorry record of achievement, adding to the debt by increasing government responsibility for prescription drug payments, among other deeds.

      Conversely, since 1968, Republicans have dominated the presidency (28 years to 14 years) and forced to cooperate with mostly Democratic majorities. Nixon, Reagan and Bush I faced Democratic majorities in the House, and only Reagan merited a Republican Senate for several years of his term. Each (especially Nixon and Reagan) produced significant and transformative legislation – and only through bi-partisan efforts. Undoubtedly, the balanced budgets of the late 1990’s (for which President Clinton has long been praised) resulted from the fact that he had a Republican House that produced those budgets – Newt Gingrich, John Kasich (new governor of Ohio) and others. Everyone knows that the Constitution (Article I) gives budgetary authority to Congress, not the Chief Executive. That Republican Congress drafted those budgets, which included slightly increased social spending and a capital gains tax cut. The latter, and the revenue windfall created by the technology boom fluke of that era, balanced the budget. (The deficits of the early 2000’s were caused not by the war but primarily by the decrease in revenues after the “dot-com” bust, when the fluke was exposed and companies that had exhausted their capital went under having never manufactured a viable product or turned a profit.) All the aforementioned successes occurred with a “divided government” and there is not a chance that a Democratic Congress –enamored of deficit spending and the opportunity to “spread the wealth around” – would have allowed Clinton, even if he was so minded, to balance any budget.

     On some level “divided government” reflects the infantilized society that, if not provided immediate satisfaction, turns elsewhere for help. Economy bad under Republicans ? Vote Democrat! Economy worse under Democrats ? Vote Republican! This pattern is classically Israeli, in which society has flipped from dove to hawk and back and forth – for more than three decades. “This one will bring peace,” and when he disappoints and a wave of violence ensues, “that one will bring security.” And when the atmosphere calms down, a new peacenik arises, and the cycle repeats: Begin/Shamir, then Peres, then Shamir, then Rabin/Peres, then Netanyahu, then Barak, then Sharon/Olmert, and now Netanyahu. And so the Ferris wheel turns. President Bush II was never really as “popular” as he was said to be post-Arab terror of 9/11 – a 90% approval rating – nor ever as “unpopular” as he was said to be at the end of his tenure (high 20% range). It is just that people are flighty.

      On a deeper level, “divided government” can work better because it is an accurate reflection of a divided society. Governments that wish to retain the support of the people (and not just its base) usually operate between the 40-yard lines, avoiding dramatic changes – except after cataclysms – and seeking incremental improvements in the life of the citizenry. Political adversaries can adjust to gradual modifications in law and policy; sudden and sharp reversals will cause upheaval and dismay. That has also been the case with Israel’s unruly democracy which for years operated with the unwritten agreement that the Right would not annex the land and expel the Arabs, and the Left would not surrender land and expel the Jews. When the Left breached its side of the agreement, with the barest majority sustaining it (if it even was a majority; two right-wing legislators from the defunct Tzomet party were literally bribed with Mitsubishis and ministries and became the deciding votes for Oslo II), the shock to the Israeli political system was intense, and has not yet fully receded.

      Case in point is the tumult that erupted when President Bush II proposed allowing workers to privately invest 10% (that’s it: 10%!) of their annual Social Security contributions. This violated one of the foundations of Democratic governance: the capacity to hide massive deficits by tapping into the Social Security funds, which, until LBJ’s time, was off-budget and sacrosanct. That is no longer the case, which is why Social Security today is the largest Ponzi/Madoff scheme in history – paying today’s recipients by stealing from tomorrow’s, and worrying about tomorrow’s tomorrow. Or after the next election. Bush’s suggestion was stopped in its tracks, dead on arrival, because it breached a sacred principle of the Democratic Party: never close off any revenue stream that can fund government.

     The real question is whether President Obama has the capacity to moderate his expectations and coordinate his policy goals with the Republicans, to whom he recently referred as “enemies” (a term he eschews even for Islamic terrorists). Failed Messiahs do not compromise, or retire, easily, and cooperating with conservatives undermines two core aspects of the Democratic appeal to Americans today: the embrace of class warfare and group identity, and the imperative of having those who work and create wealth support those who don’t or won’t. The choice is his, and his best chance of re-election rests in finding some modus vivendi with Republicans. Barack Obama, meet Rand Paul.

     In sum, “divided government” can be a blessing, as it constrains the encroachment of government on the liberties of the individual and moderates the scope of government involvement in our lives. Divided government is forced to be less ambitious and heavy-handed, and that is a boon for those who work, build, create, manufacture and renew – in other words, divided government through its limitations can foster a revitalization of the American spirit.

    Liberals, Voltaire might have said today, will defend to the death your right to agree with them. The free exchange of opinions and ideas that explores all sides of a controversy is simply not on the table. Some ideas are simply unacceptable in public discourse – not the salacious, the obscene, the tawdry, the hedonistic or the glorification of promiscuity, but rather the expression of any idea that causes offense to one of the liberal elites favored groups.

    The latest example is NPR’s firing of analyst Juan Williams for articulating what most sane people feel: a certain nervousness or anxiety when they see passengers in Muslim garb on an airplane. This “feeling” does not deprive anyone of constitutional or legal right but is a natural reaction to the most potent and irrefutable formula of our day: while not all Muslims are terrorists, all terrorists are Muslims. Every attempt to blow up an airliner in recent memory, every suicide bomber, and every bomb in a marketplace, etc., has Muslim roots. That is the painful reality of the world in which we live, and we ignore it at our peril. That peril is exacerbated when the acknowledgment of people’s justifiable fears is stifled, because it allows the enemy to gather strength and resources, and grow in fearlessness. It also eventuates in the insanity of our times when 75-year-olds named Agnes are subject to the same or more scrutiny at airports than 25-year-olds named Ahmed.

     This liberal repression, though, has a long and shameless history. In the early 1980’s already, the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick (UN Ambassador) was shouted down on campuses and not allowed to speak.  Ditto Henry Kissinger. This, by now, is the common fate of many conservative or pro-Israel speakers on campuses that glorify the”liberal arts” and “academic freedom.” Israel’s US Ambassador Michael Oren’s near-inability to address college students at UC-Irvine earlier this year is another example – but examples abound, and there is nary a well-known conservative who has not had that experience. There are many colleges where conservative student groups are denied funding and/or campus space for their activities. It is as if in the constellation of ideas to which young people should be exposed, the more conservative, traditional and revered the ideas, the more terrifying is their exposure to young minds. How shameful. How repressive. How illiberal.

      Ben Gurion University of the Negev typifies this hypocrisy. A professor of ethics who opined in the classroom that homosexuals with children could not parent as well as heterosexuals was fired for expressing ideas that are “beyond the pale and unacceptable in a classroom,” the words of the Provost who fired him. Yet, the chairman of the Political Science Department, Neve Gordon, is allowed to travel around the world calling for an academic boycott of Israel (presumably including himself) and for the delegitimization of Israel and to assign in class – for credit and as part of coursework – participation in demonstrations against the IDF and the occupation, and he is protected on grounds of “academic freedom.” How selective.

     Similarly, Fox News is vilified in the establishment press as a conservative, even reactionary network, when in fact all it does is provide the conservative viewpoint with at least equal time to the liberal one. That was a dramatic change in the presentation of news and opinion that predominated in the networks since television’s origins. Commentators were mostly liberal, reflecting the 80% of journalists who define themselves as liberals. Another case in point: Newsweek was recently able to write a three-page article in support of homosexuals in the military without even once mentioning the other side – how open homosexuals could affect unit cohesion, et al. To Newsweek, there is no other side. (Update: I cancelled Newsweek in August, and yet – like a vampire that can’t be put down – it keeps being delivered to me every week. I sense that is one way dying media organs maintain their circulation numbers – refuse to accept non-renewals and just keep mailing it out. Help !)

     In this corrupt atmosphere, it pays to be one of the favored, protected groups, if indeed it matters at all. One must be liberal, a black liberal, a Muslim, or a homosexual to qualify for special treatment. Conservatives, Christians and Jews need not apply. The great economist and thinker Walter Williams recently pointed out the double standard. Mainstream liberal cartoonists routinely used racist imagery and language to portray blacks who served in high positions in the Bush White House. Condoleezza Rice in one cartoon (Ted Rall) called herself Bush’s “House Nigga,” and another (Doonesbury) had Bush referring to her as “brown sugar.” Clarence Thomas was portrayed as Justice Scalia’s lawn jockey (Don Wright). Such depictions or characterizations are unimaginable when dealing with Obama or any black liberal, but these insults were glossed over by the liberal media, if they were mentioned at all. No one stopped carrying these cartoons – as opposed to last week’s Washington Post that nixed a “Where’s Muhammed?” cartoon from one of its regulars on grounds of “insensitivity.” How courageous.

      The kerfuffle over Bill O’Reilly’s pointing out the obvious – “Muslims killed us on 9/11” – is just another example of politically correct insanity. “Muslims” didn’t kill us ? People who happened, coincidentally, to be “Muslim”? But the organizers themselves admitted they did it to promote Islam in the world, which requires the defeat and/or humiliation of the “Great Satan,” America. The perpetrators killed, proudly, in the name of Islam, so who are we fooling ? Must we hide behind the fig leaf that one must always say “not all….?” But not all Germans killed Jews in the Holocaust, not all Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, not all Southern whites owned slaves in the antebellum South (only 2% did !),  not all of any ethnic group ever did anything – but yet we use the shorthand form because it is accurate.

      Liberals have created a new right that is applied very selectively, i.e., only to their favored classes: the right not to take offense. Apparently, the truth cannot be uttered about Muslim terror, because some Muslims may take offense; homosexuals have to be coddled and the definition of marriage changed because they may take offense. Free speech has to be curtailed, because someone might take offense – although never a Christian, a Jew, a white or a conservative. They have no right to be offended, or to complain about it. More bizarrely, we have descended to a level where certain groups reserve the right to use certain words when referring to each other – blacks and homosexuals revel in this – but outsiders may not use the same words. I was once admonished for using the term “yekke” (an endearing reference to German Jews) in a speech because I am not a descendant of German Jews, and therefore my use of the term, I was told, stung. I was informed –  the first and only time I have heard such a sentiment –  that only yekkes can refer to each other as yekkes.

     But those issues are minor compared to the threat to liberty posed by the self-proclaimed arbiters of acceptable speech. Even more egregious, NPR (like PBS) is a taxpayer-supported network, very peculiar in an era when there are thousands of media outlets available and when government budgets are stretched past the breaking point. Why doesn’t government get out of the media business altogether ? NPR and PBS have long been protected and nurtured by its acolytes in government – liberal propagandists paid for by our tax dollars.

      NPR and PBS should lose their taxpayer funding immediately. They should compete in the marketplace of ideas and entertainment like everyone else. People should be able to speak openly about their concerns and about the issues of the day, with common sense and decency their only guides and without any fear of retribution from illiberal elitists. And common sense and decency should govern our relationships and attitudes with individuals and groups, in order to advance morality and justice and conquer tyranny and evil.

      What has no beginning, yet goes on and on and never ends ? The American elections. One might think that the interminable process concludes exactly two weeks from today, on Election Day, but that would be a serious error. Those elections – for a new House of Representatives and a third of the Senate – are just the prelude to the next campaign for which the jockeying, the handicapping of the “horse race,” the raising of enormous sums of money, and the negativity has already begun.

  By contrast, elections in a parliamentary democracy occur much quicker, draw greater participation from the public, and are more meaningful. In the UK, elections can take place within three weeks, and in Israel within three months or less. The election season is very intense, but more focused on the key issues that concern the electorate. Voters get a snapshot of the candidates and can decide who is more attuned to their needs. Money plays a far more limited role in determining the outcomes than in American elections. For sure, those campaigns can get just as sleazy and nasty as those we have here, but the redeeming quality is that they are mercifully brief. The poison that seeps into society from the election season that polarizes the electorate here is contained there. They may be passionate, but they don’t suffer from a uniquely American malady: election burnout.

We have been hearing analyses, and reading polls, at least since the winter about the coming Democratic debacle, may it be G-d’s will. Night after night, the same talk often from the same people about the same issues and the same personalities fills the airwaves. The commentary from last night does not differ markedly (if at all) from the commentary in July, or May, or February. “The Republicans are poised to take the House!” “Obama’s approval ratings have fallen to a new low!” “Democrats are running from all the bills they signed into law with great fanfare – health coverage overhaul, the stimuli, the bailouts, etc.!” Get one with it, already.

    I can think of only one reason why a rational person would vote for a Democratic Congress, considering that they have likely bankrupted the country unless their policies are soon reversed: self-interest. The unions dominate the election season more than any other “special interest,” except they are never called “special interest.” Today, more union members are public employees than they are employees of private companies. So they have an interest in big government, more spending, higher taxes, incessant borrowing and limited accountability – essentially, the Democratic platform – in order to sustain their government jobs (read: SEIU, the biggest union in the country, that represents government workers). Their salaries – much higher than similar jobs in the public sector – and their pensions and perks drain the economy, with minimal productivity to show for it.

   These groups – add the teacher’s unions to the list – are the literal fulfillment of a statement attributed to both Jefferson and Franklin, that “the end of democracy comes when the majority realizes it can vote itself money out of the Treasury.” Add one other group to the list – those people who receive some form of government assistance – and we have a precise list of the Democratic base – those who seek a majority so it can vote itself money out of the Treasury. In essence, 51% of the population can eschew gainful employment but can vote through its representatives to confiscate the earnings of the other 49% of the population. We are not quite at those proportions, but we are getting very close.

     The only way to combat this is through elections, but the process is just too long. I even fear that – despite the predictions – the Republicans might have peaked too soon, like a month ago. They will gain, but not as much as the pundits think. The long season has enabled President Obama to again hit the campaign trail, allowing him to do what he does best – rhetoric – with the concomitant benefit of keeping any new initiatives on the hold. He can shower the country with “hope” and “change” and “fear of going back” to, I suppose, the days of 5-6% unemployment. He can also promise to bestow more money out of the Treasury on people if they support his favored candidates – like the promise of another $250 “cost-of-living increase” to Social Security recipients, notwithstanding that the cost-of-living has remained stable in the last year. Why not ? It’s only money, and it’s not his money he’s giving away.

     The protracted campaign also allows the malice to spew forth, with the outcome in the best of circumstances of voting “for the lesser of two evils” and in the worst, “a pox on both their houses,” which, of course, benefits the Democratic incumbents. The negativity, the lies, and the character assassination – “she’s an ex-witch !” “He cheated on his girlfriend in high school!” – is despicable, and unfortunately works. The media plays a major role in the depressing state of the campaign season, focusing on who’s winning and losing (the endless and inane polling) and emphasizing gaffes rather than policies. We are tempted to throw the bums out without quite knowing what the next group of bums will do. Peoples’ votes are often determined by the punchline of the old joke: a minister was forced to eulogize a particularly odious person, who was widely disliked by the assembled. Stumped for ideas, he turned to the audience, and asked plaintively, “Is there anyone here who has anything positive to say about this fellow?” After a brief pause, someone yelled out, “His brother was worse!” I eagerly await that campaign commercial, spelling out clearly and concisely the candidate’s primary qualification: “the other guy is just worse!” Actually, I think I have seen that one already.

     There is no easy way out of this morass, which is a bi-partisan creation. Each party seeks election to gain for itself the sinecures of power, each party makes promises that it knows it will not keep, and each party enriches itself in office through patronage, private deals, and contributions from interested parties. To roll back the clock and deprive the citizens of the government largesse they have come to expect – each person for his own pet cause or need – is practically impossible. It is hard to wean the suckling infant when there is no other access to milk, and we have become a nation of infants who look to provide every need – housing, job, health care, etc. Just like the crying infant does not care whence his bottle comes, so too most of the electorate does not consider what Ronald Reagan used to routinely say: “Government has no money. It’s all the people’s money.” If people are not bothered by the fact that the government literally seizes their neighbor’s money and gives it to them – with liberal politicians essentially promising that – then nothing will change. No wonder President Obama is targeting the youth vote – they have only known taking, and they are being promises their elders’ money. And the Democratic coalition is further swelled by blacks who vote their skin color and by Jews who vote either because of an ersatz and nonsensical nostalgia for FDR or because of a contrived fear of the “evangelicals.” Whatever the reason, the coalition is a formidable one, and will require a large turnout to overcome.

      Many have said that this is the most important election in American history, and it certainly is – since the last one and until the next one. For sure, the incumbents should be held accountable for their mismanagement, their puerile promises, and their shameless pandering. But with the number of people sipping from the public trough creeping close to the 50% mark, it might be too late to instill a sense of personal responsibility in the electorate. The innate revulsion against the reduction of the American character to those who connive, wallow in helplessness and take and take from others generated the Tea Party movement, which has sown fear in a political establishment that thrives on low turnouts and an uninterested citizenry. But it needs to gather steam now, not dissipate its force.

    With the perpetual campaign already gearing up for 2012, there will be no respite. We need shorter campaigns that would reduce the influence of money, negativity, appeals to emotion, and the foolish spectacles that elections have become. All of which echoes Winston Churchill’s famous barb that “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” But the same Churchill also stated: “The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.”

     Let’s hope he was wrong on the latter.