Living Large in the Shrinking Liberal Cocoon. By Walter Russell Mead.

Winter on the Left: Living Large in a Shrinking Cocoon. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, December 21, 2014.

Mead:

Never have liberal ideas been so firmly entrenched within America’s core elite institutions. Never have those institutions been so weak and uninfluential.

These are frustrating times for the American left. Legislative power has slipped from its hands; the states are more Republican than at just about any time in living memory, and as President Obama nears the end of his term, it seems far more likely than otherwise that, Republican or Democrat, his successor will stand well to the right of the incumbent. As I noted in the first essay in the series, the foreign policy disasters and the financial crash of the George W. Bush administration opened a path to the White House for the most liberal President in history and gave Democrats overwhelming majorities in the Senate and the House back in 2008. Jubilant liberals believed that a new era had dawned, and when they weren’t comparing Obama to Lincoln, they were calling him the “Democratic Reagan” who would reset politics for the left just as Reagan once did for the right.

Six years later, the dream is looking shopworn. President Obama is deeply unpopular, the Democratic majorities are gone with the wind, and poll after poll after poll demonstrates that Obamacare, the Democrats’ signature legislative accomplishment in the Age of Obama, is more of an albatross around the party’s neck than a star in its crown.

Some of this could change. The slow but persistent improvement in economic conditions has finally begun to register with voters; consumer confidence is up and, if the economy continues to improve through 2016, President Obama’s poll numbers should strengthen. The racial polarization that so tragically spiked in the last three months could gradually fade away. And the concatenation of foreign policy and security disasters from the Libyan anarchy to the series of Syria and Iraq fiascoes to the Russian invasion of Ukraine could look less frightening and less like an implosion of America’s world position in two year’s time. The lame duck could still swagger off the stage in the end.

But right now that doesn’t look probable, even to liberals. Eric Alterman, one of the left’s most articulate advocates, summarizes the situation with his customary frankness in the Nation:

The Obama presidency has been a devil’s bargain for Democrats. Despite the considerable policy accomplishments to its credit, the administration’s political impact has been virtually catastrophic. Since Obama’s victory in 2008, Democrats are down seventy seats in the House and fifteen in the Senate, giving an increasingly reactionary Republican Party the power to stymie most if not all of the Democrats’ agenda. But this actually understates the damage. Democrats are now the minority in over two-thirds of the nation’s partisan state legislative chambers, their worst showing in history. In twenty-three of these, Republicans will control the governor’s office, too. (The corresponding number for Democrats is just seven.)

Alterman cites two core reasons for the disaster. On the one hand, Democrats haven’t recognized that many of the policies they like on “good government” grounds are political poison. In particular, Obamacare and the immigration amnesty are alienating voters:

The Affordable Care Act and the executive order expanding the rights of undocumented immigrants were certainly the right thing to do from the perspective of Democratic values, but both are politically poisonous at present. Obamacare undermines a key Democratic constituency badly in need of help: labor unions. The immigration order fires up anti-immigrant passion among working-class voters while benefiting an ethnic group—Latinos—whose voter-participation levels remain anemic, even allowing for the restrictive election laws passed by Republicans.

Beyond that, Alterman argues, the Democrats’ turn to social rather than economic issues (gentry liberalism vs. populism) hasn’t been helpful. Focusing on “immigration, reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, gun control, etc.” at a time when real wages are stagnant or declining for most Americans is a recipe for political failure.

But this analysis, cogent as it is, raises another question: why were liberals so feckless in power? Why did they blow the historic opportunity that the Bush implosion gave them?

What liberals are struggling to come to grips with today is the enormous gap between the dominant ideas and discourse in the liberal worlds of journalism, the foundations, and the academy on the one hand, and the wider realities of American life on the other. Within the magic circle, liberal ideas have never been more firmly entrenched and less contested. Increasingly, liberals live in a world in which certain ideas are becoming ever more axiomatic and unquestioned even if, outside the walls, those same ideas often seem outlandish.

Modern American liberalism does its best to suppress dissent and critique (except from the left) at the institutions and milieus that it controls. Dissent is not only misguided; it is morally wrong. Bad thoughts create bad actions, and so the heretics must be silenced or expelled. “Hurtful” speech is not allowed, and so the eccentricities of conventional liberal piety pile up into ever more improbable, ever more unsustainable forms.

To openly support “torture”, for example, is close to unthinkable in the academy or in the world of serious journalism. For a university professor or a New Yorker writer to say that torture is acceptable under any circumstances is to court marginalization. A great many liberals don’t know anybody who openly supports torture, and a great many liberals are convinced that the concept of torture is so heinous that simply to name and document incidents will lead an aroused public to rally against the practice—and against the political party that allowed it.

Thus a group of journalists, human rights activists, and others relentlessly pursued allegations of CIA use of torture, not only as an important moral duty but also as an effective political strategy. It flopped. As we’ve seen, the revelations about CIA methods left most Americans still telling pollsters that they favor torture when national security is in question. “Torture” may be unthinkable to well meaning academics and human rights activists, but the argument hasn’t been won—hasn’t really even been engaged—among the broader public. The left silenced and banished critics; it didn’t convert or refute them. The net result of the liberal campaign to “hold the CIA accountable” wasn’t to discredit the Bush administration; the campaign simply undercut claims by liberals that the left can safely be entrusted with security policy. A group of liberal journalists and politicos worked very hard to make Dick Cheney’s day.

Similarly, the liberal hothouses that so many university campuses are today encourage students to adopt approaches to real life problems that, to say the least, are counterproductive. Take, for example, the recent attempts by law students at Harvard, Georgetown, and Columbia to have their exams postponed due to the stress they suffered as a result of the Ferguson controversy. “This is more than a personal emergency. This is a national emergency,” said the anguished Harvardians asking for an extension. Said the fragile and delicate souls from Georgetown,“We, students of color, cannot breathe…. We charge you to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter.”

One thinks of the school beneath the sea in Alice in Wonderland, where students were taught “reeling, writhing, and fainting in coils.”

Fortunately for us all, liberalism didn’t use to be such a pallid and shrinking thing. People like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King were, thank goodness, made of sterner stuff than the frail flowers of the contemporary Ivy League. The people who actually helped black people in American history down through the centuries faced more injustice, brutality, and casual public racism than our delicately and tenderly raised hothouse elites could imagine in their wildest dreams. Serious people understand that the existence of injustice is a reason to get tougher and work harder, not a reason to whine to the dean about your emotional turmoil. Truth, Douglass, Marshall, King, and tens of thousands of others knew that the people who want to change the world need to be tougher, smarter, harder working, and stronger than the people who don’t care. This may not be fair, but having emotional meltdowns over it won’t help you or anybody else.

Are these shrinking violets and sensitive souls really preparing for careers in the law? If you are a lawyer and a grand jury returns an unjust indictment against your client, are you going to come down with a disabling attack of the vapors that keeps you from concentrating on your legal work as you struggle with the unfairness of it all? If so, the legal profession is not for you. You need another and less challenging profession, perhaps involving the preparation of fair trade herbal teas for elderly Quakers in a quiet suburb somewhere.

But liberals today face more problems than cocooning. They face the problem that, even as the ideas in liberal institutions become ever more elaborate, intricate, and unsuited to the actual political world, liberal institutions are losing more of their power to shape public opinion and national debate. Forty years ago, the key liberal institutions were both less distanced from the rest of American society and significantly more able to drive the national agenda. The essentially likeminded, mainstream liberals who wrote and produced the major network news shows more or less controlled the outlets from which a majority of Americans got the news. There was no Drudge Report or Fox News in those days, much less an army of pesky fact checkers on the internet. When liberal media types decided that something was news, it was news.

If the Sandy Hook massacre had taken place in 1975, it’s likely that the liberal take on gun violence would not have been challenged. But these days, an army of bloggers and a counter-establishment of policy wonks in right leaning think tanks are ready to respond to extreme events like Sandy Hook. After the 2014 midterm, Gabby Gifford’s old congressional seat will be filled by a pro-gun rights Republican, and polls show support for “gun rights” at historic highs. Liberal strategies don’t work anymore in part because liberal institutions are losing their power.

Meanwhile, many liberals are in a tough emotional spot. They live in liberal cocoons, read cocooning news sources, and work in professions and milieus where liberal ideas are as prevalent and as uncontroversial as oxygen. They are certain that these ideas are necessary, important and just—and they can’t imagine that people have solid reasons for disagreeing with them. Yet these ideas are much less well accepted outside the bubble—and the bubbles seem to be shrinking. After the horrors of the George W. Bush administration, liberals believed that the nightmare of conservative governance had vanished, never to return. Aided by the immigration amnesty, an irresistible army of minority voters would enshrine liberal ideas into law and give Democrats a permanent lock on the machinery of an ever more powerful state.

That no longer looks likely; we can all look forward to eloquent laments, wringing of hands, impassioned statements of faith as the realization sinks in. There will be reeling, there will be writhing, and there will be fainting in coils. In the end, we can hope that liberalism will purge itself of the excesses and indulgences that come from life in the cocoon. The country needs a forward looking and level headed left; right now what we have is a mess.

The Coming Hobbesian World. By Liam Denning.

The Coming Hobbesian World. By Liam Denning. Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2014. Review of The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder. By Peter Zeihan. New York: Twelve, 2014. 371 pp. Also here.

Denning:

The North American shale energy boom raises the question of whether it is worthwhile for the U.S. to continue to protect everyone’s trade.

Peter Zeihan begins “The Accidental Superpower” by declaring that he has “always loved maps.” From this unremarkable claim springs a lively, readable thesis on how the success or failure of nations may rest on the very ground beneath their feet. Rather than focusing on charismatic leaders or lofty ideals, Mr. Zeihan stresses the more prosaic forces that shape world events: topography, soil quality, access to water. Water especially, he says, sorts winners from the rest. It can be a highway, a barrier, a larder and a battery. Rivers make it cheap to transport goods and people, enabling the efficient mixing of ideas and markets. The capital that might otherwise be spent on, say, building a road may be used for other purposes.

It happens that the United States—the “superpower” of Mr. Zeihan’s title—is blessed with 12 major navigable rivers, including the Mississippi. Much else flows from this happy accident. A less pressing need for grand, land-based infrastructure projects, for example, may lessen the need for centralized coordination, encouraging small government.

Other great powers, or former ones, have enjoyed one or two geographical advantages—think of Egypt’s mighty Nile or Britain’s status as an island nation, from which its great naval tradition comes. But no nation combines America’s easy navigability, abundant cropland and a moat the size of two oceans. The geographical underpinning of America’s global role makes it likely that U.S. supremacy will endure for some time to come. Just don’t expect it to be easy, Mr. Zeihan says, at least not for the next couple of decades.

The bulk of “The Accidental Superpower” peers into the future as Mr. Zeihan, a former analyst at the geopolitical security firm Stratfor, tries to imagine where the world, and particularly America, is headed. Conjecture is de rigueur in the geopolitics genre—sometimes to its peril. Take “The Next 100 Years” by George Friedman, Mr. Zeihan’s former boss at Stratfor. Mr. Friedman’s 2009 book got some things right, notably a renewed standoff between the West and Russia. Eventually, though, it veered into Tom Clancy territory by imagining orbiting “Battle Stars” and a midcentury Thanksgiving Day sneak attack starting a world war.

“The Accidental Superpower” does its fair share of futurology. There is a Russian collapse, a Swedish-Polish alliance and even a secession crisis—in Canada, of all places, where the residents of Alberta (not Quebec) are restless. Most fascinating of all is the notion that, while armchair generals have their binoculars trained on the Middle East, the most pressing threat to U.S. homeland security could be a spillover of Mexico’s drug war.

Even if you don’t buy the specifics of these scenarios, they don’t lapse into a geopolitical version of science fiction. Their overarching theme is that we are moving into an ever more chaotic world—an idea that may sound familiar. (Think of two much-discussed articles from the 1990s: Robert Kaplan ’s “The Coming Anarchy” and Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations?”) Mr. Zeihan’s prediction, though, derives from a startling proposition: that the U.S., during the Cold War, “turned geopolitics off,” if only temporarily.

Mr. Zeihan is referring to the 1944 Bretton Woods settlement. By establishing a monetary and trading system underpinned by U.S. military and economic might, the settlement effectively bribed Western Europe’s tribes to set aside their blood feuds and band together to help hold off the Soviet Union. In return, the allies got access to the American market—the only functioning one amid the ruins of 1945—as well as the protection of the only global navy still afloat and, what’s more, a nuclear umbrella.

Mr. Zeihan says that the Bretton Woods settlement is now unraveling—largely because it is no longer essential to the country that underwrote it. Protecting everyone’s trade by means of the U.S. Navy made sense when it strengthened allies in the face of a Cold War adversary and guarded tankers feeding America’s growing appetite for foreign oil. Now the North American shale energy boom—not to mention the recent financial crisis—raises the question of whether it is worthwhile for the U.S. to bear such burdens to the same extent.

The obvious rejoinder to this skepticism is that the U.S. can’t simply lift itself off a planet with terrorist networks and nuclear weapons. But Mr. Zeihan’s point isn’t that America is about to isolate itself; it is rather that America may see the logic of retrenching, and retrenchment will destabilize a world built on U.S. commitments. Risk-free shipping lanes, for instance, are critical to major exporters such as China and Germany. Without American power, the fate of globalized supply chains is called into question. Signs of disruption can be seen in China’s push to directly control mines and oil fields overseas and in widespread doubts about whether an American president would send troops to defend NATO allies in the Baltic states. The assumptions underlying the postwar order have loosened already.

Mr. Zeihan’s grim conclusion: The world may be headed toward a “Hobbesian period” of rivalry over resources lasting 15 years or so. Economic pressures will be intensified in many regions by aging populations that make demands on overburdened, unreplenished economies. The U.S. doesn’t escape entirely, in Mr. Zeihan’s telling, but it does better in relative terms—aided by its geographical advantages and also, for instance, by its ability to assimilate immigrants.

Only in the conclusion to “The Accidental Superpower” does the author overreach, declaring that “the world is indeed going to hell, but the Americans are going to sit this one out.” After his having done such a good job of explaining the nature of U.S. power and the threats to global order, the triumphalist tone of the final pages is jarring. Still, anyone seeking a cogent, and provocative, take on where the world is heading should start here. Even if you don’t fall in love with maps, you’ll never look at them the same way again.

Putin’s Rules of Attraction. By Joseph S. Nye.

Putin’s Rules of Attraction. By Joseph S. Nye. Project Syndicate, December 12, 2014.

Nye:

CAMBRIDGE – Russian President Vladimir Putin’s covert aggression in Ukraine continues – and so do Western sanctions against his country. But the economy is not all that is under threat; Russia’s soft power is dwindling, with potentially devastating results.

A country can compel others to advance its interests in three main ways: through coercion, payment, or attraction. Putin has tried coercion – and been met with increasingly tough sanctions. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Putin’s main European interlocutor, has been expressing her frustration with Russian policy toward Ukraine in increasingly harsh terms. Whatever short-term gains Putin’s actions in Ukraine provide will be more than offset in the long term, as Russia loses access to the Western technology it needs to modernize its industry and extend energy exploration into frontier Arctic regions.

With Russia’s economy faltering, Putin is finding it increasingly difficult to employ the second tool of power: payment. Not even oil and gas, Russia’s most valuable resources, can save the economy, as Putin’s recent agreement to supply gas to China for 30 years at knockdown prices demonstrates.

This leaves attraction – a more potent source of power than one might expect. China, for example, has been attempting to use soft power to cultivate a less threatening image – one that it hopes will undermine, and even discourage, the coalitions that have been emerging to counterbalance its rising economic and military might.

A country’s soft power rests on three main resources: an appealing culture, political values that it reliably upholds, and foreign policy that is imbued with moral authority. The challenge lies in combining these resources with hard-power assets like economic and military power so that they reinforce one another.

The United States failed to strike this balance with respect to its 2003 invasion of Iraq. While America’s military power was sufficient to defeat Saddam Hussein’s forces quickly, it did so at the expense of its attractiveness in many countries. Likewise, though establishing a Confucius Institute in Manila to teach Filipino people about Chinese culture may help to cultivate China’s soft power, its impact will be severely constrained if China is simultaneously using its hard power to bully the Philippines in the territorial dispute over the Scarborough Shoal.

The problem for Russia is that it already has very little soft power with which to work. Indeed, as the political analyst Sergei Karaganov noted in 2009, Russia’s lack of soft power is precisely what is driving it to behave aggressively – such as in its war with Georgia the previous year.

To be sure, Russia has historically enjoyed considerable soft power, with its culture having made major contributions to art, music, and literature. Moreover, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the Soviet Union was attractive to many Western Europeans, owing largely to its leadership in the fight against fascism.

But the Soviets squandered these soft-power gains by invading Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. By 1989, they had little soft power left. The Berlin Wall did not collapse under a barrage of NATO artillery, but under the impact of hammers and bulldozers wielded by people who had changed their minds about Soviet ideology.

Putin is now making the same mistake as his Soviet forebears. Despite his 2013 declaration that Russia should be focusing on the “literate use” of soft power, he failed to capitalize on the soft-power boost afforded to Russia by hosting the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.

Instead, even as the Games were proceeding, Putin launched a semi-covert military intervention in Ukraine, which, together with his talk of Russian nationalism, has induced severe anxiety, particularly among ex-Soviet countries. This has undermined Putin’s own stated objective of establishing a Russia-led Eurasian Union to compete with the European Union.

With few foreigners watching Russian films, and only one Russian university ranked in the global top 100, Russia has few options for regaining its appeal. So Putin has turned to propaganda.

Last year, Putin reorganized the RIA Novosti news agency, firing 40% of its staff, including its relatively independent management. The agency’s new leader, Dmitry Kiselyov, announced in November the creation of “Sputnik,” a government-funded network of news hubs in 34 countries, with 1,000 staff members producing radio, social media, and news-wire content in local languages.

But one of the paradoxes of soft power is that propaganda is often counterproductive, owing to its lack of credibility. During the Cold War, open cultural exchanges – such as the Salzburg Seminar, which enabled young people to engage with one another – demonstrated that contact among populations is far more meaningful.

Today, much of America’s soft power is produced not by the government, but by civil society – including universities, foundations, and pop culture. Indeed, America’s uncensored civil society, and its willingness to criticize its political leaders, enables the country to preserve soft power even when other countries disagree with its government’s actions.

Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the BBC retains its credibility because it can bite the government hand that feeds it. Yet Putin remains bent on curtailing the role of non-governmental organizations and civil society.

Putin may understand that hard and soft power reinforce each other, but he remains seemingly incapable of applying that understanding to policy. As a result, Russia’s capacity to attract others, if not to coerce and pay them, will continue to decline.

Immigration and the New Class Divide. By Ian Buruma.

Immigration and the New Class Divide. By Ian Buruma. Project Syndicate, December 9, 2014.

Buruma:

SINGAPORE – The British shadow minister for Europe, Pat McFadden, recently warned members of his Labour Party that they should try to make the most of the global economy and not treat immigration like a disease. As he put it, “You can feed on people’s grievances or you can give people a chance. And I think our policies should be around giving people a chance.”

In a world increasingly dominated by grievances – against immigrants, bankers, Muslims, “liberal elites,” “Eurocrats,” cosmopolitans, or anything else that seems vaguely alien – such wise words are rare. Leaders worldwide should take note.

In the United States, Republicans – backed by their Tea Party activists – are threatening to close the government down just because President Barack Obama has offered undocumented immigrants who have lived and worked in the US for many years a chance to gain citizenship. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) wants to introduce a five-year ban on immigration for permanent settlement. Russia’s deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, once released a video promising to “clean the rubbish” – meaning migrant workers, mostly from former Soviet republics – “away from Moscow.”

Even the once famously tolerant Dutch and Danes are increasingly voting for parties that fulminate against the scourge of immigration. Always keen to assert the freedom to insult Muslims, the Dutch Freedom Party wants to ban all mosques. And the tiny and much-harassed opposition parties in Singapore – a country where almost everyone is descended from immigrants – are gaining traction by appealing to popular gripes about immigrants (mostly from India and China) who are supposedly taking jobs from “natives.”

What can American Tea Party enthusiasts, Russian chauvinists, fearful Dutch and Danes, and Singaporean leftists possibly have in common that is driving this anti-immigrant sentiment?

Retaining one’s job in a tightening economy is undoubtedly a serious concern. But the livelihoods of most of the middle-aged rural white Americans who support the Tea Party are hardly threatened by poor Mexican migrants. UKIP is popular in some parts of England where immigrants are rarely seen. And many of the Dutch Freedom Party’s voters live nowhere near a mosque.

Anti-immigrant sentiment cuts across the old left-right divide. One thing Tea Party or UKIP supporters share with working-class voters who genuinely fear losing their jobs to low-paid foreigners is anxiety about being left behind in a world of easy mobility, supranational organizations, and global networking.

On the right, support for conservative parties is split between business interests that benefit from immigration or supranational institutions, and groups that feel threatened by them. That is why the British Tories are so afraid of UKIP. Nigel Farage, UKIP’s leader, is less concerned with economic growth than with pursuing his extreme conception of national independence.

On the left, opinion is split between those who oppose racism and intolerance above all and those who want to protect employment and preserve “solidarity” for what is left of the native-born working class.

It would be a mistake to dismiss anxiety about immigration as mere bigotry or apprehension about the globalized economy as simply reactionary. National, religious, and cultural identities (for lack of a better word) are being transformed, though less by immigration than by the development of globalized capitalism.

In the new global economy, there are clear winners and losers. Educated men and women who can communicate effectively in varied international contexts are benefiting. People who lack the needed education or experience – and there are many of them – are struggling.

In other words, the new class divisions run less between the rich and the poor than between educated metropolitan elites and less sophisticated, less flexible, and, in every sense, less connected provincials. It is irrelevant that the provincials’ political leaders (and their backers) are sometimes wealthier than the resented metropolitan elites. They still feel looked down upon. And so they share the bitterness of those who feel alienated in a world they find bewildering and hateful.

Populist rabble-rousers like to stir up such resentments by ranting about foreigners who work for a pittance or not at all. But it is the relative success of ethnic minorities and immigrants that is more upsetting to indigenous populations.

This explains the popular hostility toward Obama. Americans know that, before too long, whites will be just another minority, and people of color will increasingly be in positions of power. At this point, all Tea Partiers and others like them can do is declare, “We want our country back!”

Of course, this is an impossible demand. Short of unleashing massive and bloody ethnic cleansing – Bosnia, on a continental scale – Americans and others have no choice but to get used to living in increasingly diverse societies.

Likewise, economic globalization cannot be undone. But regulation can and should be improved. After all, some things are still worth protecting. There are good reasons not to leave culture, education, lifestyles, or jobs completely exposed to the creative destruction of market forces.

McFadden has pinpointed the central solution to globalization’s challenges: giving people “the tools to reap the benefits” of the globalized world, thereby making the “connected world work better for people.” The problem is that this call is more likely to appeal to the highly educated, already privileged classes than to those who feel disenfranchised in today’s global economy.

This is a serious problem for political parties on the left, which increasingly seem to be speaking for the metropolitan elites, while provincial populists are pushing traditional conservatives further to the right by fishing in the dark waters of popular resentment.

America Continues to Thrive. By Victor Davis Hanson.

America Continues to Thrive. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, December 11, 2014.

Hanson:

Even in its current malaise, the U.S. still soars above the global competition.

Germany’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, supposedly once said that there was “a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.”

Apparently, late 19th-century observers could not quite explain how the U.S. thrived when by logic it should not. That paradox has never been more true than today.

The U.S. government now owes more than $18 trillion in long-term debt. Even after recent income-tax hikes for the very wealthy and huge cuts in the defense budget, the Obama administration will still run an annual budget deficit of nearly $500 billion.

No government official dares to trim Social Security or Medicare. Everyone knows that both programs are fiscally unsustainable.

More than 11 million undocumented immigrants are residing in the U.S. as federal immigration law is reduced to a bothersome irritant. A record 92 million American citizens 16 and older are not working.

Red-state and blue-state animosities reveal a nation more divided than at any time since the 1960s — or perhaps the pre–Civil War 1850s.

The permanent bureaucracy is awash in serial scandals. The IRS, VA, GSA, NSA, ICE, and Secret Service have all deservedly lost the public trust.

Congress suffers from overwhelming public disapproval. President Obama’s approval rating hovers just above 40 percent.

Our new foreign policy could be characterized as managed decline. Three defense secretaries have retired or resigned under Obama. Two of them, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, wrote memoirs in which they blasted the administration. From Russia to the Pacific to the Middle East, the world seems to be descending into the law of the jungle as the U.S. withdraws from its traditional role as a global overseer of the postwar order.

The Michael Brown shooting illustrates seemingly irreconcilable racial divides not seen in 50 years. Al Sharpton once was seen as a social arsonist and tax delinquent. Now he appears to be the White House’s most influential advisor on racial matters.

Student-loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion. Six years of college has become the new normal. Even then, more than a third of the students who enter college never graduate.

In such a depressing American landscape, why is the United States doing pretty well?

Put simply, millions of quiet, determined Americans get up every morning and tune out the incompetence and corruption of their government. They simply ignore destructive fads of popular culture. They have no time for the demagoguery of their politicians and the divisive rhetoric of social activists. Instead, these quiet Americans simply go to work, pursue their own talents, excel at what they do, and seek to take care of their families.

The result of their singular expertise is that even in America’s current illness, the nation still soars above the global competition.

Only in America can you find the sort of innovation, talent, legal framework, and can-do attitude needed to invent and refine hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling. Just a few hundred thousand scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, oil riggers, and skilled craftsman have revived the once-ossified oil industry for 320 million Americans.

The United States is not running out of fuels — as was predicted over the last 20 years. It instead has become the largest gas-and-oil producer in the world.

The epitaph for Silicon Valley is written each year. Its tech industry is copied the world over. Yet seemingly each year a new American technical innovation — the laptop, Google, Facebook, the iPad, the iPhone — sweeps the world. Apparently, American informality, meritocracy, and top-flight engineering still draw global talent into Northern California, which sends back out the latest gadgets to be gobbled up by billions.

Neither drought, nor needlessly cumbersome regulations, nor unfair trade practices have stalled American agriculture. The farms of the United States — where less than 2 percent of the population resides — have never turned out so much safe, nutritious, and cheap food that is feeding the world and earning America hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign exchange.

The U.S. military — in which fewer than 1 in 100 Americans serve — is facing record cuts. The Navy will have fewer ships than the American fleet of World War I. The Air Force and the Marine Corps are shrinking. Yet superb American forces continue to ensure that the United States and its allies remain safe. Neither Vladimir Putin’s Russia, nor the Communist Chinese hierarchy, nor the Iranian theocrats are quite ready to take the on the U.S. military. All are rightly worried that to do so would be suicidal.

America is not saved by our elected officials, bureaucrats, celebrities, and partisan activists. Instead, just a few million hardworking Americans in key areas — a natural meritocracy of all races, classes, and backgrounds — ignore the daily hype and chaos, remain innovative and productive, and dazzle the world.

The silent few of a forgotten America have given the entire country an astonishing standard of living that is quite inexplicable.

Jonathan Gruber Reveals the Arrogance of Liberals. By Michael Gerson.

Jonathan Gruber reveals the arrogance of liberals. By Michael Gerson. Washington Post, December 11, 2014.

Gerson:

Jonathan Gruber — the source of more smoking guns than the battle of Gettysburg — recently appeared before a hostile House committee. The good professor, you might recall, is an MIT economist who played a significant (and paid) role in producing and defending the Affordable Care Act. He also later admitted, in an astonishing variety of settings, that the law was written in a “tortured way” to hide tax increases and other flaws. “Lack of transparency,” he cheerfully conceded, “is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

At the hearing, some Republicans seemed oddly focused on Gruber’s profit motive, as though a real scandal must involve venality. Democrats attempted to salvage the credibility of Obamacare by throwing the witness to the wolves. Rep. Elijah Cummings declared Gruber’s past statements “disrespectful,” “insulting, “stupid” and “absolutely stupid.”

But the problem for Democrats is that Gruber is not stupid. By all accounts, he is knowledgeable, candid and willing, on occasion, to criticize the Obama administration — an advocate for Obamacare without being a shill. But he is perfectly representative of a certain approach to politics that is common in academic circles, influential in modern liberalism and destructive to the Democratic Party.

“My own inexcusable arrogance,” Gruber told the committee, “is not a flaw in the Affordable Care Act.” Oh, yes it is.

Many academic liberals have fully internalized the “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” theory, given vivid expression by Thomas Frank. In its simplified version (and there is seldom any other kind), this is the argument that people who are suffering from economic inequality should naturally vote Democratic. But they often get distracted by the shiny objects of the culture war and tricked into resentment against liberal elites.

It’s a very short step from this belief to its more muscular corollary: Liberal elites (through liberal politicians) should constructively mislead Americans. The task of persuasion is pretty nigh hopeless, given the unfortunate “stupidity of the American voter or whatever.” So the people must be given what they need, even if they don’t want it.

This involves a very high regard for policy experts and a very low opinion of the political profession. Gruber clearly views his own world of policy as a place of idealism and integrity. Politics, in contrast, is a realm where “lack of transparency” and “mislabeling” are sad necessities to persuade low-information voters to pursue their own interests. Purposely employing such tactics in an academic paper, for example, would be a scandal (and presumably a firing offense) at Gruber’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But liberal academics expect politicians to have greater cunning and lower standards. In fact, academics depend upon the rougher talents of politicians to turn their ideas into reality.

Politics, in this view, is the grubby business of winning in order to put the proper technocrats in charge of large, complex systems. This assumes that academic and bureaucratic elites know how to run the world. It also relegates politicians to the job of doing their blocking and tackling, even if involves deception. The moral goal justifies it all. “Look,” said Gruber, “I wish . . . we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”

This reflects a deeper tension within progressivism — working itself out for more than a century — between a belief in democracy and a faith in expertise. Progressives originally assumed the people would choose to be ruled by experts — that more direct democracy would lead to more professional administration. But that now seems politically naive. So progressive elites are left believing that the people are stupid and must be managed, like everything else, in the public interest.

The success of this kind of progressivism depends on not being too obvious about it. Which is where Obamacare has utterly failed. With its self-evidently false promises — you can keep your current health-care plan — and its public displays of incompetence, the system has become a symbol of progressive arrogance. This perception has helped spark a massive, sustained populist reaction, contributing to dramatic GOP gains in Congress and state legislatures.

This does not mean that Obamacare will be easily undone. But it does provide conservatives an opportunity to present a different, more idealistic vision of government: one that enables and empowers, not misleads and controls.

Achieving the American Dream. By Bill O’Reilly.

Achieving the American Dream. By Bill O’Reilly. Video. Talking Points Memo. The O’Reilly Factor. Fox News, December 11, 2014. YouTube. Also here, here, here.

Transcript:

When I was a kid growing up in modest circumstances, my parents told me that I could succeed in life.

They didn’t say much more than that, only that I could be successful.

From my vantage point, the American dream meant that I would lead a happy life and contribute to society, but each one of us has our own definition of the dream.

A recent New York Times poll asked, “Do you think it is still possible to start out poor in this country, work hard, and become rich?”

Sixty-four percent of Americans say it is possible.

Thirty-three percent say it is not.

Three percent don’t know.

Second question, “Do you think the economic system in the U.S. is basically fair?”

Fifty-two percent say it is.

Forty-five percent say it is unfair.

Four percent have no opinion.

For this poll, money was the basic theme, and for this memo we will stay on that subject.

As someone who started out with little – I was flat broke when I began my first broadcast job in Scranton, Pennsylvania – I know that you can become wealthy in America.

So the 33% who say it's not possible are wrong.  You are looking at the proof.

But there are things that you have to do to succeed economically.

Number one, you must get educated unless your athletic or music skills are so enormous that you can make a living that way.

Number two, you must be willing to work hard and conform to levels of performance.

That means you have to learn how to speak properly, you have to learn how to groom yourself ... you can’t have a face covered with tattoos unless you can punch like Mike Tyson.

Basically, succeeding economically is about being smart, working hard, and presenting yourself in a way that leads to making money.

That’s it.

Now some Americans work very hard, are smart, and don’t succeed economically.

That’s why life is not fair; you never know how it’s going to shake down.

But remember the poll question was, is it possible to start out poor and become wealthy?

Now here are some things that you cannot do.

First, if you feel America is a rotten, awful country, you will not succeed.

And that is what is being peddled by the far left:

On MSNBC on Dec. 10:

MICHAEL ERIC DYSON, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: “What’s the next institution that you think needs to be isolated and then challenged?”

ROSA CLEMENTE, HIP HOP ACTIVIST: “The economy.  Capitalism, I think that’s the institution that’s all over this country, right?  It is really what is the oppressive force.  And the police are actually, we have a lot of theory I think that proves this, are that force that are keeping us, as particularly working class people, from achieving this idea of, you know, economic justice.”

Ms. Clemente will never succeed in this country because her concept of economic justice is basically communism, and we are not going to convert to that.

If you want communism Ms. Clemente, Fidel and Raul Castro are just 90 miles from Florida.

Two, you cannot walk around with a sense of entitlement, that people owe you things.

In our system, nobody owes you anything.

Three, if you want to succeed, you cannot portray yourself as a victim of white privilege, of slavery, or of any other historical injustice.

It may be wrong, but the free market place doesn’t want to hear it.

And finally, if you behave badly; if you are disrespectful; if you act foolishly on a consistent basis; if you refuse to develop your talent; if you have three children by the time you are 20; if you abuse drugs and alcohol or do other self-destructive things, you will never succeed.

Talking Points laments that our leaders will not tell you the things I am saying right now.

Our political parties do not level with the folks; instead both Democrats and Republicans pander to them.

Capitalism is tough, very competitive, but the American dream is still achievable.

And I know what I’m talking about.

And that’s the memo.

The Democrats Lost the South Through Culture War and Elitism. By Timothy P. Carney.

Democrats lost the South through culture war and elitism. By Timothy P. Carney. Washington Examiner, December 9, 2014.

It’s Not Sour Grapes, Michael Tomasky Just Hates the South. By Charles C. W. Cooke. National Review Online, December 8, 2014.

Have Democrats Failed the White Working Class? By Thomas P. Edsall. New York Times, December 9, 2014.

Carney:

Fritz Hollings, John Edwards, Zell Miller, Blanche Lincoln, John Breaux, Kay Hagan, Mark Pryor and Mary Landrieu. These eight Democrats have been senators from the South in the past decade.

If not for Southern Democrats, Republicans would have nearly had a filibuster-proof Senate supermajority after the 2002 elections, giving George W. Bush some real clout. Without Southern senators, Democrats wouldn’t have taken over the Senate with Jim Jeffords’ party switch in 2001. If not for Southern Democrats, Obamacare wouldn’t have become law.

For the foreseeable future, though, Democrats will have make do without Southern senators.

With Mary Landrieu’s gigantic loss on Saturday, following Hagan’s surprise loss and Pryor’s thumping, the Southern Democratic senator is officially extinct. In the House, there are no White Democrats from the South.

Why did it happen?

In short: Democrats waged a culture war against the South, trying to force Southerners to stop “clinging” to their guns and to God. When you try to make it illegal for people to conduct their own affairs according to their conscience, you tend to lose their votes.

The self-soothing story the Left tells itself is that it’s all racism, that Democrats have lost the Southern vote because they’re not as willing to be racist as the Republicans are. Liberal columnist Michael Tomasky cheered the Democrats’ loss of the South, which he lovingly called “one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment.”

Any full accounting of Southern politics has to involve race and racism, but it isn’t a top reason for the realignment.

Tomasky and other liberals may not have heard of Sen. Tim Scott, the first black Southerner elected to the U.S. Senate since reconstruction. South Carolina not only elected Scott to the Senate in a special election this fall, it gave him 757,000 votes — 85,000 more votes than his South Carolina colleague Lindsey Graham received the same day.

South Carolina’s voters re-elected their Republican Governor, Nikki Haley, nee Nimrata Nikki Randhawa. The state that defeated Mary Landrieu has had an Indian-American governor since the 2007 elections.

White racism can’t explain the GOP takeover of the South.

The best explanation comes from the mouth of President Obama himself. Speaking to San Francisco donors in 2008 about white voters in the Midwest, Obama lucidly expressed his low opinion of all non-rich voters in flyover country: “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.”

Naturally, Democrats and the Left have tried to pry Southerners away from their guns and religion. Gun control has largely been a culture war effort for Democrats. “Some of the southern areas have cultures that we have to overcome,” was Congressman Charles Rangel’s explanation for why gun control was both needed and difficult.

The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten cursed the Second Amendment as “the refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.”

Obama and his party waged this culture-war crusade with glee — and failed, but not before making it clear that they disapproved of the way Southerners live.

And the Democrats have made it clear that they are willing to use government to impose their morality on others. Through the courts, the Left has banned prayers at high school football games and forced states to remove the Ten Commandments from public grounds.

The Obama administration, through its birth-control mandate that includes abortifacient drugs, has told Christian employers that they can’t run their businesses as Christians.

There’s no mystery here, and no need to assign widespread racism to why Southerners have rejected Democrats. It’s simple: Democrats and the Left have tried to outlaw Southerners’ way of life.

Here’s a related factor in the realignment: Democrats have given up on being the populist party, and — as they have increasingly won over the wealthy suburbs and the college-educated — have embraced their status as the party of the economic elite.

As crony capitalism and corporate welfare have grown, and as the Washington region has sucked in more and more of the nation’s wealth, Republicans have started to take up the populist mantle.

Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, whose populism flares up in many ways, joined Louisiana’s David Vitter in co-sponsoring a bill to break up the big banks. Sens. Landrieu, Hagan and Pryor all campaigned unsuccessfully on their support for the Export-Import Bank (a federal agency that subsidizes U.S. manufacturers and the banks that finance them).

Democrats have become the party of Hyde Park and Chevy Chase — elitist on culture and economics. It’s no wonder they can’t also be the party of Charleston and Shreveport.