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COMMENTARY
February 19, 2011
Yankee mobs
For those who were getting bored with the distant scene from Cairo -- and the reprises in Algiers, Benghazi, Amman, Sana'a, Manama, Beirut, and Tehran -- we now have scenes of chaos from the Wisconsin State Capitol. "Democracy is coming: to the USA," to quote a certain Leonard N. Cohen, or so it must appear to those who have come to associate democracy with mob demands.Wisconsin, whose capital is Madison in case you haven't looked it up recently, is in the throes of a "collective action" that has, in fact, better parallels in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, than anywhere in the Middle East. Yet in the grand scheme of things, everything is connected, and I'll try to draw the circle. This state was typical of many, through the last U.S. election. Conservative Republicans made big gains in the national Congress, but even bigger in state legislatures and government houses. They are riding an arguably unprecedented trend, in which the U.S. electorate becomes increasingly proactive on the budgetary issues. Wisconsin, and at least three dozen other states, face exactly the same challenge as states within the European Union, which have piled up debts that simply cannot be repaid, and are staring into bottomless chasms of public sector "entitlements." Taxes have been pushed to the practical limit -- beyond which private enterprise becomes pointless -- and something has to give. Compounding this is the squalor of post-modern society, more advanced in Europe. Populations are aging rapidly, two full generations after a "sexual revolution" undermined both the Christian moral order that glued society together, and the demographic principle by which the aged and deceased were replaced by babies. This is further compounded, in the European case, by massive immigration of the culturally alien, into countries which have no "melting pot" experience. The U.S. and Canada are not nearly as far gone, but we are headed unambiguously down the same road. And the Americans are displaying their "exceptionalism" again, by wrestling with these problems in an open way. We could look instead at New Jersey, Indiana, Michigan, Arizona, or many other states in which fairly new governors and much-freshened legislatures are doing what Washington has been shrinking from. They are confronting typically national problems within their own domains, ranging from illegal immigration and organized crime; to the key, unavoidable issue of public sector entitlements -- from the wages of innumerable unionized state employees, to their perks and pensions. Insofar as he has a riot on his hands, within two months of assuming office, it might be said that Governor Scott Walker has failed to outflank his opposition. He has all the Democrat members AWOL, denying him a quorum in the state senate; all the public unions allied against him, including firefighters, police, and possibly state troopers; and he has President Barack Obama mounting the demagogue's soapbox against his best efforts. Walker has assumed responsibility in a state with a very "progressive" history, and as we have seen in Europe, the wealthier the vested interests, the angrier they become. Tactics are important. Leadership is important, and the reason Ronald Reagan is remembered as a great president is that he could carry Democrats as well as Republicans along, when something labelled "conservative" needed doing. As Peggy Noonan wrote this week, Governor Mitch Daniels in Indiana, and Governor Chris Christie in New Jersey, have shown the kind of political skill that is needed when cutting Gordian knots. They seem able to articulate necessity. Whereas, Governor Walker may indeed have bitten more than any politician could chew. But that's OK, too: politicians are expendable. We elect them to do a job, and we are perfectly free to punish them, later, for doing exactly what they promised. There is, however, limited time, to defuse the fiscal bombs before they explode in everybody's porridge. For the alternative to eliminating deficits, and getting the public debt under control, is so much uglier than Thatchering the unions. I promised to complete the circle, and here is my try. It is just possible, in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, to confront problems that would overwhelm a country, because organized oppositions exist. Republicans are waiting when Democrats fail, and vice versa. It is because of the long history, not so much of "democracy" per se, but of a formalized adversarial order, that such a chance exists. There are at most two countries in the Middle East of which this could be said: Israel, and maybe Turkey. (Iraq maybe some day.) In societies ruled by autocrats, since time out of mind, no organized opposition waits to pick up the pieces. In each case, the autocrat who falls can only be replaced by another autocrat -- unless by something like the Taliban. Nasty as things will get in states like Wisconsin, the majority can rule. And if that majority can be persuaded to see sense, solutions are possible. David Warren
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