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It’s a Marxist’s dream:

Class, the Industrial Revolution’s great political dividing line, is enjoying Information Age resurgence. It now threatens the political future of presidents, prime ministers and even Politburo chiefs.

As in the Industrial Age, new technology is displacing whole groups of people — blue- and white-collar workers — as it boosts productivity and creates opportunities for others. Inequality is on the rise — from the developing world to historically egalitarian Scandinavia and Britain.

But not a Democrat’s one:

This should give Democrats an issue, theoretically. But to date, Obama and his party seem incapable of harnessing the growing middle- and working-class unrest.

In fact, according to recent polls, these have been the voters that Democrats and the president have been losing over the past year as the economic stimulus failed to make a major dent in unemployment.

Part of this problem lies with the party’s base, which the urban historian Fred Siegel once labelled “the coalition of the overeducated and the undereducated.” Major urban centres like New York, Chicago and San Francisco might advertise themselves as enlightened, but they have lost much of their middle class and suffer the highest levels of income inequality.

And their opponents can’t figure it out either:

What is not clear is whether conservative parties can abandon their often slavish devotion to big corporate interests to take advantage of these new dynamics. For years, these parties have relied on divisive social issues, like immigration, to win working- and middle-class voters. But it’s possible that a focus on profligate government spending might yet increase the right’s appeal among mid-income voters.

As this current shift to greater inequality continues, the self-styled “popular” parties’ tendency to ignore class issues could prove disastrous.

I don’t think that the obsession with deficit spending is a political winner.  Why?  Because solving the problem will involve cutting benefits (many of which go to the middle class) and/or raising taxes (which will again hit the middle class.)  If eliminating deficit spending was such a great political deal, the Republican Congress under George W. Bush would have done it.

I think it’s fair to say that we are beyond the point of no return on the deficit.  There is simply not the growth potential–not under this government, at least–to repay our obligations.  When the critical moment comes, the person or party which can seize the moment and the middle class discontent will make a dive for it, and then everything will be different.

Which is more than one can say about Bill Kristol:

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele was absolutely right. Afghanistan is Obama’s war and, judging by other recent Democratic ventures in military affairs, isn’t likely to turn out well…

Our troops are the most magnificent in the world, but they’re not the ones setting military policy. The president is — and he’s basing his war strategy on the chants of Moveon.org cretins.

Nonetheless, Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney have demanded that Steele resign as head of the RNC for saying Afghanistan is now Obama’s war — and a badly thought-out one at that. (Didn’t liberals warn us that neoconservatives want permanent war?)

This will doubtless start a major row within American conservatism in general and the Republican Party in particular.  But it’s time for that debate, no matter how acrimonious it gets.  I haven’t agreed with Coulter on everything, and have had fun at her expense over her difficulties of voting in Palm Beach, but she has the prominence to take this stand and make it stick with a good number of people.

And her last statement should gladden the hearts of many over at Asia Times Online (such as Pepe Escobar, the late Julian Delasantellis would have also been amused) who rail against American hegemony:

I thought the irreducible requirements of Republicanism were being for life, small government and a strong national defence, but I guess permanent war is on the platter now, too.

Secularists love to hold up the Scandanavian countries as models of economic and social excellence, but if they’re members of a teachers’ trade union, they may want to think twice:

But this is Sweden, willingly taken as an example by policies introduced in 1992.  Its education reform was “to improve the quality of its system, and diversify school offerings while liberalizing parents’ the school choice” says the Swedish centrist party MP Mats Gerdau. Municipalities finance all the schools based on number of children enrolled. All schools, public or private, secular or religious, are free for students from 3-20 years with this system. This model runs from kindergarten through 20 year olds.

The independent schools are paid by municipalities the same as public schools.  They must meet the same objectives and the same legal framework as public education, but may have different profiles, whether cultural, ethnic, educational or religious.  The results are very conclusive. The evaluations show that competition between schools has helped to improve the quality even in public schools, at least in areas where there are private schools.

There are two main obstacles to this in the US.

The first are the aforementioned teachers’ trade unions, who would sooner abolish compulsory education than to see this kind of competition (think opposition to vouchers, and the Swedes are using what amounts to a voucher system.)

The second is the secularists’ dread of funding any kind of religious schools.  But that cuts both ways: religious schools don’t want the secularising controls that would inevitably come with state or federal funding.  That in turn suggests another kind of competition: one between those educated in a secularistic way and those educated in a religious way.  Cut schools loose and let’s see who ends up on top.

In a country where freedom has been the hallmark, there are just too many people scared that change will leave them behind…

Fred Hiatt at the Washington Post is worried about the receding state of “democracy” in the world:

As America this weekend celebrates the birth of its liberty, in much of the rest of the world freedom and democracy are in retreat.

Over the past decade, authoritarian rulers have refined their techniques to stay in power, learning from each other and thinking two steps ahead of democratic forces. Unprepared for this systematic reply to the advance of democracy from the 1970s through the 1990s, democratic governments have yet to formulate a coherent response.

“A global political recession” is how Tom Melia describes the current state of affairs. Melia is deputy director of Freedom House, a nonprofit that annually measures the state of liberty in every nation — and that has found “more countries seeing declines in overall freedom than gains” in recent years, Melia said last week.

There are, IMHO, two main problems here.

The first is that the information technology we think is so conducive to “democracy” (true representative government is what’s really on the table here) tends, in most places, to favour the centralising of power.  That’s because it’s easier to gather information on your citizenry and stamp out power challengers before they get off of the ground.  That was certainly the case in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and now in Iran and China.  The democratising effect of the Internet in our own society is based on the fact that we had the legal framework for the free exchange of ideas–and the protection of that freedom–in place before the media got going.

The second problem is more subtle.  I used to have a statement in my About page that stated that democracy was dying in the places that made it work in modern times.  It’s no secret that we have a dysfunctional political system that is expensive to keep up and produces marginal results.  Beyond that, if we read what our élites say and take their words at face value, what we see is a strong lack of faith in people to make their own decisions, and for democratic processes to produce acceptable results unless those results go their way.  We see the insatiable desire to centralise economic power.  Finally we see a culture that is obsessed with educational institutions (not necessarily real education, just the institutions) to the point where only products of certain ones get to actually make the substantive decisions in our society, to say nothing about educational qualifications for positions that may or may not need them.  Educational institutions are, by their nature, inherently undemocratic, and if we make them a model for everything else, democracy will suffer, even if we like the results.

The example we’re putting forth right at the moment isn’t inspiring to those who would consider opening up their societies to a more democratic process.  If we want these processes to work elsewhere, we need to start making them work here first.

And no one in the Republican party wants to admit it:

Top Senate Republicans on Sunday stopped short of asking Michael Steele to resign for his suggestion last week that the war in Afghanistan could not be won, seeming to signal that the ever-embattled Republican National Committee chairman will survive his latest self-inflicted wound.

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who caucuses with Republicans on most foreign policy issues, all harshly criticized Steele during appearances on Sunday’s talk shows – but none of them joined the chorus of Republican foreign policy hawks demanding that Steele step down.

Steele has survived previous flaps ranging from ill-advised criticism of Rush Limbaugh all the way to approving a $2,000 expense at a bondage-themed strip club. At a fundraiser Thursday, he said that “everyone who has tried over a thousand years of history has failed [to win in Afghanistan], and there are reasons for that,” and called the conflict, approaching its ninth year, “a war of Obama’s choosing.”

I can’t say that Steele is the optimal chairman of the party, but he’s right on this one, and the “hawks” need to face reality.  Afghanistan has been a graveyard of military reputations for a lone time, and our overrestrictive rules of engagement (which have been developed, in part, by our military brass) only make matters worse.

Besides, it’s patently absurd to expect a President with the intellectual heritage that Barack Obama has to properly conduct a war of any kind.  If we want a President to properly lead our military, we need a different one altogether.  The GOP needs to work towards that end and quit criticising its chairman for stating the obvious.  But stating the obvious is the quickest way to get into trouble in American politics.

In his clumsy, populistic way, Senator Tom Coburn (R,OK) has hit on something really important:

Since it’s clear Kagan is not an originalist (although it’s not clear what she is), it’s not surprising that natural rights strike her as a distraction from the proper work of a Supreme Court justice. When she says D.C. v. Heller “made clear that the Second Amendment conferred that right [to arms] upon individuals,” she is expressing the positivist view that we have whatever rights we have by virtue of the law (including the Constitution). Although she did not directly answer the question, it’s pretty clear she believes those rights are not pre-existing. When she says, “I don’t have a view of what are natural rights, independent of the Constitution,” her agnosticism is hard to distinguish from atheism. (I don’t mean to imply that believing in natural rights requires believing in God; Ayn Rand certainly didn’t think so.)

Still, it’s hard to believe that Kagan really thinks there is no external standard by which to judge the morality of a constitution. If our Constitution is better now that it bans slavery than it was when it tacitly allowed slavery, why is that? The traditional American answer is that slavery violates basic human rights, a.k.a. natural rights, that people have by virtue of being people, regardless of what the law says. What would it cost Kagan to acknowledge as much?

Coburn is one of those people who evidently believes (as I do) that our Declaration of Independence, whose proclamation we are celebrating today, is our foundational document.  Kagan is one of these people who believes that the Constitution is that foundational document although, for anyone familiar with French history, such an idea is a ROFL moment if there ever was one.

It’s an important issue.  If we take Coburn’s position, then we must interpret the Constitution according to the ideas of the Declaration, which includes the concept of natural rights.  If we take Kagan’s position, then the basic rights we have are subject to amendment, be that by explicit constitutional amendment or by fiat amendment from the bench.  And that amendment, in turn, is subject to whatever “prevailing” values are on that bench.

That’s the central flaw in the Tea Party’s obsession with the Constitution: in the hands of a supple judiciary, it becomes whatever they say it is, and the appeal possibilities are decidedly limited.  The Tea Party will, in the end, be hoisted by its own petard.

What Coburn should have asked Kagan is something like, “If the Declaration of Independence isn’t our foundational document, then what right does the country have to exist?”  But neither he nor most conservatives have the guts to ask that question.