NEW AMERICA VS OLD AMERICA
[This Monday’s Archive was originally published in TTP on February 26, 2009, just over one month after Obama’s 1st inauguration. Today, we are witnessing Trump’s 2nd presidency creating a New America replacing the Old. How it got old is explained by applying the cross-link theory of aging to politics.]
TTP February 26, 2009
The current leader of Japan has the most appropriate name for a politician in world history. He is Prime Minister Taro Aso, pronounced “ass-hoe.”
This week (2/24), Prime Minister Aso met President Zero in the White House. Albeit that, at 47, the American is the junior of the Japanese by 21 years and embodies youth and fitness, it was nonetheless a meeting of Old Japan and Old America.
The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has had a monopoly of power in Japan since the end of World War II. Here is how Hidekazu Kawai, professor emeritus of comparative politics at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, describes the LDP today:
“The LDP has become a source of structural corruption permeating the entire society. The Aso administration of the LDP exists to win elections, not cope with economic crisis. All that the ruling party has come up with as a solution to our crisis is to distribute cash.”
Remind you of some other party and its leaders in some other country?
Japan is the oldest country on earth: 21% of its 130 million people are over 65. But it’s not just the physical age of so many of its citizens that makes it old – it’s Japan’s political age.
After defeat in WWII and conversion to democracy, Japan exploded with youthful energy and productivity. Eventually becoming the second largest economy in the world, Japan’s GDP growth averaged 10% in the 50s and 60s, 5% in the 70s, 4% in the 80s.
Then came the baburu keikai, the bubble economy, at the peak of which the bank-assessed property value of the Imperial Hotel and its grounds in downtown Tokyo was greater than that of the entire continent of South America.
The bubble popped in 1990 and tens of trillions of dollars in imaginary wealth vanished.
This too sounds familiar. The interesting question, however, is not how such a bubble happened, but why Japan has never recovered from it to this day, almost 20 years later.
It never recovered because Japan got politically old and decrepit, limping along on the inertia of the past. It is incapable of change. Currently, Japan’s economy has fallen off a cliff, with exports plunging 47%, GDP collapsing almost 13% — and it is stuck, frozen, and immobilized. In a word, old.
This brings us to the cross-link theory of aging.
What do tanned leather, old hard bread, brittle windshield wipers, cracked plastic lawn furniture, wrinkled skin, and hardened arteries have in common? The molecules in each have been cross-linked, unnecessary chemical bonds or links formed between them.
Put one hand on top of the other and notice how easy you can move your eight fingers in tandem. Now interlock your fingers, making them a lot harder to move. They are “cross-linked.”
As you grow older, your body becomes stiffer, less elastic, less agile, and your skin gets more wrinkled. This is due to cross-linking on a molecular level caused by free radical and glycation metabolic processes, or sunlight.
Cross-links hold our structural tissues in a rigid and inflexible relation to each other. Cross-linked arteries are hard, inflexible, and can no longer normally pulse the blood pumped from the heart. The formation of beta-amyloid protein clumps in the brain, thought to be the cause of Alzheimer’s, is a cross-linking process.
Now let’s transfer this from molecules in an organism to people in a society or “body politic.” In a young society, people are free to form associations between them that work smoothly together, that are supple, flexible, and can adapt to change.
But as the body politic ages, political cross-links develop, relationships of dependence that become increasingly rigid and incapable of flexible change. They would be rendered obsolete and subsequently die off in a young free society. To preserve them, the people or groups so cross-linked demand the government provide subsidies or protection from completion. Politicians who are more interested in power than freedom, or want in on the take, are happy to supply both.
And that is how democracies get old and capitalism dies.
Our bodies have natural repair mechanisms, enzymes such as proteases, which chew up and dissolve cross links, replacing old tissue with new, and thus slow down the aging process.
A body politic with a capitalist economy has plenty of political enzymes that chew up political cross links to keep it young and free. Economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) termed this process “creative destruction.”
The purpose of the LDP in Japan and the Democrat Party in America is to block and shut down the activity of political enzymes, of capitalistic creative destruction, in order to preserve the welter of special interest cross-links that keep both parties in power.
The entire purpose of Zero’s $787 billion Porkalooza Stimulus is to preserve political cross-links and government power. It has nothing to do with reviving our economy on purpose – for such revival requires the political enzymes that would dissolve his party’s power.
This is why every time you see Zero, you should see not someone of youthful vitality, but an old, a very old, man. For he is embarked on a campaign to rapidly accelerate the political aging of America. Indeed, he embodies Old America.
Who embodies New America? Who stands for unleashing the political enzymes of freedom? Sarah Palin. Bobby Jindal. Jim DeMint. Tom Coburn. These and other genuinely conservative Republicans who want to de-cross-link America’s body politic.
They together with millions of normal Americans who want to live in freedom and not in a society of moochers. The millions who have made Rick Santelli their hero.
[The link is to CNBC’s Rick Santelli’s famous “rant” on February 19, 2009, one week before this article was written, that launched the Tea Party Movement. Cf. The Transformative Power of Rick Santelli’s Rant by Michael Barone, June 9, 2010.]
Can they do it? Can they dissolve the rigidities, the dependencies the Dems have built up over the last 76 years (since 1933), plus repair the cross-linked damage they will inflict by November 2010 or 2012? That’s the question of this moment.
Given that they also have to overcome the obstacle of “moderate” cross-linking Republicans dependent on corporate moochers, like the ones protesting any cut in farm aid – let’s call them Old Republicans – the task may seem insurmountable.
It’s not – if the most powerful political enzyme of all is activated. Its formation has begun with the emerging American Tea Party movement. So far, this is only groups of public protestors waving signs and singing songs against the Porkalooza, but it’s growing fast, as discussed by Michelle Malkin.
What has to happen is for these folks to go beyond signs and songs and have an epiphany: That the only way to defeat the beast of Democrat Fascism is to starve the beast to death, that it is every freedom-loving American’s patriotic duty to preserve his or her own money and avoid giving it to the fascists and moochers.
Think carefully here and you’ll realize that this in no way entails doing anything illegal. It is a psychological tax protest de-legitimizing the government’s claim on your money.
If a thief holds you up at gunpoint, you give him your money to save your life instead of engaging in a “theft protest” – yet you nonetheless believe he’s a criminal with no moral right to steal from you.
Such a psychological tax protest by millions of voters will cause the electoral shift we need in 2010 to defeat Old Republicans in spring primaries, and elect real conservatives in November with a net gain of 40 seats to regain GOP control. (In 1994, two years after Bill Clinton’s election, the GOP gained 54 seats and control.) [Note: in the 2010 House elections, the GOP gained 62 seats, changing from 178R-257D to 242R-193D.]
When enough Americans view Zero, the Pelosicrats, and their Old Republican accomplices as thieves who have no right to their money, who are stealing their freedom and their children’s future, then Old America will die as it deserves to, and our country will be young again.