Custer’s Last Stand

Democrats are in deep trouble. The November election results were devastating, especially at the state level where control shifted to Republicans. To put this into perspective, Republicans had been out of control in some of these states since the Civil War.

Wounded, perhaps critically, the party is desperate. It is only in the context of  the bigger picture that the battle of Wisconsin can be understood. The childish behavior of legislators, Obama inappropriately stepping into the fray and the national mobilization of union support reflect the importance of public unions and the desperate straits of the party.  This battle, and others like it, will determine the viability of the Democrat Party. The battle to support public unions it the political equivalent of Custer’s Last Stand.

Like Custer, the Democrats are greatly outnumbered. Not fighting the battle means sure political death. But so does fighting it and losing. It must be fought, even though the odds of success are miniscule. In this sense, the public union battle is apt to be remembered as the Democrat’s Little Bighorn.

Wisconsin Just Happens to be First

The drama in Madison, WI is merely the first act of what will be repeated in many locales around the country. Particulars differ but the plot will be the same – public employee salaries, jobs and benefits must be reduced.

Government at all levels got fat and sloppy during the salad days of debt-generated economic growth. Staffing, salary levels and unnecessary programs were increased as the cornucopia of tax revenues seemed endless. Much of the increased revenue at the municipal level derived from the housing bubble. Spending decisions and cost structures were predicated on an economic fantasy continuing forever.

The world changed in 2008, invalidating the assumptions upon which government revenues were based. Tax revenues dropped and will not likely return to assumed rates of growth for years. Government cost structures, built on the expectation of continuing higher revenues, are unsupportable. Tax increases are not possible without risking political backlash if not outright taxpayer revolt.

Wisconsin government is being painted as evil and against unions. Other inevitable government cost cutting moves will be described in similar fashion. Where unions are not involved, loyal public employees will be portrayed as victims. What is happening is not difficult to understand. Government at all levels is out of money.

The problem for the Democrat Party is that their survival depends upon public employees. They must have their political donations and their votes to remain a viable party. Unfortunately for the Democrats, as expressed by Robert Tracinski:

The current crisis exposes more than just the financial unsustainability of these programs. It exposes their moral unsustainability. It exposes the fact that the generosity of these welfare-state enclaves can only be sustained by forcing everyone else to perform forced labor to pay for the benefits of a privileged few.

Therein lies the lose-lose situation for the party. They lose if they don’t step in and lose if they do. They have decided to go down fighting and ride into the battle.

A reader, JJC, sent his relevant comments along with the Tracinski article:

The Thatcher Line

I say this with neither satisfaction, nor glee, but I have never had much doubt that the left would fail. This is not because I am particularly insightful, but only that I can observe history. Frankly, I’m pretty good at it. To say that there is a whole lot of bad road behind socialism is an extreme understatement.

Margaret Thatcher once said: “The facts of life are conservative”. Like it or not, millions of Europeans, and now a growing number of our state governments, are experiencing for themselves and in rather harsh terms I might add, their rather conservative construction.

Any threat to public unions is an existential threat to the Democratic Party and its liege lord –the cultural and financial institutions of the political left. To that end, and from that point of view, the battle must be fought and any means and any tools are considered acceptable.

Public unions are one of the largest sources of funding for the Democratic Party. The formula really was never too complicated: Collect dues from employees and use the money to elect politicians who will increase pay and benefits. Then, start the cycle all over again. It works pretty well until economic reality catches up. As Margaret Thatcher once said, that is just fine “until you run out of other people’s money”.

The “Thatcher Line” has now been reached in many states.

The piece below by Robert Tracinski is brilliant and is without doubt, the best I have ever read on this subject. It is worth your time and effort.

TIA Daily • February 23, 2011

Public Workers’ Paradise

Unionized Public Employment Is the Socialist Utopia

by Robert Tracinski

The Democratic lawmakers who have gone on the lam in Wisconsin and Indiana—and who knows where else next—are exhibiting a literal fight-or-flight response, the reaction of an animal facing a threat to its very existence.

Why? Because it is a threat to their existence. The battle of Wisconsin is about the viability of the Democratic Party, and more: it is about the viability of the basic social ideal of the left.

It is a matter of survival for Democrats in an immediate, practical sense. As Michael Barone explains, the government employees’ unions are a mechanism for siphoning taxpayer dollars into the campaigns of Democratic politicians.

But there is something deeper here than just favor-selling and vote-buying. There is something that almost amounts to a twisted idealism in the Democrats’ crusade. They are fighting, not just to preserve their special privileges, but to preserve a social ideal. Or rather, they are fighting to maintain the illusion that their ideal system is benevolent and sustainable.

Unionized public-sector employment is the distilled essence of the left’s moral ideal. No one has to worry about making a profit. Generous health-care and retirement benefits are provided to everyone by the government. Comfortable pay is mandated by legislative fiat. The work rules are militantly egalitarian: pay, promotion, and job security are almost totally independent of actual job performance. And because everyone works for the government, they never have to worry that their employer will go out of business.

In short, public employment is an idealized socialist economy in miniature, including its political aspect: the grateful recipients of government largesse provide money and organizational support to re-elect the politicians who shower them with all of these benefits.

Put it all together, and you have the Democrats’ version of utopia. In the larger American culture of Tea Parties, bond vigilantes, and rugged individualists, Democrats feel they are constantly on the defensive. But within the little subculture of unionized government employees, all is right with the world, and everything seems to work the way it is supposed to.

This cozy little world has been described as a system that grants special privileges to a few, which is particularly rankling in the current stagnant economy, when private sector workers acutely feel the difference. But I think this misses the point. The point is that this is how the left thinks everyone should live and work. It is their version of a model society.

Every political movement needs models. It needs a real-world example to demonstrate how its ideal works and that it works.

And there’s the rub. The left is running low on utopias.

The failure of Communism—and the spectacular success of capitalism, particularly in bringing wealth to what used to be called the “Third World”—deprived the left of one utopia. So they fell back on the European welfare state, smugly assuring Americans that we would be so much better off if we were more like our cousins across the Atlantic. But the Great Recession has triggered a sovereign debt crisis across Europe. It turned out that the continent’s welfare states were borrowing money to paper over the fact that they have committed themselves to benefits more generous than they can ever hope to pay for.

In America, the ideological crisis of the left is taking a slightly different form. Here, the left has set up its utopias by carving out, within a wider capitalist culture, little islands where its ideals hold sway. Old age is one of those islands, where everyone has been promised the socialist dreams of a guaranteed income and unlimited free health care. Public employment is another.

Now the left is panicking as these experiments in American socialism implode.

On the national level, it has become clear that the old-age welfare state of Social Security and Medicare is driving the federal government into permanent trillion-dollar deficits and a ruinous debt load. Even President Obama acknowledged, in his State of the Union address, that these programs are the real drivers of runaway debt—just before he refused to consider any changes to them. You see how hard it is for the Democrats to give up on their utopias.

On the state level, public employment promises the full socialist ideal to a small minority—paid for with tax money looted from a larger, productive private economy. But the socialist utopia of public employment has crossed the Thatcher Line: the point at which, as the Iron Lady used to warn, you run out of other people’s money.

The current crisis exposes more than just the financial unsustainability of these programs. It exposes their moral unsustainability. It exposes the fact that the generosity of these welfare-state enclaves can only be sustained by forcing everyone else to perform forced labor to pay for the benefits of a privileged few.

This is why the left is treating any attempt to fundamentally reform the public workers’ paradise as an existential crisis. This is why they are reacting with the most extreme measures short of outright insurrection. When Democratic lawmakers flee the state in order to deprive their legislatures of the quorum necessary to vote, they are declaring that they would rather have no legislature than allow voting on any bill that would break the power of the unions.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty describes these legislative walk-outs as “small-scale, temporary secessions.” The analogy is exact. One hundred and fifty years ago, Southern slaveholders realized that the political balance of the nation had tipped against them, that they could no longer hope to win the political argument for their system. Faced with a federal government in which they were out-voted, they decided that they would rather have no federal government at all. The Democrats’ current cause may not be as repugnant—holding human beings as chattel is a unique evil—but it has something of the same character of irrational, belligerent denial. More than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the left is still trying to pretend that socialism is plausible as an economic system.

The Democrats are fleeing from a lot more than their jobs as state legislators. They are fleeing from the cold, hard reality of the financial and moral unsustainability of their ideal.