Put Men Back to Work
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Why am I feeling so good these days? Somehow it doesn’t bother me
that the Democrats are inching toward passing some kind of
healthcare reform or that that global warmers are celebrating in
Copenhagen.
Maybe it’s the reception Sarah Palin has been getting on
her book tour. Maybe it’s the way the polls all show the
Democrats headed straight down. But somehow it doesn’t seem as if
it’s going to be long before the Republicans get the chance to
govern again.
The clincher was the
CNN poll showing only 19
percent of Americans think Obama
deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. The fog created by liberal
adulation is beginning to lift. The President is being revealed
for what he is — an academically trained intellectual with a lot
of abstract ideas who doesn’t have much real feel for the
country. Sarah Palin is the perfect foil for him — the earthy,
commonsense straight talker who knows the things that are
important are what happens away from Washington.
It’s not even too early to start speculating Obama may be a
one-term President. We’ve seen this twice before with the
elections of Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Mayor David Dinkins of New
York in 1989. In both instances candidates to the far left came
to office under unusual circumstances. Carter was healing the
nation after Watergate, Dinkins was New York’s first
African-American chief executive.
When the glow wore off and their politics became clear,
however, the public soon became disenchanted. Carter couldn’t
handle the energy crisis or the Iran hostages and made a mess of
the economy. Dinkins raised taxes in the midst of a recession and
let rioters in Crown Heights run wild. Each of them served one
term.
What is more important, each paved the way for a Republican
renaissance. The GOP used its time in the wilderness wisely.
Ronald Reagan always knew he wanted to rebuild America’s military
and the supply-side crowd at the Wall Street
Journal had worked out the details for reviving
the economy. Mayor Giuliani spent the few months before taking
office attending a series of seminars arranged by the Manhattan
Institute. There he learned first-hand the details of James Q.
Wilson and Richard Herrnstein’s “broken windows” hypothesis,
which said that reducing crime meant establishing public order.
The day he took office the squeegee men were gone, subway fare
beaters were being arrested and New York was on the way to
reducing annual murders from 2,200 to their present level of 600.
Along with that he deregulated New York’s sclerotic economy.
George Will called it the best effort at governance in recent
America history. (For a full account, read Fred Siegel’s
The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of
American Life.)
So what theme should the Republicans prepare for their
coming revival? I have a few suggestions. I’ve actually tried to
convey all this to Sarah Palin a couple of times but her website
never answers emails and I figured standing in line all night at
one of her book events wouldn’t do much good. So I’ll float this
up here on The American Spectator in the
hopes that the prevailing winds can carry it up to Alaska. I say
this because I think Palin would be an excellent representative
of the GOP to promote this issue right now. If it comes from any
of the male faces of the party, it will sound too caustic and
resentful.
The message is, “Put men back to work.” Seventy-five
percent of employees thrown out of work in the current recession
have been men. We’re about to pass the point where there are more
women than men in the workforce. Obviously this idea is going to
have a constituency. But it’s not just men who will respond.
There are millions of women out there who would like to see their
men back working again as well.
The reason men are out of work has nothing to do with
feminism or “feminazis” or any of that stuff. The problem is we
don’t build anything in this country anymore. The reason is the
twin towers of bureaucracy and environmentalism. The main
products of our economy are now lawsuits and environmental impact
statements. This creates a lot of jobs, but they’re all for
pencil-pushing bureaucrats — male or female — who sit around
telling other people what they can’t do. Just the other day at a
rally at a Democratic sponsored job rally in California, somebody
got up and complained, “I wanted to put solar panels on my house
and found the first thing I have to do is fill out 400 pages of
government forms.” Solar energy isn’t even off the ground yet and
already it’s mired in bureaucracy.
As David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy in Princeton, N.J., puts
it, “We don’t make anything in this country anymore.” Crane
should know. He’s been trying to get a license to build the first
new nuclear reactor in this country in 30 years. Already he’s
discovered that America’s nuclear industry — which led the world
into this technology — has now vanished. Remember Westinghouse?
It’s now a Japanese company. GE doesn’t do anything in nuclear
anymore without partnering with Hitachi. Babcock & Wilcox,
the third manufacturer, has given up building large reactors but
does have a design for a
“mini-reactor” that can work at the factory level. It’s two years
away from applying for a license at the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, however, and the NRC will take another five years to
approve it. Meanwhile, the Russians are already marketing a
similar mini-reactor to other countries.
There is no steel forge in this country that can cast the
500-ton ingots used in building today’s reactor vessels. For a
while Japan Steel Works was the world’s only manufacturer, but
China and Russia have now caught up and France and Britain have
plans on the drawing board. Altogether, there are 54 reactors
under construction in the world, none of them in the United
States. Korea, which gets 45 percent of its electricity from
nuclear (we’re at 19 percent), has developed its reactor (from an
American design) and is starting to compete with France’s Areva
and Japan’s Westinghouse on the world market. This month it
stunned the two by emerging as a legitimate candidate for a $40
billion contract to build five new reactors in the United Arab
Emirates.
China only started working on nuclear in 2006 and already
has four Westinghouse AP1000s under construction. The first will
open in 2012. It also reversed-engineered the model and has 132
projects of this design on the drawing boards. Meanwhile our
Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not yet awarded
design approval to the
AP1000. It will be at least five years before shovels are in the
ground and a decade before a new American reactor comes on line.
By that time, the Chinese will probably be selling them in
Wal-Mart.
I was reading Brooks Adams’ The Law of Civilization and
Decay the other day and he mentioned something
I’d never heard before. What gutted Rome during the declining
years of the Empire, he wrote, was that the city didn’t
manufacture anything
anymore. Gentleman farming was considered the only noble
occupation (the Roman version of environmentalism) and all the
dirty work of manufacture was farmed out to the provinces of the
Eastern Mediterranean. The provincials actually prospered during
the era. Meanwhile, Rome tried to survive on conquest and
taxation. Taxes were raised to brutal levels in the conquered
provinces and all the money funneled back to Rome so that
generals and government officials could live in luxury. Soon the
Empire was over its head in debt, forced to devalue the currency,
and things went downhill from there. It has a familiar ring,
doesn’t it?
What I would suggest, then, is a Republican for 2010 and
beyond built around the idea of putting men back to work in
regenerating industrial America. Manufacture is the kind of heavy
lifting men do best. Nuclear power is the place to start. It’s
the energy technology of the 21st century and those who ignore it
will be in the same position as countries like Spain and Portugal
that missed the Industrial Revolution. Look at France today. The
French are 78 percent nuclear and have weathered the current
recession very nicely. They have the lowest electrical rates in
Western Europe and electricity is their third largest export. The
French certainly don’t work any harder than us and take longer
vacations, but nuclear electricity is keeping the whole economy
afloat.
Our failure to adopt nuclear has reverberated through the
economy. Between 2000 and 2006 we lost 100,000 jobs in the
chemical and fertilizer industries because natural gas prices
quintupled and those industries use it as a feedstock. All of
them moved abroad. The main reason natural gas supplies ran short
is that we have appropriated it to generate 20 percent of our
electricity. Environmentalists won’t let anybody build anything
else. Now they are promoting an “Age of Renewable Energy” that
will consist of hundreds of square miles of windmills and solar
collectors backed up by natural gas plants ready to be fired
instantly if the wind dies down or the sun goes behind a cloud.
California, which leads the nation with 12 percent renewable
energy, gets 40 percent of its electricity from natural gas,
twice the national average. If we squander the recent discoveries
of shale gas in the Midwest by using it to generate electricity,
we’ll probably never manufacture anything in this country
again.
So let’s get ready to reindustrialize America and save it
from Obama’s bureaucrats and government employees whose only job
is to make life difficult for everyone else. Putting men back to
work is the place to start. Think of the tens of thousands of
construction jobs that would come from building new reactors –
and that would be only the beginning.
Sarah Palin may be the best flag-bearer for this issue
right now. She can become America’s Joan of Arc, breathing
courage back into a culture that has lost its nerve. But any
Republican who can make the case for America’s industrial revival
is soon going to have the whole country behind him. A la
victoire!
