Après le Déluge, What?

The riots in Britain left some Americans shaken. In the affluence of the past 40 years, and with the rise of the jumbo jet, we became a nation of travelers. We have been to England, visited a lot of those neighborhoods. They were peaceful; now they’re in flames. But something else raised our unease as we followed the story on TV and on the Net. I think there was a ping on the national radar. We saw something over there that in smaller ways we’re starting to see over here.

The British press, left, right and center, was largely united in a refusal to make political excuses for the violence. Almost all agreed on the cause and nature of what happened. The cause was not injustice; this was not a revolt of the downtrodden masses, breaking into stores looking for food. The causes were greed, selfishness, a respect and even lust for violence, and a lack of moral grounding. Conscienceless predators preyed upon the weak. The weak were anyone who happened to be passing by, and those, many of them immigrants, who tried to defend their shops and neighborhoods. The iconic scene was the 20-year-old college student in East London who was beaten for his bicycle and fell bloody to the ground. His tormentors, with a sadistic imitation of gentleness, helped him up. Then they rifled through his backpack to get his phone and wallet. It was cruelty out of Dickens. It was Bill Sikes with a million YouTube hits.

The denunciations were swift and fierce. Max Hastings, in the conservative-populist Daily Mail: “The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. . . . Nobody has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything, least of all Britain or their community. . . . Not only do they know nothing of Britain’s past, they care nothing for its present.”

In the left-tilting Guardian, youth worker Shaun Bailey called the rioters opportunists. “Young people have been looting the shops they like: JD Sports and mobile phone shops have been hit, yet Waterstone’s [a bookstore] has been left alone. These young people like trainers [sneakers] and iPhones; they are less interested in books. This is criminality in a raw form, not politics.”

In the right-leaning Telegraph, Allison Pearson asked: “Where are the parents?” She told of a friend who’d called a mother to tell her her son was out and acting up. The mother yelled at her for calling at 2:15 a.m. “The adults are afraid and the children, emboldened by adult timidity, are fearless.”

More stinging and resigned was the brief essay by Theodore Dalrymple in the intellectually bracing City Journal. The subject—the decline of Western society—has been his for 20 years. He has written what he saw as a doctor working in British prisons. “The ferocious criminality exhibited by an uncomfortably large section of the English population” in the riots did not surprise him. “To have spotted it required no great perspicacity on my part; rather, it took a peculiar cowardly blindness, one regularly displayed by the British intelligentsia and political class, not to see it and not to realize its significance.”

At fault in the riots were the distorting effects of the welfare state and a degenerate British popular culture: “A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice.” Much of what they have is provided by others, but they are not grateful: dependency doesn’t encourage gratitude but resentment.

***

What does this have to do with America? What we’re seeing on the streets in Britain right now is something we may be starting to see here. It hasn’t come together in a conflagration, but it is out there, and I think it’s growing. And as in Britain, it doesn’t have anything to do with political grievances per se.

Philadelphia right now is under curfew because of “flash mobs.” Young people send out the word on social media, and suddenly dozens or hundreds of them hit a targeted store, steal everything on the shelves, and run, knowing no one will stop them or catch them. It’s happened in other cities, too. Sometimes the mobs beat people up on the street and take their money. There are the beat-downs in McDonald’s, where the young lose all control and the old fear to intervene. There were the fights and attacks last weekend at the Wisconsin State Fair. You’ve seen the YouTubes of fights on the subways. You often see links to these stories on Drudge: He headlines them “Les Miserables.”

Some of these young people come from brokenness, shallowness and terror, and are bringing those things into the world with them. Here are some statistics of what someone last week called a new lost generation. In 2009, the last year for which census data are available, there were 74 million children under 18. Of that number, 20 million live in single-parent families, often with only an overwhelmed mother or a beleaguered grandmother. Over 700,000 children under 18 have been the subject of reports of abuse. More than a quarter million are foster children.

These numbers suggest the making—or the presence—of a crisis.

Some of these youngsters become miracle children. In spite of the hand they were dealt, they learn to be constructive, successful, givers to life. But many, we know, do not. Some will wind up on YouTube.

The normal, old response to an emerging problem such as this has been: The government has to do something. We must start a program, create an agency to address juvenile delinquency. But governments are tapped out, cutting back, trying to avoid bankruptcy. Which means we can’t even take refuge in the illusion that government can solve the problem. The churches of America have always helped the young, stepping in where they can. That will continue. But they too are hard-pressed these days.

Where does that leave us? In a hard place, knowing in our guts that a lot of troubled kids are coming up, and not knowing what to do about it. The problem, at bottom, is love, something we never talk about in public policy discussions because it’s too soft and can’t be quantified or legislated. But little children without love and guidance are afraid. They’re terrified—they have nothing solid in the world, which is a pretty scary place. So they never feel safe. As they grow, their fear becomes rage. Further on, the rage can be expressed in violence. This is especially true of boys, but it’s increasingly true of girls.

What’s needed can’t be provided by government. When the riot begins or the flash mob arrives, the best the government can do is control the streets, enforce the law, maintain the peace.

After that, what? Britain is about to face that question. We’ll likely have to face it, too.

By JOSEPH RAGO

New York

Whatever the rhetoric that preceded this week’s deal, the debt-ceiling debate was never really about the debt at all. It was about the terms on which the debate would continue. The “two different worldviews” that divide Washington, explains Eric Cantor, are too far apart for anything more than an armistice. Still, listening to the House majority leader—who says the deal is “not perfect” but “there were some achievements”—it’s remarkable that the two parties were able to agree even to its modest terms.

The “philosophical starting point” of today’s Democrats, as Mr. Cantor sees it, is that they “believe in a welfare state before they believe in capitalism. They promote economic programs of redistribution to close the gap of the disparity between the classes. That’s what they’re about: redistributive politics.” The Virginian’s contempt is obvious in his Tidewater drawl. “The assumption . . . is that there is some kind of perpetual engine of economic prosperity in America that is going to just continue. And therefore they are able to take from those who create and give to those who don’t. We just have a fundamentally different view.”

Mr. Cantor’s aggressive style has earned him the enmity of liberals and most of the D.C. press corps, though his larger offense is against their orthodoxy that a fiscal compromise must by definition include tax increases. Mr. Cantor, who holds the second most powerful post in the House after Speaker John Boehner, did more than any other figure to prevent “revenue” (that is, tax increases) from entering the final package.

Like Mr. Cantor, President Obama is also a man of deep and strong convictions, and perhaps that’s why they seem to dislike each other so much. Call it, to adapt Freud, the narcissism of big differences. Mr. Cantor cautions that he isn’t a “psychoanalyst”—before politics, he was a real-estate lawyer and small businessman—but he says, “It’s almost as if someone cannot have another opinion that is different from his. He becomes visibly agitated. . . . He does not like to be challenged on policy grounds.”

In a meeting with the Journal’s editorial board Wednesday, Mr. Cantor, 48, gives his side of one of his more infamous altercations with the president. In a mid-July Cabinet Room meeting, Mr. Cantor made a suggestion that Mr. Obama and other Democrats took as impertinent. “How dare I,” Mr. Cantor recalls of the liberal sentiment in the room. He was sitting between Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, “and they were in absolute agreement that [the president] was such a saint for having endured all this.”

“No president has sat here like I have, in these kinds of meetings, with congressional leaders, in this detail,” Mr. Obama said in Mr. Cantor’s recollection, which Democrats dispute. Mr. Cantor says the president also invoked Ronald Reagan “to be a little patronizing of us, because he assumed that anything Reagan did we like.” Mr. Obama then told Mr. Cantor, “Eric, don’t call my bluff,” and walked out.

***

The roots of the Obama-Cantor animosity date back at least to another memorable exchange in 2009, some three days after the inauguration. In a meeting with the president, Mr. Cantor—then the No. 2 Republican in the House—discussed the economic recovery plans that the post-2008 GOP remnant favored. “Elections have consequences,” the president responded, “and Eric, I won.” The White House promptly leaked the remark to the media.

Mr. Cantor went on to whip the GOP minority against the near-$1 trillion stimulus, and all 187 members ultimately voted against it, though at the time that was not a given. The unanimous opposition was a political coup for the canny, ambitious Mr. Cantor, who was elected to the House only in 2000. He holds the seat that James Madison once held, now Virginia’s seventh district that stretches from Richmond to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

After the GOP won in 2010, many of its 87 new members—one-third of the caucus—planned to block any increase in the debt ceiling, full stop. It was only after concerted lobbying by Mr. Cantor, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy and Budget Chairman Paul Ryan that they flipped to a debt-ceiling hike with conditions. “Most people who were elected this time feel they were elected to change the system,” Mr. Cantor says, with some understatement.

The debt talks began in earnest in May. Mr. Cantor principally spoke for the Republicans in talks with Vice President Joe Biden, which met two to three times a week for a month and a half, with daily “free and open communication” among staffers.

The talks “did make some progress” because the opposing sides agreed not to agree, says Mr. Cantor. The vice president and majority leader even established a rapport because they tried “not to get flared up over philosophical differences,” as Mr. Cantor puts it. “Throughout the weeks there was always the possibility that we would veer off into our own worldviews, but we really did try and say, all of us know we’ve got to cut some spending.”

“Nothing was agreed upon until everything was agreed upon,” but the group identified between $2 trillion and $2.3 trillion in savings. Major proposals included means-testing Medicare so that higher-income seniors paid more for benefits, revising the wraparound “medigap” policies that insulate patients from out-of-pocket costs, and changing the federal-state Medicaid payment formula. “It was those types of nibbling-around-the-edges entitlement reforms,” Mr. Cantor says.

Mr. Cantor’s insight was that no modus vivendi could be reached this year that would solve the fiscal crisis, so it was better to focus on “incremental wins with this president.” Even the $4 trillion “big deal” that Messrs. Obama and Boehner nearly closed in separate talks was too small to be worth the cost (though it may have raised the Medicare eligibility age and made technical changes to inflation measures to reduce the annual growth of Social Security checks). “None of those, none of those, really address the underlying problem,” Mr. Cantor says. “We need transformation in those programs in order to sustain them.”

Mr. Cantor quit the talks in late June amid Democratic tax demands, which he considered non-negotiable. Their position, he says, was that “we can’t do this unless you Republicans are going to relent on revenues.” His truculence did not endear him to Washington—though of course no one likened Mr. Obama to a terrorist for similarly refusing to give on any part of his new health-care entitlement, which was not even in the vicinity of “the table.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Mr. Cantor was in fact prepared to bargain on about $20 billion in higher taxes on “the shiny balls of the millionaires, billionaires, jet owners and oil companies” that Mr. Obama so often mentioned in public. “If they wanted to be able to claim the win on that,” Mr. Cantor says, he wanted net revenue neutrality in return, by lowering the corporate income tax rate or perhaps enacting an even larger tax reform. In effect, he was calling Mr. Obama’s bluff on “cheap politics.”

In private, however, the debate always returned to the status of the top marginal rate for individuals earning over $200,000 and $250,000 for couples—aka the Bush tax cuts for people who do not own private aircraft. Mr. Cantor argued that some large portion of the income that flows through the top bracket comes from “pass-through entities”—that is, businesses—and “to me, that strikes at the core of what I believe should be the policy, and that is to provide incentives for entrepreneurs to grow.”

By contrast, he says, “Never was there ever an underlying economic argument” from Democrats. “It was all about social justice. Honestly, one of them said to me, ‘Some people just make too much money.’”

***

Mr. Cantor is “cautiously optimistic” about the deal, which creates a 12-member “super committee” to reduce the deficit by another $1.5 trillion in return for another debt-limit increase later this year. Apart from taxes, its parameters institute the principle that new borrowing must be offset by dollar-for-dollar spending cuts. And while “we may go through the fit and start again of some kind of big deal,” he thinks it will merely result in more incremental progress. “I just think that’s what’s doable given this almost intractable divide we’ve got with this president and where we are.”

Throughout the debt debate, many GOP freshmen and the tea party in general have found it difficult to accept the limited powers that come from controlling only one-half of one branch of government. Mr. Cantor acknowledges their “consternation, angst, anger and the rest leading to a deal like this” and says the party will continue to try to make “the jump” between “reality” and “rational, solid theory,” like a balanced budget amendment. But he welcomes the fervor and entertains no strategic or other regrets, except that “we were not able to get what we would consider a really good deal. . . . We didn’t get to where we wanted.”

Now that the debt debate is in abeyance, the House is “going to continue the focus on the impediments that continue to be erected by this administration to jobs and job growth.” Mr. Obama’s policies “are what are choking this economy,” Mr. Cantor argues, mentioning the stimulus, health care, the auto bailout, “unpredictable and onerous” regulators like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Labor Relations Board, “the God-forsaken Dodd-Frank regime” and “a taxation system that is noncompetitive, to say the least.” He continues: “It doesn’t work for Washington to be granted this almighty power that somehow is going to cure all ills and right all the wrongs that they think exist.”

But since the GOP is “pit against a White House, a president and a party that just doesn’t share the same worldview,” Mr. Cantor says “the real fight is going to be making sure that President Obama doesn’t have a second term.” He describes the 2012 election as “a very existential question” that will determine “what it is that we’re about in this country and what kind of country we are and want to be.”

As for the 2012 Republican field, Mr. Cantor seems cautiously optimistic, but he hasn’t endorsed and doesn’t divulge a rooting interest. There’s “no question” that the campaign will turn on jobs, the economy and growth, or lack thereof, Mr. Cantor says. He suggests candidates argue that “Washington has become an impediment to the American way of life. That American way of life has to do with entrepreneurship, it has to do with everyone having a fair shot at equal opportunity. . . .

“They need to change Obama’s Washington, but it’s really a return to what we know is America. Obama ran as an agent of change, and I don’t know what that hope and change really was at this point. It’s turned out to be something a lot different than what most people thought. But yes, we need to change and take the country away from President Obama.”

A debate in that key was never going to be resolved in a matter of months over the debt ceiling.

Mr. Rago is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.

There was drama at the White House this week when a man tried to hurl himself over the fence. But the Secret Service intervened and talked the president into going back inside and finishing his term.

That’s from Conan O’Brien’s monologue the other night. It captures the moment pretty well. Mr. Obama’s poll numbers continue to fall, his position in the battleground states to deteriorate. From Politico: “Obama emerges from the months-long [debt ceiling] fracas weaker—and facing much deeper and more durable political obstacles—than his own advisers ever imagined.” The president seemed to admit as much when he met with supporters at a fund-raiser in Chicago. “When I said ‘Change we can believe in,’ I didn’t say, ‘Change we can believe in tomorrow.’ Not ‘Change we can believe in next week.’ We knew this was going to take time.” When presidents talk like that, they’re saying: This isn’t working.

One fact emerged rather starkly during the crisis, and it will likely have implications in the coming year. It is that the president misunderstands himself as a political figure. Specifically, he misunderstands his rhetorical powers. He thinks they are huge. They are not. They are limited.

His conviction led to an interesting historic moment, and certainly a dramatic one, during the debt ceiling negotiations.

***

It was late Wednesday afternoon, July 13, in the Cabinet Room in the White House. Budget negotiations between Democrats and Republicans had been going on for months. The president, the vice president and congressional leaders on both sides were meeting again. Late in the meeting, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor asked the president a question. As Mr. Cantor told it this week, he was thinking about how the White House and the Republicans were still far apart on the size of budget cuts. He felt the president and his party were hung up on an insistence on raising taxes. Mr. Cantor asked Mr. Obama if he would drop his stand that the debt ceiling should be raised without dollar-for-dollar cuts.At that point, said Mr. Cantor, the president “turned to me and said, ‘Eric, don’t call my bluff.’ He said, ‘I’m going to take this to the American people.’” Then he got up and left.

The president was confident he could go over the heads of the opposition and win the day with his powers of persuasion. On July 25 he made his move, with a prime-time national address.

Boy, did it not work.

It was a speech with a calm surface but a rough undertow. “The wealthiest Americans” and “biggest corporations” should “give up some of their breaks.” The “burden” must be “fairly shared.” The problem is Republicans, who are “insisting” on an approach that “doesn’t ask the wealthiest Americans or the biggest corporations to contribute anything at all.” These Republicans ask nothing of “those at the top of the income scale.” Their stand would “threaten working families” and enrich the “corporate jet owner,” the “oil companies” and “hedge fund managers.” But don’t worry, “the 98% of Americans who make under $250,000 would see no tax increases at all.” “Millionaires and billionaires” must “share in the sacrifice.” Otherwise the government may not be able to send out Social Security checks.

It was, obviously, an attempt at class warfare. But class warfare is inherently manipulative, and people often sense manipulation and lean away from it. Americans at this point—they’ve been through the 20th century—don’t like attempts to divide them. It turns things sour.

Beyond that, it was the kind of appeal Americans would only begin to consider if the person making it had a lot of personal trust built up in the credibility bank. People have to believe you’re genuine in your anxiety for your country, that you’re working in good faith with the other party, that you’re not using a crisis for political gain, that you genuinely mean well toward all, including even the wealthy, that you are shrewd and wise in your choice of a path. Mr. Obama doesn’t have that kind of trust. How many people think he’s broad-gauged, genuine, knowing, or that his judgment on political issues is superior?

So the big speech went nowhere. It moved the dial nowhere but down. The president’s poll numbers continued to fall. And soon the White House put up a white flag and dropped the insistence on tax increases, and Democrats and Republicans came up with a bill that finally passed both houses.

The July 25 speech was of a piece with most of the president’s rhetorical leadership through the debt ceiling crisis. Some of his statements were patronizing: We have to “eat our peas.” He was boring in the way that people who are essentially ideological are always boring. They bleed any realness out of their arguments. They are immersed in abstractions that get reduced to platitudes, and so they never seem to be telling it straight. And he was a joy-free zone. No matter how much the president tries to smile, and he has a lovely smile, one is always aware of his grim task: income equality, redistribution, taxes. Come, let us suffer together

***

But the president is supposed to be great at speeches. Why isn’t it working anymore? One answer is that it never “worked.” The power of the president’s oratory was always exaggerated. It is true that a good speech put him on the map in 2004 and made his rise possible, and true he gave some good speeches in 2008. But people didn’t really vote for him because he said did things like: “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” They voted for him in spite of that. They voted for him for other reasons.

The president has been obsessing on Ronald Reagan the past few months, referring to him in private and attempting to use him to buttress his position in public. They say Republicans can’t get over Reagan, but really it’s Democrats who aren’t over him, and who draw the wrong lessons from his success. Reagan himself never bragged about his ability to convince the American people. He’d never point a finger and say: “I’ll go to the people and grind you to dust.” He thought speaking was a big part of leadership, but only part, and in his farewell address he went out of his way to say he never thought of himself as a great communicator. He thought he simply communicated great things—essentially, the vision of the founders as applied to current circumstances.

Democrats were sure Reagan was wrong, so they explained his success to themselves by believing that it all came down to some kind of magical formula involving his inexplicably powerful speeches. They misdefined his powers and saddled themselves with an unrealistic faith in the power of speaking.

But speeches aren’t magic. A speech is only as good as the ideas it advances. Reagan had good ideas. Obama does not.

The debt ceiling crisis revealed Mr. Obama’s speeches as rhetorical kryptonite. It is the substance that repels the listener.

This document concerns “parent trigger,” an ambitious reform idea we’ve reported on several times. Invented and passed into law in California in early 2010, parent trigger empowers parents to use petition drives to force reform at failing public schools. Under California law, a 51% majority of parents can shake up a failing school’s administration or invite a charter operator to take it over.

California’s innovation caught on quickly—and that’s where the AFT’s PowerPoint presentation comes in. Prepared (off the record) for AFT activists at the union’s annual convention in Washington, D.C. last month, it explains how AFT lobbying undermined an effort to bring parent trigger to Connecticut last year. Called “How Connecticut Diffused [sic] The Parent Trigger,” it’s an illuminating look into union cynicism and power.

Facing the public call for parent trigger—mainly from minority groups like the State of Black CT Alliance—the AFT’s “Plan A” was “Kill Mode.” That failed. So it was on to “Plan B: Engage the Opposition.”

But only some of the opposition, it turns out: “Not at the table,” notes the AFT document, were “parent groups” who supported the reform. Engagement meant pressuring legislators vulnerable to union muscle. That’s most of them—and the AFT’s muscle worked.

The result was a reform in name only. Out were simple parent petition drives, in were complex “school governance councils” of parents, teachers and community leaders. Most significantly, as the AFT’s PowerPoint brags, the councils’ “name is a misnomer: they are advisory and do not have true governing authority.”

Called about the PowerPoint presentation, the spokesman for Connecticut’s AFT said he knew nothing of it so couldn’t comment. Perhaps it was comment enough when the AFT took the file off its website Tuesday night. Good thing blogger RiShawn Biddle, who first discovered it, made a copy.