The Prospect of Nuclear Terrorism

In order to justify various activities which have undermined some of the Constitutional protections Americans once enjoyed, certain elements of the political establishment (notably Dick Cheney) have raised the terrifying prospect the nuclear terrorism. Since no one in the media, left or right, has adequately addressed the likelihood of such an event, in seems well worth a look.

Let’s begin by allowing that there are terrorists who would certainly be willing to use a nuclear weapon if they had one. I see no reason to think, given the nature of Al Qaida’s various actions of a smaller scale, that the zealots of that movement would have any qualms about destroying a city in the name of their cause. Less fanatical sovereign governments have been willing to bomb and incinerate civilians by the tens of thousands, as the citizens of London, Hamburg and Tokyo discovered seventy years ago – thus, it would be deeply naïve to believe that Islamic extremists would show moral restraint in this regard. The restraint the nuclear powers have shown over the last seven decades has had more to do with self preservation than morality. The doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD) has worked. The nuclear powers have understood that starting a nuclear war is likely to bring about their own demise. It is not clear that stateless terrorists, scattered across the globe, willing, in many cases, to die for their cause are deterred by anything. So, we can dispense with the question of willingness and proceed to the question of capability.

A scenario often cited or implied is one in which a rogue nuclear state – Iran, or more imaginatively, North Korea – might supply a terrorist organization with a bomb. While this might make an interesting movie plot, there are reasons to believe it would not be likely. Consider, to begin with, that nuclear weapons are a hard-won technology that states develop at enormous expense. Not only is there a huge material and financial cost, but the diplomatic and physical hardship of possible economic sanctions. At the end of the long development process, middle-tier nations take years to produce even a small stockpile of bombs, perhaps sufficient to survive an enemy airstrike and thus provide a viable deterrent. Is it plausible that a nation, having suffered much to attain such weapons, would turn any number of them over to a vaguely sympathetic organization of fanatics over which that nation exercises little control? While it is at least conceivable that a council of radical mullahs in Iran or the “dear leader” of North Korea might decide to employ a bomb to please Allah or fulfill some twisted notion of personal destiny, it is very unlikely they would turn the matter over to some even more unstable middle men. If a bomb explodes in Tel Aviv or New York, it isn’t likely the originator of the device will go long without suffering retaliation in kind. The origin of these devices can be deduced with some considerable technical accuracy, and even if they couldn’t there would be an enormous impulse on the part of the victim to lash out at the most likely suspects. Thus, while Iran might conceivably use a bomb, handing one over to Hamas would gain them nothing. Doing so would also entail secondary risk. He who has the bomb has power, and there is always the risk a nuclear-equipped terrorist might turn that power against his own benefactors. It is notable that, in the entire history of the atomic age, every nation has produced its own weapons – and even such close allies as the US and the UK have shared the actual weapon technology only very sparingly and reluctantly.

A more plausible scenario in which stateless terrorists acquire the bomb, or the fissionable uranium to make a bomb, is based on the collapse of an existing nuclear power. This happened when the Soviet Union collapsed, and could happen if Pakistan disintegrates in civil war. In the former case, while no whole weapons went missing (as far as open sources can tell us), a considerable amount of fissionable material was smuggled out, and only some of it has been retrieved. What will happen in Pakistan in the next few years is anybody’s guess. One can only hope they manage to hold their shaky state together somehow. Still, as real as such possible threats might be, it is far from obvious that they are substantially mitigated by dismantling the civil rights of Americans within the borders of the United States. If 100 kilos of marijuana can be smuggled into the country by sea, smuggling a bomb across the border should be only slightly more difficult. Once here, no further communication traffic of the kind the NSA routinely intercepts would be required. In other words, while the threat is plausible, the efficacy of the intelligence countermeasures deemed necessary for our safety is marginal. Surely, a focus on intelligence gathering closer to the sources of the fissionable material would do more good.

In the final analysis, it is true that an utterly closed police state would be all but immune to terrorism – nuclear or otherwise. The Soviet Union, throughout its illustrious history, had little to fear from even the most dedicated groups of foreign radicals. A xenophobic police state is, however, a very high price to pay for security.

In defense of culture

We live in an era in which immigration, urbanization, the lingering effects of the 1960’s counterculture, government policy, and various other factors are driving rapid changes in American society. These changes have not distributed themselves uniformly across the country, but vary by region, by the urban-rural divide, by race, ethnicity, and age. America is now, in effect, an assemblage of separate nations. I am skeptical that there ever was a truly unified American identity, but it is obvious that there isn’t one now. The old metaphor of the melting pot – in which, after a generation or two, immigrants assimilated themselves to the general culture – is certainly not currently applicable. Rather, in contemporary America, people fracture along a variety of lines. Even people of a common general background now find themselves in different and often antithetical cultures.

So – what is a culture, really?

A culture is a set of constraints imposed on the individual as a prerequisite for acceptance in a given group.

Some cultural constraints are the product of environmental conditions. Traditional Inuit culture, for example, is characterized by a high degree of patience and cheerfulness. If you live in close proximity to your family in an igloo for several months of the year, moodiness and negativity are likely to have disastrous consequences. Inuit must either be nice or suffer miserably with one another. The famous politeness and formality of the Japanese, however, has little to do with the mountains and climate of Japan. Rather, the politeness and formality of the Japanese is essentially arbitrary. Their culture carries these traits by the usual mechanisms of societal tradition and individual upbringing, but Japan could just as easily have been populated by a race of rude, obnoxious slobs. For the actual Japanese, politeness and formality are self-defining rather than physically necessary characteristics.

Very many cultural constraints, perhaps even most of them, are arbitrary. For example, apart from climatic considerations at higher latitudes, there is no physical reason that we couldn’t all be nudists. The fact that some hunter-gathers groups do live without clothing proves conclusively that it is possible. Still, if you live in virtually any modern nation, east or west, you probably find the notion of universal nudism rather unpleasant. You really wouldn’t want to see your ugly neighbors mowing the lawn or standing in a checkout line in the nude, and, unless you are a deviant, you would not want to dispense with all of your own clothes either. You feel this way because you have certain arbitrary cultural standards. You have been taught to believe certain behaviors are acceptable while others aren’t – and you know that the great majority of others in your society share the same beliefs. Wearing clothing, often quite specific clothing, is a defining feature of your culture. While it is not a physical necessity, it is a social necessity.

The consequences of abrogating social constraints are many and varied, from mild rebuke to capital punishment, but one broad consequence is a constant. If you violate a cultural taboo, you weaken the bonds you have with other members of your group. A Japanese who decides to be a rude, obnoxious slob gives up a large share of his Japaneseness. To share a culture with another person is precisely to share certain fairly reliable expectations about one another’s possible behaviors. It may be quite possible for you to attend you aunt Margaret’s funeral in the nude, but everyone else in attendance is likely to become rather anxious about what you might do next. You will have branded yourself as someone who cannot be expected to behave within the usual social bounds. You will be treated as irresponsible, erratic, and mentally unstable.

Multiculturalism, as a culture in itself, makes hash of any coherent system of social limitations. Rational people can learn a certain degree of tolerance – which is to say, to accept a rather broad range of behaviors or at least suppress one’s learned revulsion to certain things – but one cannot accept two or more incompatible cultural systems simultaneously. Contrary to what multiculturalists might hope, one cannot find homosexuality acceptable and also find Islam, which considers homosexuality a serious or even fatal transgression, acceptable. You can find one, or neither, acceptable – but not both. When the Saudi or Iranian government puts a human being to death for the crime of homosexuality you cannot consider it a tragic injustice and a reasonable expression of another culture’s beliefs at the same time. What multiculturalists usually do to defend their worldview is to either ignore those aspects of reality that make their position self-contradictory, or to gloss them over with comforting narrative. I once heard of a feminist who argued that the burka – the bag-like garment under which many Muslim women are compelled to conceal themselves – should be properly viewed as a symbol of female empowerment. This would be like calling the shackles that bound a chain-gang together instruments for promoting Afro-American unity, or like calling Buchenwald a weight-loss spa for Jews.

Multiculturalism, as actually practiced in America, suffers the further problem of simple hypocrisy. To continue with the convenient example above, it is irrational to stretch one’s tolerance of one conservative religion, Islam, to absurd lengths – but show so little tolerance for the much less militant followers of Catholicism.1 How can tolerance of some cultures and intolerance of others be multiculturalism in any robustly meaningful sense? If a person is intolerant of relatively benign cultures nearby, but tolerant of hostile cultures he or she rarely encounters, that isn’t much different from being intolerant in general. I can say that I am tolerant of the culture of New Guinea headhunters – but that’s not really much of a claim if I don’t live in New Guinea.

If we attempt to examine the phenomenon of culture as objectively as possible, it should be plain that any viable culture must have at least two traits. First, a culture must have a set of characteristics that define it. A culture has to be something other than a boundary drawn around some random group of human beings. It can be defined by subjectively good characteristics (such as patience) or subjectively nasty ones (such as racism) but it must have some consistent nature – something to bind its members in a sense of solidarity. Second, perhaps as a corollary to the first, a culture must have a means of recognizing what a non-member is – or, perhaps more to the point, of recognizing what an enemy is. Islam, it happens, does both of these things extremely well. Muslims know what being a Muslim means. They know what they should and should not do, what observances they need to make, and what they are prescribed to believe. Likewise, they know what is not Islam, what threatens Islam, and they are unapologetic in this knowledge. Western multiculturalists, on the other hand, have no idea who they are. By attempting to throw their arms around a large assortment of alien cultures, they leave themselves without any common characteristics. The multiculturalist cannot even claim tolerance as a dogma, for the reasons I’ve already outlined: some of the people they’ve included under their imaginary umbrella are decidedly intolerant, and most multiculturalists harbor hatreds of their own conservative brethren. Further, the multiculturalist, in a fantasy of universal inclusion, finds it impossible to fully reconcile himself (or herself) to the very concept of an out-group, let alone an enemy. The political and religious conservatives of their own ethnicity can be the target of enmity precisely because they share a common background with the multiculturalist. Conservatives are a sort of alter-ego, symbolic of what the multiculturalist strives to reject. True enemies, outsiders who despise the multicultural anti-culture for its flaccid tolerance and amorality, must be embraced, placated, or imagined not to exist.

A very recent example of an in-group / out-group disconnect is to be found in the case of Paula Deen, the once-popular cooking show host. Deen was discovered to have used the word “nigger” in a private conversation many years ago, and, as a consequence, was dropped by her network and is being actively harassed by MSNBC and others. I don’t doubt that many people find the “n-word” offensive, but why is it any less offensive when wielded causally by hip-hop performers in an entirely public context? Deen is vilified because, as a successful, Christian, heterosexual Caucasian, she is perceived as part of the evil conservative alter-ego that must be constrained. This, despite her actual political affiliations. Hip-hop performers, as symbolic victims of conservative oppression, are exempt from the standards of political correctness that apply to Deen.

To be clear, I am not saying that some degree of tolerance isn’t nice, or that traditional standards are necessarily laudable. What I am saying is that in a conflict between cultures, one that is coherent and cohesive has a substantial advantage over one that is inconsistent and heterogeneous. I’m not saying xenophobia is good – I’m saying xenophobia has often proven successful.

Another thing I am not doing is fully equating western liberalism with multiculturalism. The latter is a dominant meme of the former, but the two are not synonymous. In America, at least, the government has usually been able to recognize out-groups so long as they remained beyond the US border. There are interesting parallels between 19th century gunboat diplomacy and the policy of drone warfare. Ethical considerations aside, American political leadership is not completely unwilling, even now, to conduct international affairs with blunt instruments in the time-honored human way. What our leaders do not seem to understand anymore is what the in-group is – or, more romantically, what a citizen is.

One need look no further that the illegal immigration problem to grasp the growing irrelevance of American citizenship. Many Americans, some of them in positions of high authority, take it for granted that the circumstances and sufferings of illegal aliens are our responsibility. Being within the US border makes them automatically part of the in-group. Imagine you were to entertain this attitude on a person basis? What if a squatter entered your house through an open window, sat down on your couch and asked, in an alien language, to be treated as one of the family. Wouldn’t you ask him to leave? Wouldn’t you call the police if he refused? Would you feel the slightest guilt to see him ejected? Almost all of us would be indignant at the effrontery. Could you imagine sneaking across the border of a foreign country, with no intention of learning that country’s language or adapting to that country’s culture – but simply showing up there with the expectation of carving out a niche?

Immigrants can approach their relocation to a new country in one of two ways. First, they can assimilate – adopting the language, customs and other cultural aspects of their new country. With some notable exceptions, this is what most 19th century immigrants to the United States eventually did, if not fully in the first generation then certainly in the second.2 Alternatively, immigrants can colonize – which is to say, they can settle in discrete and permanent enclaves, keeping their old culture and rejecting that of natives. 19th century European colonists to Africa and Asia obviously did this, remaining British, French, Belgians, Germans and Italians in new exotic surroundings. Muslim immigrants in America and Europe have done largely the same, not merely rejecting but often despising the cultures of the countries they inhabit. Recent waves of Latinos, too, seem reluctant to assimilate – although it remains to be seen whether or not they will follow the path of the Irish in time. Language may be key in this process – both as an indicator of an immigrant’s intentions and as an actual cultural barrier. It is obvious that a person who moves to another country with no intention of learning the language has no intention of assimilating either, but intends to live in an enclave with fellow members of the same culture. When the dominant culture accommodates multilingualism it actually encourages a continued and entrenched sense of separateness, aiding and abetting a sort of neo-colonialism in reverse. Add to such excessive accommodation the nebulosity of the multiculturalist anti-culture itself, and assimilation becomes all the more unlikely. Which is easier for the immigrant: to learn a new language and adopt a new culture with a bewildering lack of defining characteristics, or to keep the old language and old customs in a new context? The multiculturalist may consider his or her society a cornucopia of attractive possibilities, but it can equally be perceived as a weak and decadent mess with something for everyone to find revolting.

One point I have already alluded to needs emphasis. Considering the remorseless Darwinian processes that actually shape history, it may not be the best educated or intellectually sophisticated culture that endures. A few years ago there was a minor stir over whether or not President Obama believed in American exceptionalism. When asked, his somewhat nuanced answer amounted to “no.” Broadly speaking, “no” is the “correct” answer. All nations have a certain uniqueness within the greater context of history – some are more powerful than others; some put more emphasis on particular rights; others are more elaborate in their artistic expression; etc. Most human beings love their own nation (if perhaps not their own government) more than any other. In this context, American exceptionalism seems little more than an expression of one particular bias. To understand that we are nothing intrinsically special is a rational achievement. It is also a serious impediment to cultural cohesion. People can identify with a high ideal, even a fictitious one, in a way that they cannot identify with a prosaic fact. Perhaps it is naïve to stand in reverence to Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” – but it is hard to imagine anyone standing in reverence to a historically accidental superpower whose behavior is sometimes good and sometimes bad. Even the narrow aspects of multiculturalism that are actually rational are culturally corrosive. Many people have died for Christianity, Islam, France, Japan, and even for Communism or Nazism – but no one ever risked life or limb for the greater glory of relativism. To the contrary – cynicism and intellectual sophistication may well go hand-in-hand. Much of the corruption we now see in government may simply be the product of a progressive erosion of coherent cultural standards and myth-infused ideals.

Anti-intellectual as the above argument may sound, it is by no means self-evidently false. No law of nature promises us a stable society at the end of our efforts to sort the world out objectively. It may well be that our pursuit of open inquiry will turn out disastrously in the end. I am not suggesting that we surrender ourselves to tradition and superstition, but I am pointing out that tradition and superstition do yield certain strengths which may turn out to be necessary to cultural survival. It is not by accident that they have survived.3

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1 Not all cultures are religions, but all religions are cultures.

2 The Amish did not, of course. The Jews retain a considerable distinctiveness although they have adapted to a high degree. Blacks were handicapped from assimilating through the peculiarities of their history. The Irish required more time than most groups, but now retain only a nominal separate identity.

3 There is a further irony here. Progressive anti-theists, like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, make the implicit assumption that an empirical pursuit of truth will, in fact, continue to make a better and more stable society. While one could produce a body of interesting if inconclusive evidence to support this, they tend to just take the assertion for granted. The belief is so deeply imbedded in their particular culture that it functions very much like an article of faith. Theirs is a culture that excludes religions and seeks to convert everyone to a certain epistemic schema – while rarely bothering to apply that schema to their own core principles. Thus, they have a dogma despite themselves. Unfortunately for them, it is not a very unifying dogma. The low number of people willing to self-identify as “brights” reveals this. (See: “Why I am not a Bright” [ http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2011/08/why-i-am-not-bright.html ] )

The high cost of a false sense of security

For the last week I have been listening to establishment politicians, Republican and Democrat, attempting to justify the NSA’s PRISM program [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) ] on the grounds that it helps prevent acts of terrorism. No doubt is does. What we should be asking ourselves, however, is how much security we are gaining for the surrender of both our immediate privacy and the possible eventual surrender of the rest of our freedom.

The total number of American civilians killed by Al Qaida related terrorists thus far has amounted to a little over 3000 – almost all of them killed during the attacks of 9/11. The US population stands at over 300,000,000 so, in rough terms, your odds of having been an American civilian killed by Al Qaida terrorists stands at about 1-in-100,000. To put this into perspective, nearly 500,000 Americans have died in auto accidents since 2001 – about 1-in-600 of the population.

If we assume the elimination of PRISM and other forms of mass surveillance would increase our individual risk by a factor of ten – to 1-in-10,000 – I would still quite willingly accept that risk against the unknown but historically plausible risk of seeing our republic degenerate into a totalitarian police state. Against that latter risk, Edward Snowden has staked his life. Like Patrick Henry, he has thrown down the gauntlet to the rest of us – “Give me liberty, or give me death.”

Science, Authority and Narrative (oh my!)

It is common for human beings to confuse narrative for fact. We are often attracted to explanations that actually have little going for them except some measure of coherence. To illustrate this for yourself, consider any of the major, popular religions that you don’t happen to believe in. In such a religion, you will find a deity (or deities) with an interesting but largely unverifiable history, possessing vast powers that can either be attributed to normal physical causes or, at least, to the powers of someone else’s deities. Religion is one kind of narrative – one attempt to explain the behavior of world. Whatever you happen to believe, you have to admit that many people in the world have erroneous beliefs.1 Even atheists and theists can at least agree that they cannot both be right.

I used to think, rather naïvely, that science was a cure for the ailment of magical narrative thinking. It is not. To show this I will need to define “science” for the purposes of my argument – or perhaps to isolate the abstraction of science from the institutional practice of science. Much worthwhile effort has already been made in this area by Thomas Kuhn and others. I don’t intend to spend much time reiterating the work of examining the internal processes of science, rather, I am interested primarily in the way that science (and scientists) influence what non-scientists believe.

Let’s begin with the abstract notion of science. Dig into any text on the philosophy of science, and you’ll find out pretty quickly that “science” is surprisingly difficult to define. I’m going to dispense with most of the subtleties and propose a rough definition that works for my purposes:

Science is the formalized process of determining the truth of assertions solely by empirical means.

Let’s parse this.

It is important to note that science is a formalized process to distinguish it from all sorts of common behavior. When one of my cats gets hungry and walks to the kitchen to examine his bowl for food, he is testing a mental proposition by empirical means – but I wouldn’t say he’s doing science. Science is formal in the sense that scientists are conscious not only of the subject of their inquiries, but also of a set a rules stipulating how those inquires may be conducted. To do science one must have rules regarding what constitutes acceptable evidence, and consciously and consistently adhere to those rules.

Science is a pursuit of truth.2 To pursue truth scientifically is to presume that a context-independent form of truth exists. It is to assume there are states of affairs in nature which are not subject to our biases and desires, even if they are sometimes beyond the reach of our unaided senses.

Lastly, science in the abstract is a method of determining truth solely by empirical means – observation (whether direct or augmented with instruments), measurement, and experiment. Scientific truth is the antithesis of belief arrived at through persuasion, or belief based on acquiescence to accepted authority. To put this another way, scientific truth is that truth based on actual observation of events, rather than on traditional belief or other social mechanisms.3

Given this definition of what science is ideally, two problems are apparent with the proposition that science has supplanted narrative or magical beliefs in contemporary society. The first is that the systems by which scientists themselves actually operate tend to deviate from the ideal. The second is that the public’s faith in science is itself unscientific. I will address the second first.

It is safe to say that the average person who venerates science is not very knowledgeable about the accumulated body of scientific knowledge. Rather, the typical admirer of science knows a few interesting scientific facts and has a sort of vague notion of something popularly called “the scientific method.” What most people believe, really, is that a faith in science is justified because technology works – the two being bound together in the public imagination. In earlier times, when technology was not a transformative force in ordinary people’s lives, the general public had little awareness of science. They respect it now because it conjures iPads and other nifty shiny things into being from time to time. People would respect wizards or witchdoctors who had the same capability. Their faith in science as a whole stems from the great practical successes in physics and chemistry. That this faith has spilled over into fields like psychology and sociology has little to do with great successes in those fields, but depends on a generalization of scientists as a class. Once the witches and priests worked miracles; now the Ph.D.s do. Popular belief is not in a body of facts, but in a body of people who use special words, work in special places, and have special titles. While such belief is not altogether divorced from empirical justification, it rests on the same sort of authoritarian trappings any medieval peasant would have recognized.

The other problem with science as a working institution – the problem that the practice of science is corrupted by non-empirical factors – is best illustrated with a few examples.

Consider Climategate, a good summary of which appears at the following link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/07/climate-emails-question-answer . An even shorter summary of Climategate is that an important body of climate scientists were engaged in restricting access to data that might throw doubt on the man-made global warming hypothesis, and at least discussed the possibility of smearing their critics in the press rather than attempting to refute them scientifically. While a significant portion of the general public believes that the Climategate emails prove that the man-made global warming hypothesis is false, the published evidence actually does not accomplish that. A scientific theory is not disproved by showing that some of its proponents were practicing bad science. A scientific theory can only be utterly disproven in the same way that it can be proven – which is to say, with empirically derived facts. However, by showing that a body of scientists were willing to defend their theory in explicitly non-scientific ways, it does throw reasonable doubt on the credibility of contemporary science as a public institution. This is really neither new nor surprising. If you believe that science is immune to political influence, Google the name Trofim Lysenko. In fact, scientists are human beings, subject to the influence of their particular cultures, the social acceptance of their peers, and the power of the educational, commercial or political institutions that support them. When their inquiries have obvious social consequences, empirical evidence ceases to be the sole requisite of what they promote as scientific truth.

The picture in the social sciences is even worse. A recent and glaring example is that of Diederik Stapel: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0  In brief, Stapel, a renowned Dutch sociologist, was ultimately forced to admit that he invented the data he used in over 50 published studies in sociology. Again, this does not prove that all, or even most, social scientists are that unscrupulous. What it does prove is that the peer review process, whose purpose is to ensure that scientists are actually practicing science, failed to uncover Stapel’s outright fraud at least 55 times. The social sciences, already questionable as “sciences” due to their general lack of predictive success, are doubly burdened by such failures of their own procedural integrity. Sociology, psychology, and related disciplines all struggle with a common problem. A case study of an individual, or of a particular group, does not yield results that can be generalized to all people at all times. A study in the social sciences is, at best, a snapshot of a certain unique set of circumstances. Studies in sociology and psychology are not repeatable in the way experiments in chemistry are. This makes the social sciences all that much more prone to the influences of culture, personal prestige, and politics. Stapel was believed because he was, himself, a recognized authority. He was, to some considerable extent, a recognized authority because he understood what his peers and his society wanted to believe.

In 2012, the summarized results of a series of studies from the University of California at Berkeley appeared in the popular press: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/are-rich-people-more-ethical/254689/  These studies purported to show a variety of ways in which the rich were less ethical than the rest of us – from a study of traffic behavior to a study of, believe it or not, literally stealing candy from children. These studies were presented as science and conducted, or at least directed, by academics of high standing. Even without examining the methodologies for systematic bias, it is immediately interesting that the studies were specifically targeted to compare the wealthy with an artificially homogenous class of everybody else. At least in the popular summaries, I have found no reference to any other social divisions. Considering the magnitude of the research, wouldn’t it have been more scientifically enlightening to rank all recognizable classes and groups – instead of just the rich vs. everybody else? But let’s be serious. How likely is it that researchers at UC Berkeley would ever release a set of findings showing that welfare recipients, blacks, or Latinos were less ethical on average than everybody else? I’m not asserting here that welfare recipients, blacks, or Latinos are innately less ethical, but simply that researchers in a liberal university know better than to ask the question. The studies that were actually conducted were tailored to produce findings that are consistent with the dominant ideology at UC Berkeley. In that context, the findings were entirely unsurprising. I am not suggesting, either, that the researchers would have falsified the data if they had gotten results that were surprising (i.e. contrary to their desired outcomes) but I am confident that in such a case the studies would not have been so widely published. Practically speaking, there are some assertions you are allowed to make and others you are not. In our culture, as in all cultures, certain inquiries are taboo.

An even more culture-bound political exercise masquerading as science is to be found in Right Wing Authoritarian (RWA) research. I wrote a critique of RWA in an earlier post, and append it here in the extended footnote below.4

Science in the sense that I outlined at the beginning – the formalized process of determining the truth of assertions solely by empirical means – is probably the most useful tool the human species has. By testing our beliefs about reality in a broadly scientific way, we can struggle forward with some confidence. With only faith, tradition, and consensus to guide us we hardly struggle forward at all. Science in the sense of the cultural institution embodied in a handful of professionals, however, has as much to do with authority as it does with truth. While it is likely that those with specialized educations will be especially fluent in their chosen disciplines, it does not follow that they will always be right, or that those with less formal training should surrender their skepticism, especially in the arena of the social sciences. Assertions are not true or false in accordance with the status of their originators, but in accordance to their correspondence to material reality.

It should always be remembered that the very core mechanisms of scientific inquiry, far from being the privileged sphere of the academic elites, are nearly universal. All animals with senses use them to uncover truth. If my cat is not exactly doing science when he examines his food bowl, he is at least doing things that science depends on. He makes a hypothesis, albeit an unstated one, that his bowl might contain food. He conducts a kind of experiment by walking to the bowl. He makes an observation. He adjusts his view of reality based on that observation. These rudiments of science are what sense organs and nervous systems evolved to do. It is the social, mystical, and authoritarian roads to belief which are peculiar to us. While most animals, including humans, suffer from certain instinctive reactions which drive us to occasionally behave against our better interests, only the most socially complex animals can summon up real delusions. The capacity to plan is the same capacity that allows us to imagine the world in ways that it is not. The capacity to communicate complex ideas is the same capacity that allows us to extend our imaginary world to others. Thus, the very mechanisms that make science possible put it continually at risk.

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1 If there are any true relativists out there who believe that everybody’s truth is just as good as everybody else’s, they have to believe in my epistemic absolutism too, so they do not qualify as an exception.

2 Here I admittedly generalize right over the messy business of philosophy and all of its interesting nuances. Is a scientific theory true because it works – in other words, because it yields correct predictions? Are scientific theories expressions of reality, or merely symbolic analogies of what are ultimately imperceptible states of affairs? Interesting questions, but beyond my current scope.

3 I am tempted to say that tradition and authority based forms of “truth” are not truth at all, but this would be begging the question. It is sufficient for my purposes to roughly define what I mean by scientific truth, and leave other definitions of truth alone for now.

4 RWA research ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism ) suffers from the same problem IQ tests do – the test itself becomes the definition of the property you are testing for. This is a hazard with almost all standardized assessments of this nature. You test against the biases of the people who compose the test. If the people who compose the test have an agenda you get a very bad test indeed. Consider what the article cites as the first item on the new RWA scale:

"Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us."

The article explains: "People who strongly agree with this are showing a tendency toward authoritarian submission (Our country desperately needs a mighty leader), authoritarian aggression (who will do what has to be done to destroy), and conventionalism (the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us)." Well, that sounds like very frightening stuff. Now, let’s alter the language only slightly, while trying to maintain the same essential content:

"Our country desperately needs a forceful leader who will do what has to be done to stamp out the new extremist policies and runaway corruption that are ruining us."

This still sounds like... authoritarian submission (Our country desperately needs a forceful leader), authoritarian aggression (who will do what has to be done to stamp out), and conventionalism (the new extremist policies and runaway corruption that are ruining us). Of course, this sentence would have dovetailed neatly into any Democratic candidate's nomination speech during the 2008 US election cycle. Well, amusing as it might be, we can't all be Ring-wing authoritarians.

What the proponents of RWA have done is to assemble a compact set of stereotypically conservative traits that most liberals find especially abhorrent, then constructed a quite precise linguistic trap that would snare conservatives – and only conservatives – into identifying with that definition.

A common hallmark of good science (though I admit not one that occurs in absolutely all cases) is that it produces some surprising results. The RWA assessment appears to be so carefully crafted that the results are about as surprising as discovering that optometrists write more glasses prescriptions than other people.

The RWA article continues:

“In a study by Altemeyer, 68 authoritarians played a three hour simulation of the Earth's future entitled the Global change game ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_change_game ). Unlike a comparison game played by individuals with low RWA scores, which resulted in world peace and widespread international cooperation, the simulation by authoritarians became highly militarized and eventually entered the stage of nuclear war. By the end of the high RWA game, the entire population of the earth was declared dead.”

Again, if you look at the Global change game objectively you will have to admit the findings are rather problematic. As a socio-economic-military simulation of the world, the game is both crude and overly subjective. The game world is quantified along resource and population lines based on real numbers, but little if any attempt is made to model cultural or historic relationships between nations. Military and economic models are oversimplified for the sake of playability. Assessments of the effects of player’s decisions are often not handled algorithmically (by some neutral mathematical rule) but by the rulings of “facilitators” with their own personal biases. I have no doubt the game is an enjoyable exercise, but it proves little. A global simulation designed and refereed by conservative economists might be equally enjoyable, would probably yield very different results, and would be every bit as useless.

A classic study of authority like the Milgram experiment ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment ) had real validity because it attempted to hide the game from the experimental subjects. They thought they were doing something real. The Global change game is, straightforwardly, a game – not reality. Further, while the Milgram experiment put people into an unusual situation, it was one that was at least plausible for them to be in. The tiny population of world leaders the Altemeyer game attempts to have players represent are, in the real world, not drawn from some sampling of people from a common culture, screened only in accordance with how they performed on a psychologist’s test. On average, real leaders in the real world are a more cautious and deliberative breed. They have something real to lose. The “global change game” that actually played out over the forty-four years of the Cold War failed to produce a nuclear exchange, even though there were often authoritarians on both sides and always authoritarians on at least one side. Any candidate for a valid simulation of the future ought to also be a credible simulation of the past. While Altemeyer’s game is dramatic and interesting, I don’t see the Rand Corporation seizing on it anytime soon as means of predicting the future behavior of actual nations.

What could the government possibly do with phone call metadata?

Here’s a quick scenario based on my own experience.  I’ve attended my local Tea Party group’s meetings many times.  I know how they are organized.  They have a web site with a fair amount of contact information.  The organizers are proud of what they do, and make no attempt to hide their identities.  Meeting attendees often provide their phone numbers so they can stay informed about future meetings, upcoming speakers, and so forth.  The organization’s volunteer secretary feeds these numbers into a robocaller for that purpose.  The robocaller makes a series of calls in steady succession, which has a certain pattern no doubt easily identifiable by NSA software.  An analyst can easily look up the originator of the calls, a Tea Party group secretary, and reasonably infer that she isn’t robocalling birthday greetings to her grandchildren.  Thus, without a warrant, a list of people connected with that Tea Party organization can be arrived at.  When people have to worry that participating in a political organization that supports the US Constitution might result in harassment from the IRS or some other government entity, they may decide to stay at home and keep their mouths shut.  They may take a step, in fear, away from freedom.  That is why a little metadata matters.

A good walk through the woods

I had a good walk through the woods the other day. It is both refreshing and instructive to observe those parts of the world that remain largely beyond the regulatory influence of human beings. Contrary to what some might think, plants and animals get on pretty well without our intervention. They flourish and decline by turns with the fortunes of the seasons. Trees struggle slowly, invisibly, upward towards the sun, competing against one another for the holes made in the canopy by storms and disease. Animals strive to eat without being eaten. Their lives, for the most part, are brief – but I think not wholly miserable. The turtle that sits on the log in the river, warming itself in the sun, does not convey a sense of desperation. There is room in this world for pleasure and pain, for life and for death.

The woods is, of course, a wonderfully complex Darwinian engine. The term “ecosystem” is popular now, but I prefer the 19th century word “engine” because I think it captures the essential dynamism characteristic of living things. Seen as a whole, a woods is a solar-powered machine. It is composed of an enormous number of different parts all working together with complete indifference to their collective result. The sycamore does not think “I must contribute this much shade, and this many places for birds and insects to live.” It doesn’t even think “I must push toward the sun.” It just does what it does. The sycamore is a machine itself – in the purest, broadest, most sublime, most beautiful sense of the word. “Ecosystem,” to me, sounds like a bureaucracy. A sort of a closed box of plants and animals, every pigeon in its proper pigeonhole, limited, with overtones of deliberate cooperation and a shared desire for collective success. A theoretical place, more than a physical one. “Nature” as the mind imagines it. “Engine,” too, I realize, is only another rough description of that which stubbornly eludes the trap of words. Nothing in the universe survives the passage into language true and whole. But then, I’m a symbolizing animal. It is just what I do.

When I am paying enough attention – which is to say, when I am living in the physical world instead of in my head – I find “nature” both humbling and uplifting. Most of the time I am trapped, along with the rest of humanity, in one kind of social game or another. We weigh the merits of this person or that person, or what someone did, or will do, or might do. Most of it is not only trivial but nonsense – only real because we make it so. The woods is full of reality – right down to its roots. It overflows with reality. A minute spent in the woods, or on an empty beach, or on a mountainside, makes a minute spent in any city on the planet almost embarrassing. A paltry knock-off of life. A crude impersonation of reality.

Contemporary American Liberalism, a brief dissection

I know many lifelong conservatives who either misunderstand American liberalism, or find it utterly incomprehensible. While I have never considered myself a liberal per se, I was at one time sympathetic to many of their causes. My own political views were actually to the left of mainstream liberalism for much of my life, but liberalism has drifted left while I have reasoned my way inevitably to the right. I could say I’ve looked at liberalism from both sides now – but unlike the Judy Collins song, I think I know and understand it pretty well. Here, then, are my general conclusions about how liberalism functions as a movement.

First, like most other groups, liberals are not a homogeneous like-minded mass. They are really three groups that, while distinctly different, operate symbiotically from a political perspective. Far from being equal, these three groups are stratified by class and there is only very limited interaction between them.

At the bottom of the liberal pyramid, we find the people among the lower and lower middle classes that believe they will benefit from a redistribution of wealth. Generally speaking, these people do not perceive themselves as liberals or progressives, though some may self-identify as Democrats. They rarely think about politics in any abstract, ideological sense. Rather, they vote for those that offer them some real, tangible favors. They are entirely practical in this regard. They want material things from the government, and they are unimpressed with the complex ideas of individual liberty, property rights, limitations to government power, etc. Their eyes are on their own immediate interests.

While there was a time when the direct beneficiaries of government charity were few, they have grown steadily more numerous as government has seen fit to compensate for more and more kinds of inequities. To begin with the most inflammatory example, history furnished a ready-made grievance for most black Americans, and the liberal elite have been happy to tuck them under the great paternalistic wing. This alliance is largely opportunistic at both ends. The leaders of the American left do not care about black people as individual human beings. Government policies, by their nature, do not cope well with the unique circumstances of individuals. This is a weakness of all social policies, not merely leftist ones. Leftist ideology though, from Marx on, has always explicitly dealt with people as aggregate classes, ethnic groups, or some other kind of collective.1 They always talk about what is best for society rather than about what is best for the individual. It is the collective which is important. The importance of the individual human being is a bourgeois enlightenment idea – it has never been a socialist one. Consequently, the left treats blacks, and everybody else, as members of a particular group, and it is the group whose history must be redressed – in exchange, of course, for their support in the elections. If you think that wealthy liberals genuinely like poor blacks as individuals, see if you can find some section 8 housing in one of the neighborhoods where the liberal elites live.

The same basic way of carving up humanity is applicable to all sorts of groups. For example, a liberal government created a bureaucratic category of disabled persons and functionally pretends that no one collecting disability is able to work. What else could disability mean? Yet I have known several people on disability, including a couple of my own relatives, and none were so handicapped that they could not have continued to do productive work of some kind. Indeed, it is not unusual for someone receiving disability benefits to be quite active, and even to operate some small business on the side. On the other hand, I know several blind people who are not collecting disability at all, but who manage to support themselves quite well. Disability is, from a social engineering perspective, a construct for the redistribution of wealth and the reorganization of labor. It’s a way to keep unemployment numbers down by removing people from the workforce. From an individual perspective it is, more often than not, a way to get a paycheck without working. Ask and you shall receive. The number of people who have been exempted from contributing to the theoretically all-important greater good of society is now quite staggering. Nine million on disability alone.2

I will skip over the middle tier of educated middle class liberals for now, getting back to them in a moment. It’s always best to tell your jokes either at the beginning or the end – either to set your audience at ease, or to leave them with a laugh. There is nothing especially funny about either the dependent classes or the elites, but the middle classes of liberals are one long running gag.

The ruling elite, those people who enact new laws and feel entitled by their stations to ignore the old ones, is the group with whom I have the least direct experience. Practically none, in fact. I stood on a street corner once as a president passed by in an armored bus with black windows, preceded and followed by an army of well-dressed but intimidating thugs with black sunglasses. On another occasion, I saw my governor at about a hundred yards distance. This is about as close as most of us will ever get to a major political figure. That is significant in itself. The ruling class of the United States today are far more estranged from the general public than the aristocracy of medieval Europe ever was. The medieval lord might live in a castle, but the castle at least overlooked the town. If the lord did not necessarily share in every aspect of the lives of his serfs, he at least could not help but be aware of them. A couple of decades ago, the first president Bush had a telling moment during a campaign visit to a supermarket, when he was surprised and obviously fascinated by the bar code scanner. He had obviously never seen or used one. Why would he have? George H. W. Bush is obviously no liberal, but he is certainly a member of the ruling class and shares in its high degree of isolation from the rest of us. Some of our rulers may come from modest backgrounds, but it is a rare politician, high level bureaucrat or nationally recognized journalist who maintains much active contact with those roots. Official Washington is, in a very importance sense, a nation unto itself.

In the absence of personal experience, I can only make inferences about the thinking of the elites based on their statements, their reported behavior, and the public policies they advocate. Their actual statements are the least compelling of the three. All major politicians now are surrounded not only by a cordon of security, but also by a buzzing swarm of campaign managers, media consultants and the like. This is to say, they are surrounded by people whose goal is to turn all of their utterances to some political advantage, either by encouraging pompous grandstanding, or some comforting, well-crafted species of baby-talk. Politicians don’t tell you what they believe, but do their best to shape what you believe. This is incompatible with any notion that their function is to represent you. Rather, your function is to support them. Their consultants are nothing more or less than a specialized group of advertizing experts, who want to sell you a narrative or a candidate rather than a product. The policy or the persona is the product. It is a mistake, though, to think of members of the ruling elite as habitual liars. It is perfectly possible that they maintain at least a normal level of honesty among themselves. They lie to us because the lies are impersonal, and because they are supremely confident that they know best, and any abuse of the truth that will convince us to go along enthusiastically or at least quietly is just a normal part of political life. They treat us, at best, like children. The only vestige of power still in the hands of the public is our tenuous hold on the elections, but in a culture that values emotional reactions and charisma over substance, elections are more of a beauty contest than an expression of the popular will. One can only elect a candidate who represents one’s interests if the candidate’s views are both known and consistent. The system that has evolved makes it unlikely they will be either.

I haven’t delineated the differences between the liberal ruling elite from their nominally conservative, Republican counterparts because, frankly, the differences are minor. Bill Clinton can be chummy with the Bushes because they both see themselves in essentially the same way. To use George junior’s own inane, quasi-folksy term – they are “the deciders.” The great experiment of the United States, in which, to use Thoreau’s rather more articulate phrase – “that government is best which governs least” – is over. Republicans talk about freedom and conjure up the image of the rugged individualist, but most don’t really take it seriously. What they want is not a diminution of government size or power, but merely it’s redirection to favor a somewhat different agenda. Likewise, most Democrats only talk about the preservation of privacy and other civil liberties. They do so only to avoid alienating the more educated members of their base by moving toward authoritarianism too quickly. They know well that they will never be subject to any oppressive laws themselves, and that sweeping government powers would make governing easier.

The American ruling class is, in one sense, uninteresting. Anyone with even a moderate knowledge of history can see that they are nothing new. Humanity has been burdened with such people since the dawn of civilization. The details of the methods are new, but the motives and attitudes are timeless. The liberals at the top of the current political heap are not egalitarians. They are people who enjoy the exercise of power, and feel that some natural superiority on their part entitles them to mold the rest of us like so much human clay. They recognize, to some degree, that they are constrained by the dictates of their own public narrative – which is to say that, to the extent that elections still matter, they must still dance the egalitarian dance to the satisfaction of their base – but their goal is not to serve that base, but to serve their own ambitions – utopian, avaricious or otherwise. Nothing much to see here. Let us move along.

It is now my pleasure to present the class that I know best – that class from which, in fact, I sprang. (“Stumbled” might be a better word – or perhaps “escaped after a protracted struggle.”) Middle class liberals are not an absolutely uniform group either. They range from upper middle class professionals (lawyers, doctors, professors in schools beneath the Ivy League, et al.) to lower middle class union workers and school teachers. Still, within this broad swath of people there are some common characteristics.

The first point of similarity is one of simple identification with the ideology’s core narrative. Middle class liberals see themselves as part of a continual moral and material progress upward. The newly revived term “progressive” is probably a more apt term than “liberal” – a term which once connoted nearly the opposite of what it connotes now. Contemporary liberals see themselves as good because they want society to continually be made better. Conservatives, by contrast, are suspicious of dismantling institutions that experience has proven to work. Though this distinction is simplistic to the point of childishness, it is still quite illustrative. The core liberal belief is that the aggregate direction of change is always toward improvement. By destroying established tradition, they believe they will get a better society when the dust settles. For this reason, they tend not to worry much about the consequences of change, provided that change is being driven by members of their own team. To them, progress it the inevitable consequence of upheaval. Unfortunately for them, history fails to confirm this outlook.

Reality is under no obligation to adhere to anyone’s beliefs. A religious belief in progress is no better a predictor of the future than any other magical belief. The historical record indicates that civilizations rise and fall due to many subtle factors, and that rapid change has at least as good a chance of being negative as it does of being positive. Things don’t just get better and better because you feel good about your ideology. The story of civilization is substantially a chronicle of unintended consequences – of unhappy things that happened on the way to somebody’s idea of utopia.

The second thing that bonds middle class liberalism together is a misguided notion of altruism. This can have different motivations depending on the circumstances of the individual. If one is a materially successful liberal – not a member of the political elite, but in the top 5 or 10% of the population economically – altruism in the form of coughing up a little more in taxes, or just having the proper attitudes toward the least successful members of society, gets you off the moral hook. You can be rich, which your ideology tells you is a kind of sin – and yet have a clean conscience through the secular tithe of taxation and a politically correct thought or two. I can only imagine many lawyers find their politics a useful balm to sooth the atrophying vestiges of their consciences. At the other end of the spectrum, in the liberal lower middle class, the additional tax tithe and political correctness elevates your station through association with the elite. Perhaps you cannot change the world like Bill or Hillary Clinton – but you can help! You can have a little piece of their high holiness through your modest sacrifice and right (or rather left) ideas.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not opposed to genuine human sympathy. The world would be a wretched place if we were all unflinching Randian egoists. What I am opposed to is letting a government or an ideology manage and codify our natural human sympathies for us. If someone takes a certain share of my income by force and tells me they are doing good with it, this does not constitute a moral action on my part. Only voluntary actions can be moral. Likewise, if I feel a politically correct sense of pity toward some underprivileged minority whose members I only rarely or superficially encounter, I do not make their lives any better. Words and thoughts are cheap. This isn’t altruism at all – it is just a thinly disguised exercise in good old fashioned subservience and conformity. How often does the average liberal ask: “So – how are these social policies really working out?” “Is there less poverty now than there was 40 years ago?” “How well do my representatives actually embody my ideals?” Some do, of course, but most are content to play the my-team-vs-their-team game which is the default pattern of human interaction wherever recognizable groups of any kind exist. Liberals don’t love all human beings – they love the people that their culture elevates and hate the people that their culture vilifies. In this way, frankly, I suppose the liberal middle class really isn’t very interesting either. A mob of followers and wannabes that are the willing tools of an elite. Nothing new under the sun.

What is peculiar (though not unique) about the contemporary liberal middle class is their enthusiasm for undermining their own actual best interests. It does not benefit them to have a greater and greater share of their income doled out to a growing number of entitled victims. Neither does it benefit them to grovel at the feet of their own leadership. Virtually all of the productive capacity of society lies in the knowledge and abilities of the dwindling middle class. Despite this theoretical power, they are progressively wrung dry by the elite, who use their wealth to pay both the poor and themselves while contributing rather little useful work themselves. Politically speaking, the middle class is the most naïve component of the liberal movement.

The lengths to which the middle tier of liberals will go to defend their narrative are both tragic and amusing.  I can think of no better illustration of this than the comments of a liberal friend. He once told me that he knew perfectly well his leadership was lying to him, but he’d concluded that this wasn’t a particularly serious problem. He felt that because his leaders always said the right things that they would eventually have to do the right things as well. Stunned, I countered with the argument that Joseph Stalin always said the right things, while happily sending millions to the gulag. I needn’t have bothered. My friend’s position was neither rational nor amenable to argument. It was, in fact, the perfect political analog of battered woman syndrome – the victim’s belief that, although the abuser has beaten her repeatedly in the past, his words prove that he really loves her and that eventually he will change. The only rational response – no, to forgive abuse is to encourage more abuse, and to believe in change occurring spontaneously under such circumstances is self-destructive – is rarely worth the effort of expressing. Against a truly magical belief, mere reason struggles in vain.

It is bitterly ironic that contemporary liberalism has identified itself so closely with science, and yet divorced itself so completely from external epistemic standards. So confident are most middle class progressives that their ideology is grounded in science that they endow liberal policies of all sorts with an aura of infallibility they do not merit. At least the religious realize their understanding of the world is based on faith – the liberal has a faith-based worldview he thinks is factual because, here and there, it has a veneer of scientific structure and the approval of scientists.

The association of a political movement with science tends to have a corrupting influence on both. It gives political positions credibility they do not merit, while is undermines the credibility of science. Take the recent case of Diederik Stapel, the well-respected Dutch sociologist. He spent the greater part of his career inventing sociological mechanisms and supporting them with data he invented out of thin air. Since his work supported the general narrative of western liberalism, it escaped serious scrutiny for decades. It was peer reviewed, of course – but by peers who were in general sympathetic, and who knew quite well the consequences of bucking the culture. Consider, by contrast, the case of Charles Murray. Murray’s landmark work, The Bell Curve, brought an immediate storm of academic attack for showing that, as groups, blacks and Latinos performed significantly poorer than whites on intelligence tests, and for asserting that genetics could not be ruled out as a contributing factor to the disparity. Whether Murray and his co-author Richard Herrnstein where ultimately correct or not is not at issue. The point is that scientists who excoriated Murray in the popular press were heroes, whereas Stapel’s credibility was taken for granted.

I have digressed somewhat. Let’s return to my main topic, which is the interplay between the three classes of liberals.

In its roughest, most general outlines, the socio-economic mechanism of contemporary American liberalism is as I outlined earlier: the elites harvest the productive effort of the middle class to maintain their own status and to buy the support of the dependent classes. The elites win economically in more-or-less the same way elites always win economically – they own the game – and they entrench themselves politically by buying the support of a large class of dependents. This part of the mechanism is as old as Rome, at least. The dependent classes win to the extent that they can live a poor but not a desperate life without having to do any real work for it. They lose in that tax pressure suppresses the economic activity that would allow them to rise from a state of dependency more easily if they wanted to – as some of them certainly do want to. Their rise from dependency would be of no real benefit to the liberal elite – in fact quite the opposite. They are perfectly useful where they are. Although this may sound cynical, consider what would have to be true were it otherwise. The leaders of the left would have to be so altruistic as to be willing to give up a near-certain source of political support simply because it helped some individuals not personally known to them. Individuals whose culture is as alien to that of the elites as a Kalahari bushman’s is to you or I.

The middle class loses. The leftwing middle class wins the fantasy moral victory of feeling it is on the side of the angels. The conservative middle class just loses.

The problem with this game, even from the perspective of the current winners, is that it can’t go on forever. We have reached a point in history where both the socio-economic mechanism outlined above and a variety of material factors (mostly involving resources shortages of one kind or another) are eroding the middle class engine that powers the system. The crash of 2008 and a gradually shrinking economy that has followed has pushed a huge number of productive working people into a condition of non-productive dependence. Since at least 2008, we have had largely a fictitious economy built of currency debasement and dishonest government statistics. The shrinking middle class can carry no more burdens. Certainly, they cannot offset in taxes the 40% of the budget that the government prints out of thin air. Sooner or later there are just going to be more balls in the air than the juggler can handle, and people are going to discover the hard way that they cannot eat promises or dreams – which is all the government will have to offer them. Many people now feel this intuitively, but not very many look too closely. It’s a frightening sight. And if they did look – what could they do?
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1  Yes, I know that I am generalizing in exactly the same way. Old habits die hard. I do not claim that absolutely every liberal fits neatly into my formula. What I am struggling to paint is a portrait of a crowd in its most general outlines. It is only an aggregate form created from the shapes of many individuals, who are themselves undoubtedly unique in many respects. I do not claim the portrait fully subsumes the beliefs of all those that it contains, or that their individual lives or characters are altogether irrelevant.

2  To be fair, if I may be forgiven the use of a liberal holy word, the economy has become so structurally distorted that there would not be enough jobs to go around now if, by magic or necessity, everybody wanted one. I deal with that in more detail elsewhere. http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2012/07/automation-service-economy-and-welfare.html