Resolved: We the people defer our constitutional crisis

It's rather remarkable, once you add it all up.

The lowest rated Congress in history (is it still at 10% approval?) working in tandem with the lowest rated president in history is spending the largest amounts of money ever seen in history.

The Daily Beast has it in a phrase: the Never-ending Bailout. Indeed what it is.

This effort is helmed (would you believe it) by a Princeton economist and a private banker. I heard they ladled out $800 million in the soup kitchen yesterday.

Here we have an academic who has spent his life nodding blankly in the faculty lounge or on Fed boards during breaks from his higher calling: promoting failed, nonsensical models of how economies work. Meanwhile, his colleague at Treasury spent his entire career as a salesman at Goldman Sachs. Peddling product and as he says, taking care of the customers (who are now comin' a beggin').

You say you want economic insight? How about expertise administering untold trillions in handouts? I give you a salesman running Treasury. This fellow, if he learned anything about economics at all, did so accidentally over lunch. He gathered mere crumbs of that same drivel spooned out by the Bernankes of the world - a tiny portion of droppings left by the Great Army of Pleasantly Respectable Incompetents.

You can laugh at it all, as they do over at LOL Fed (the picture above is from that site), but the corollary to scorn would, in a normal polity, be constitutional crisis. We deserve one at this point.

And here it gets interesting.

In the truly extraordinary arrangements made to hand out staggering amounts of cash with an absolute minimum of strings attached, the humblest citizen understands that a constitutional milestone has been passed, that one phase of constitutional history has eneded and another has begun.

Here we would do well to consult the late Carl Schmitt who taught us that actual sovereignty rests with that individual or agency able to declare rule by exception. Unfortunately, the LOL team at the head of the Fed and Treasury are ruling by exception.

The good news is that Congress exercised the power before delegating it to the LOL team and it stands poised to take it back, after additional oceans of cash have been squandered.

Even at 10%, Congress remains an embodiment of We the People - of the people's sovereignty. A next step in the process, and who knows what the trigger may be, could conceivably be popular sovereignty asserting itself against Congress and other elected institutions. Not just in Icelandic-style rioting to fire failed politicians, but as it was imagined in early state government making. There, the people reserved to themselves to make whatever changes were needed to the constitution or government by whatever process pleased them, whenever it pleased them, whether or not it was reflected in the foundational laws.

As Christian Fritz points out in American Sovereigns, these early Americans viewed sovereignty as immune to rule-making or constitution drafting. As a lawyer once told me, "You can't sign away your rights."

After the LOL team has spent away two or three generations' worth of tax income -say in another week or two - maybe we should sign away their rights while asserting our own.

This spells fret time for movement conservatives who, to defend themselves from liberal government, have erroneously enshrined the Constitution above the Declaration.

Every assertion of popular sovereignty will thus represent a constitutional crisis; and yet the current situation demands dicsussion of whether the Constitution can be used to end the "never-ending bailout."

The trick is to decide how to assert our collective sovereignty in this crisis. Here, 50 years of conservative thought and polemic have failed us and we start with little more than an Icelandic template.

Enter, the frivolous opposition

The neat thing about being a Leftist in Britain is the form of government over there, a parliamentary dictatorship. If you can think it up and draft it as law, you can have it.

The difficult thing about being a Leftist over here is in operating politically inside of a constitutional and legal carapace; this structural disadvantage requires all sorts of wriggling and squirming to get your way. In an NPR radio interview, the man who calls himself the New Dawn of American Leadership once agonized over this dilemma.

An intelligent opposition is well favored here. Many of the Left's workarounds hang by a thread. One example involves oil drilling. The federal government issues federal land drilling permissions every year. Of course, 100% of these permissions are immediately tied up in lawsuits brought by environmentalists; a lawsuit requires standing; standing has been granted environmental lobbyists by the legislature; standing can be taken away by the legislature.

It may be worth mentioning the recent "Drill here, drill now" exercise. Political forces were mobilized not to remove the standing contrivance that prevents drilling but to put more land on the availability list for environmentalists to file suit against ... as if the Left would run out of lawsuits if enough leases were issued. This is the quality of the opposition's thinking.

We would be foolish to ignore this early indicator of what the Republican is going to behave like over the next four years. The fellow behind the "Drill here" futility is widely regarded as the smartest of that bunch and is contending for Party leadership even as I write this. If he thought more leases would produce more oil, he is a fool. More likely he was staging a political manipulation to position himself for the current leadership contest.

An effective political opposition would have a legislative "hit list" with all these little extra-Constitutional workarounds targeted for elimination via new laws. The Left cannot get what it wants by law, only by executive or judicial fiat, by obstructionist lawsuits, by direct action, by street intimidation, etc. Those watching for new laws have their eyes on the wrong place (not that there won't be new laws that test the limits but because the creation of new law will be such a small part of the total effort).

But I'm not here to give advice to the opposition - that would be a descent into punditry. Let me simply predict a new rash of extra-Constitutional workarounds from the winners of the last election. When the Republicans eventually regain control of the legislature, these workarounds will then form the new baseline of an extra-Constitutional reality that is as willingly accepted then as now.

Our problem is as much with the opposition as it is with the soldiers of the New Dawn.

Ingratitude

Two days late but there's still time to say: stop thanking me for my service.

Your thanks are a paltry, contemptible substitute for your own service deficit. You watched a world pass you by: Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Bosnia, Kossovo, Somalia, Iraq I, 9/11, Iraq II, Afghanistan, what have you. You proved to the whole world by your actions that there is nothing that could ever happen that would induce you to join an armed service.

And you want to thank me, calling attention to your own deficit.

Please, next Veteran's Day, avert your eyes, keep quiet, and make yourself as inconspicuous as possible. That will be my thanks.

The Serials: Intercollegiate Review

In front of a train station magazine rack, I encountered Intercollegiate Review last week after a 40-year separation. The design had not changed, neither had the quality of its writing.

These shots of nostalgia are overwhelming when they occur.

IR can be read in one sitting, this Fall 2008 issue running to about 60 pages. The content consists of long-form essays by professors you'll not have heard of, quite set in the old style of the early 1960s rather than in the childish punditry that fills up magazines today. If I want a meme, I have to dig it out and when I find it, behold the glow of a prizewinner.

The magazine has its own website; past issues are archived, any new issue is not online. It's a portal, so sister serials can be accessed at will.

Getting into the September 1965 issue, mainly Willmoore Kendall's essay, "How to Read Richard Weaver," I was intrigued by a footnote citing a 1965 article in Modern Age attacking Neoconservatives. Instant gratification: I popped over to the Modern Age archives on the same website and there was the article. This is how archives are supposed to work.

The Intercollegiate Review, as well as Modern Age, were/are outside of National Review's Conservative Movement: a haven for refuseniks of the Right. Kendall in particular is rich in his scorn for Bill Buckley's Movement project. The linked article, for instance inventories those Movement errors of which Richard Weaver never partook. Kendall renders them as (my paraphrasing):

(1) Upholding the "Liberal lie" according to which the American tradition is one of "individual rights"

(2) Erecting a "right wing ideology" in which government is "evil" and freedom is "good"

(3) Spreading the notion that the Left is winning, ergo conservatives are fighting a gallant "rearguard action" against superior forces

(4) Conceiving the struggle as a conquest from without as the Right seeks sway over a vast, inherently Left wing populace looking to sell itself to the highest bidder

(5) Cultivating an anti-intellectualism out of rejection that the best discussion will win and the best books will prevail

(6) Operating out of an economic and social identity as professional "Right winger" instead of out of the workaday world, out of an individual's natural sphere of competence and experience

(7) Confusing American tradition with what one likes in the American past rather than what men made into American tradition by their acts

(8) Collaborating with a Liberal establishment that keeps lists of acceptable and unacceptable conservatives; appearing on their programs, acting as selected spokesmen, presenting the respectable face of someone "who really agrees with us on fundamentals."

You can see how far afield this is from the content of your American Spectator, National Review, Weekly Standard, even American Conservative. And so you can see how necessary it is as well.

Good to see the strain alive. IR has even launched a new website: First Principles. May it thrive.

"Where is conservative culture?"

Mrs. Instapundit yesterday fielded the question of the hour: "...where is the conservative culture? Conservative politics is fairly easy to find."

Answer: The Conservative Movement, as organized by Bill Buckley, shed culture nearly at its inception. (That's my answer, not hers.)

National Review, the movement's HQ as it were, had become so unbearably newsy by the time of the Johnson Administration that it was an unreadable bundle of policy nitpicks and "topical" wisecracks. This trend has been enlarged with the launch of National Review Online, where punditry reigns supreme; with the launch of the competing Weekly Standard, which aimed at bringing us better punditry with more politics and less filler; and with the success of talk radio, more on which below.

We all know what punditry is, don't we? It's an attempt to fashion the catchiest summation possible - a meme. Buckley ventured into these waters early when he dedicated the front section of his National Review to a week-in-review hodge-podge that sported what were essentially memetic blog entries assigned topically to his staff. Each item was designed to be the most compressed, clever, insightful bon mot possible. (To see alternative magazine approaches to review-of-events content, have a look at Spectator's "The Week," at American Spectator's "Current Crisis," and the front matter in Chronicles.)

Behind these squibs appeared longer articles dedicated to handicapping political horse races or quarreling with policies or intimations of policy.

The Spectator has been more or less organized the same way almost as long as NR, and have a look at its table of contents: this week we see nine arts pieces and 14 book reviews. Among the reviews, only one might be considered of a political book, two or three of pop culture. If you buy this conservative magazine, you'll notice the ads placed by museums, music and theatre productions, and the publishers of non-political titles. And yet it is hardly divorced from politics: one former editor is mayor of London. He has a fair shot at the prime ministership some day.

I have often wondered over the decades why Buckley turned his back on this model of "whole man" in publishing, especially since he was well acquainted with Spectator, recruiting its writers for NR pieces and eventually recruiting its publisher to run NR.

Nor can we look at the political stunting of NR in isolation. A quick review of Firing Line's guest list shows an overwhelmingly political strain with minor notes of economic talk. Half-way through the alphabet, I counted only six "cultural" names on the 33-year guest list, if we include borderline philistines like Gunnar Myrdal and Jack Kerouac (shown in photo above).

WFB conceived of "his" Conservative Movement in narrowly political terms. He invented something like a biweekly political blog, which ran on memes, and he recycled these blurby insights on his TV show, Firing Line. By the way, if you remember Firing Line as dominated by WFB's rambling, idiosyncratic and discursive style, think again. This style - a distraction - was the delivery system for titanium-hard discrete memes, which he would package as syllogisms:

If, then, we allow X, are we not obliged by the same logic to permit Y?

The charm (or pain) in watching Firing Line was in watching Buckley slowly assemble some rocket for firing its payload at a liberal or leftist guest. In fact, the draw of any particular show rested in the guest of the week, something Buckley and his producer did not sufficiently understand.

So we have the "father" of a movement birthing it as acultural.

This brings to mind the recent dustup over novelist Christopher Buckley, WFB's son. C. Buckley's first piece in Tina Brown's new online magazine The Daily Beast (hello, Evelyn Waugh!) was a Democratic presidential endorsement and triggered reactions from Rush Limbaugh and others. (Blogger David Burge ladled out mockery of this endorsement with tart Auberon Waugh acidity bathing the incident in the oddest flavor - given Chris Buckley's career as an Evelyn Waugh manque.)

Chris Buckley responded to this criticism with an attack on Rush Limbaugh's claim to be leader of the movement WFB started. I don't think he understands the movement his dad founded nor how Limbaugh fulfills his father's aspirations.

The game was utterly up with NR when we saw Buckley and his editors straining in its pages to quelch some utterance made in public by some nonenity that might possibly redound to the disadvantage of some Nixon underling charged with a modicum of responsibility for discharging a totally uninteresting function in a borderline useless federal department. When NR began delivering that in lieu of conservatism, I for one had to move on. Long before Limbaugh, NR had been reduced to doing bad, very bad Limabaugh.

Bad Limbaugh is when the radio host twists himself into knots trying to rationalize or defend some transient nonsense of not even the least passing interest. Good Limbaugh, which is what has made him what he is, is when the host stamps out memes of surpassing excellence like a factory, turning out a daily performance that enlivens the day's water cooler chats.

Limbaugh applies his unusual analytical facility to the news of the day bringing to the listener in the course of three hours what NR aspired to deliver in its frontmatter biweekly. The syllogism at the tip of a half hour of hemming and hawing on Firing Line is here delivered in a moment with the half hour on the back end devoted to exploration of its implications. Limbaugh is a meme machinegun. He is adapted to short attention spans. He is political 24x7.

Of course, Limbaugh is the heir to Buckley's political aspirations. He has helped perfect the conservative punditry WFB aspired to. He had developed a mass of active conservatives where there were only "mainstream Americans" and "ordinary people." He has shaped the Conservative Movement exactly as Buckley wanted it shaped.

Note that the refuseniks who bailed on this Buckley-led movement are still out there publishing their articles, books and magazines with little reference to talk radio. The affinity is with Buckley's movement - the elder was interested in Limabugh and company. Limabaugh was also wined and dined by the Weekly Standard in its early days. Buckley, Kristol, the lot of them are in the business of producing exactly what Limbaugh produces.

On a more personal note, I have my own testimony to tender, having pulled a Rip Van Winkle this year. I joined in the political frenzy in 2008, my first foray into activist ranks since 1970, when I politicked for Jim Buckley's election. I have been stunned by the then-and-now characteristics of conservative activists.

This is a movement of talk radio fans. There is not even a residue of the old guard afoot. No one of these newbies, regardless of age, have heard of Buckley, much less Burnham, Voegelin, Ortega, et al. Having been midwived by punditry and immersing themselves in pure politics day after day, they function on the level of individual insights (the meme of the day) organized around various favored issues.

This is less mosaic and more like heaped broken glass.

There is an incoherence accompanied by the kind of dogmatism that you associate Libertarianism. Comity is lacking; "pragmatism" is sellout and there a mighty confusion when the self-designation of "conservative" bumps up against some other movement person's unique definition of same. There is also the mirror image of political correctness but it reflects the miniscule sub-genre of conservative thought in which they have invested themselves.

Take a look at two boards on which, as part of my political psychosis, I began posting. This one declares, as a conservative principle, that each individual is politically sovereign. This other one includes a founder who recently posted that he joined the conservative movement because of those available, this one looked like it could get things done.

I mentioned the strangeness of my fellow (new) conservatives to my brother who told me to go easy on them. "They have had nothing but public education and college training in the way of culture. Talk radio has been their only access to an alternate way of looking at things." We're lucky to have them however they may appear to us, he said.

Aside from the general problem of the decline of the quality of our public intellectuals, talk radio as a medium has peculiar characteristics that affect the kinds of conservatives it creates. It is a mass medium that is also private - even intimate. It is cool, allowing the listener to "read into" the content and delivery; it fosters a sense of uniqueness and at the same time community; it flatters the listeners that they now know enough to go forth and engage the world; it is self-contained and encourages a philistinic self-containment among the audience.

Most of all, worst of all, it encourages a telegrammic communication in which readymade units of insight are exchanged for fresh memes and sensational news - this inside a self-described Conservative Movement.

Where is the conservative culture? In what appears to be an irretrievable place.

Towards a culture of political psychosis

The idea of a bubbly British comedy producer interviewing a disgraced vestige of the Eisenhower Administration has a gothic humor within that would make for a good Auberon Waugh novel.

Unfortunately it was the idea for a series of "high-toned" news broadcasts served with all the seriousness of a fifth-grade civics lesson. I refer to the Frost-Nixon talks and in this form, as Q&A, the idea reached only that level of satire that might be found in the eyes of the beholder.

To later create a high-minded stage play out of this inherently inane concept required of playwright and audience a level of seriousness bordering on derangement. But so it was done and the theatre was thus able to reach out and build audience from the herds of otherwise unreachable, uncultured news buffs.

Apparently, even after nationwide theatrical "performances" of the Frost interviews, there remained so many news junkies who could never ever be persuaded to enter a theatre that it was deemed necessary to make a film of the play of the TV broadcasts. (Baudrillard fans, are you listening?) In this way, NPR's great unwashed will eventually get a crack at it on HBO or DVD.

The film of the play of the TV show premiered in London a few weeks ago. The D.C. Examiner is giving the movie front-page play. For here, in the nation's capital, culture is a rare commodity with politics rushing into that vacuum. (There would be no opera, believe me, without subsidies and the huge foreign audience that resides here. As for theatre, if I am not mistaken there is less here than in Baltimore.)

You get the idea sometimes that Ivy Leaguers are appreciated in the ranks of the political class because for four years they are guaranteed to have had some little culture pounded into the crevasses left by their impoverished home lives. They can, by graduation time, find Europe on a map. They have a vague idea of some Constitution or other. They can spell Kabul, though with a little help from Word. And they can appreciate the "importance" of Nixon and the Frost interviews.

Of course, looking in at this from the outside, it seems nutty. Are these the baroque manifestations of any hobby taken too far? Or are we immersed in a culture of political psychosis?

I think the latter. One test will be if the course that shows Ivy League undergraduates how to find Europe on a map is eventually displaced by a new course studying all the fascinating "cultural" artifacts connected with the Frost-Nixon chat.

Read a good book tonight.Do your part for mental health.

Rolls Royce enters the culture wars

May I do a little "culture wars" posting? I won't take too long. Here's the point: if we can't count on Rolls Royce to maintain standards, on whom can we count?

A couple of lines of ad copy will set the tone we expect (emphasis added) re the Phantom Drophead Coupé:

...our design team drew inspiration from the classic J-class racing yachts of the 1930s. The fastest yachts of their time, these pedigree vessels possessed a spectacular combination of ability, versatility and fitness for purpose. Thanks to the use of the finest materials in their natural state...

Rather conservative values, don't you think? The tone having been set, have a look at this new commercial for a Phantom.

The music in the background seems to be Coldplay - pop music to put a young woman in the mood, not a soundtrack many men would choose for driving.

Then the images: they go by fast but do pause to look.

First, the couple is emerging from not from a home but from an elevator in a garage: they are exiting office or hotel.

Next, we see the driver is a graybeard.

(He looks modeled on Standard Charter's CEO Peter Sands - and he is accompanying a younger woman.)

We are given a glance at this consort and she seems under 30.

What kind of a message are we sending to the next generation of Rolls Royce owners? I mean the impressionable young Sands of the world? This fellow is "dating" his PA. The manufacturer here uses dreamy adultery images and metrosexual pop music to sell Rolls Royce.

The shock subsides when you ask yourself who is the manufacturer? BMW owns RR.

Recall that and it all comes together, suddenly:

Among German men, Porsche drivers were the least faithful, with 49 percent admitting infidelity, followed by BMW drivers at 46 percent.

It's a scientific fact: the German automakers are experts in reaching that all-important infidelity market when pitching luxury cars. It is what they do well.

Perhaps the ad will change if BMW finds the adultery market already saturated. Otherwise, on behalf of the existing customer base: Someone please stop them!

(Click to enlarge images. Sands via Reuters. Market penetration pun reserved for future use.)

We interrupt this blog to bring you punditry

How about we make the first Wednesday in November NATIONAL PUNDITRY AWARENESS DAY?

This idea could really take off: people love punditry and rarely get enough of it. Why not also celebrate punditry instead of just reading it, hearing it, and watching it? Pundit parades. Best pundit costume. Pundit punch. Pundit songs, pundit marches, pundit races.

Here's some punditry of my own.

In D.C., the striking thing for us visitors and denizens has been the disparity in energy levels between election day and the day after. The Obamans who nearly climbed on my car Tuesday night seem utterly worn out, and dispirited. I had expected the kind of office/street excitement yesterday that you see after some team wins some playoff. Little clusters around the water cooler. High fives. Animated chatter.

None of that here. Exhaustion (?) and introspection reign.

I have to salute Onion TV with it's dead-on simulationcast, "Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are." If you look at the lifeless shuffling in the background of some scenes you'll get a good picture of DC the day after.

Another way to look at this is that this week's surge voters - who are normally disengaged - have faded back into their non-political wallpaper.

Brian Maloney, quoting Rush L, says "... Obama's 'progressive' left will be forced to find new outlets for their eternal rage and anger."

Ah, not so sure about finding. They have been lining those ducks up for months. The proper form is to say,

Obama is not a leftist, would that he were; he is a liberal pragmatist [grimace, head shake].

Inference: I will turn on him at the first sign of liberalism or pragmatism.

I have heard that nearly verbatim, from professors on O'Reilly and on Pacifica. It is a hunting license issued to self in the name of "progressive conscience." BHO "sold out" his progressive intimates. Never mind whether it's true. The preparations continue.

I believe the Left knows that Obama is less Daffy and more Bugs; that any plunge into wabbit season may result in a series of Fudd-like accidents.

In this line, Democracy Now! had a little segment yesterday on (my rendering) "How are we going to manage our Obama problem without hurting ourselves?" How to keep BHO out of the liberal carrot patch?

We might understand their worries better if we distinguished between Liberal and Left views, but in a world of two-syllable political analysis, talking heads, and garden-variety talk radio, that is not possible.

Some may see a reprise of the first Clinton election here, a president with an intensely hostile opposition and a deeply suspicious left wing. Needless to say, Obama lacks Clinton's political skills and he is going to have problems with the Congressional leadership.

All we need now is a Newt.

Goldwatered again!

These Lyndon Johnson moments seem to happen every 44 years or so.