The other day, I was talking to someone about college sports. I made a comment that a particular school was just a knucklehead academy. I love college football, but I’m well aware of what’s going on with these kids. Most of them have no business being on a college campus. They are placed in fake classes to stay eligible and they are given tutors to do their work. Some of the kids are real students and some of the schools have real standards, but that’s not the rule. The school in question is well known for cutting corners in order to field a good team every year.

The person, with whom I had the exchange, was offended by my use of the term “knucklehead academy.” The reason is they know some graduates of that college. I know an Episcopal minister, but I would never take offense if some criticized that church. I could see it if his kids was a player at that school. Then he could interpret my comment as an insult of his son, which is an insult to him. Here we had transitive offense taking via acquaintance.

Maybe sensing my confusion, his explanation was not just that he knew a graduate, but that he felt the school did a great job “creating a community and did wonders for minorities.” Having rolled that around in my head for a while, I’m thinking that “community” has passed from meaningless cant to abracadabra word status. Of course, if the “community” is good for the minorities then we’re getting close to the promised land.

The weird thing about the “community” fetish is that there are lots of very bad examples of communities. The Nazis built a community. Pol Pot built a strong community. I could probably spend all day listing “communities” with outlandishly high body counts. A cult, after all, is a community. I suppose the hive minded don’t think much about that stuff. They just know their hive is good so hives must be good, as long as they are good to the right minorities, I guess.

The transitive offense taking is the kicker. I can see this being the new way to stifle debate. If you hold an opinion contrary to the Cult’s truths then they can just conjure an imaginary friend or relative to take offense. Since that friend or relative is not around to be outraged, they can be outraged in absentia. It’s another version of “some people say”, the favorite way fro liberal journalist to call non-liberals bad names. “Some people say you are divisive. Please talk about this.”

By itself it is just a weird tick, but these people are in charge. The result is a deranged meta-language in public discourse. It’s not quite esoteric, just tortured. This post at NRO is a good example. In order to make sensible comments about Pegida, Stuttaford has to perform a strange ritual proving he is not a heretic. That means apologizing in advance for offending anyone by mentioning the subject matter. Stuttaford is a well grounded guy, but he likes his job and career so he does what’s necessary.

I’m fond of saying we live in a different sort of Iran. Their religious lunatics whip heretics and stone homosexuals. Our lunatics hound heretics out of their jobs and cast insults at “homophobes.” The one thing the mullahs had on our lunatics is they could claim Allah was unhappy with someone and that was license to do as they liked. It seems our lunatics are conjuring their Allah through this transitive micro-aggression stuff. The imaginary victim of your micro-aggression they just conjured is instantly deified, which means they are doing the lord’s work by attacking you.

As an old codger, I have a growing relationship with the nation’s health care “system.” I put quotes in there because systems have an internal logic. It may be screwy and pointless logic, but there’s a reason things are the way they are in a system. There’s no logic to health care in this country. American health care is more like the exercise yard at the penitentiary. The weak are victimized by the strong for no reason other than they can. It’s what I imagine Hell to be, pointless, irrational torment.

I could probably fill up a library with commentary on the health rackets, but I’ll save that for another day. Last night I stopped at the pharmacy (that’s the chemist for my UK readers) to get my heart meds refilled. I stood waiting for someone to acknowledge me for ten minutes until a black fellow waved me over. His name was Michael Yababadodaba. OK, I made up the last name, but it was something like that. My guess is he originated in Ghana as they love English first names and tribal last names.

Michael moved so slow it was hard to know if he was actually moving. His English was passable, but I suspected he had an IQ in the 90’s. Everything about the job seemed to confuse him. After fiddling with the computer for ten minutes, he informed me that they were out of the medication. He did not know when it would be available. Further, he said he tried to call me earlier about it. That seemed to be important to him as he repeated it several times, like an incantation. I suspect that by “tried to call me” he meant that he tried and failed to use the telephone.

Another ten minutes of him fiddling around with the computer and he finally grunted out that another pharmacy had the medicine. It’s very weird to have to use hand signals to communicate with someone responsible for correctly dispensing your medication. Anyway, he handed me a piece of paper with a telephone number on it. Michael may not have the sense God gave a goldfish, but he has very nice penmanship. He has that going for him.

Pharmacist used to be a job for middle-class white kids from the state college. The job did not require much in the way of IQ, but you needed to be conscientious. Filling the wrong meds or letting someone take something that would have an adverse reaction with their other meds are the sorts of mistakes a pharmacy likes to avoid. The pharmacist is supposed to be a pest for little details, as the last check point in the quality control system. They are the sorts of people who enjoy reading the fine print on small bottles.

That worked fine until the usual suspects decided they needed to loot the pharmacies so they have started to import third world types on visas to fill those jobs. Instead of dealing with a pleasant white girl from the neighborhood, I now deal with illiterate Africans not entirely sure how they got here. I can’t imagine anyone in America is standing around saying that we have a shortage of Africans , but here we are, importing them from the mother country.

I called the number from my cell on the way out and learn that it is for a pharmacy in the ghetto. I fear no man, but being an old white guy in the ghetto at night is inviting trouble I don’t need. After reaching a human, I learned they do have the meds and my script will be filled and ready in the morning. The woman on the other end sounded white, pleasant and competent. I mentioned in passing that Michael did not fill me with confidence and she laughed and assured me my drugs would be there waiting. You can always trust the drug dealer to be straight with you.

Mid-morning, I had a break in the schedule so I headed over to the ghetto to make a drug buy. I always feel like I should have the soundtrack of Shaft playing in my eight track when I head into the ghetto. In the hood, it always feels like 1972. One thing about living in or near the ghetto is you quickly learn that black people are not good drivers. They are unpredictable drivers. For no reason other than they want to, a driver will make a right hand turn from the left lane or turn onto a busy street causing a pile up. That means you have to pay extra attention to avoid getting wrecked.

Sure enough, a clapped out sedan comes speeding toward me out of a parking lot on the left. Traffic coming the other way skidded to a stop in the snow and I had to do a series of maneuvers to avoid getting hit. The two yos in the “hoopty” were completely oblivious to the fact they almost caused a multi-car pile up. They just had somewhere to go and that’s all that mattered.

Anyone who has been to the third world knows that driving in those places is a life altering adventure. Drive anywhere for any length of time in these countries and you have a near death experience. A hallmark of the third world is comically dangerous roads. My sense is it is due to the lack of self-restraint and time preference. In the ghetto, time in not linear. As we invite the third world to settle in our lands, the ability to navigate ghetto drivers will be an essential skill.

I parked and headed into to get my meds. As I walked in the help all stopped what they are doing and looked at me like I just parked my space ship. They don’t see too many white guys in there. They assumed I was either cop or a higher up in the store’s management. Once they figured out I was just a customer, they went back to doing nothing. The woman at the counter was polite, but “customer service” in the ghetto is an abuse of the language. The woman was named, I’m not kidding, “Chakita” and she must have spent her pay check getting an elaborate hair weave. From behind the bullet proof glass she handed over my drugs and I handed over my money. What a way to live.

This is our future.

Given the mood of the electorate, anyone named Bush would have a tough time winning votes in the 2016 GOP primary. A good share of primary voters share my view that W was a decent and honest guy, but horribly wrong about most everything. His presidency caused so much damage to the nation we may never live to see it repaired.

That does not mean he cannot win. The elites love the Bush family. They are reliable on the important issues. The reason the Cult went bonkers over W was they saw him as a class traitor. His overt Christianity was horrifying just as it would be to fanatical Muslims. W represented the triumph of the wrong sort of white people, even if was merely symbolic.

Anyway, in order for Jeb to become president, he needs some things to happen. One is he needs the GOP field to be splintered. If conservatives of different stripes find a single guy they like enough to back, Bush is doomed. He needs every faction to be married to their guy until the money runs dry. Bush will have all the money he needs to run in the early contests so he can outlast everyone.

Seeing Huckabee jump in and now maybe Santorum has to make the Bush Klan smile.

Rick Santorum has invited former aides to Washington next week for a “private briefing” on his plans for a possible 2016 presidential bid.

The “Personal Invitation from Senator Santorum,” provided to CNN by a Republican who received it, was sent by a Santorum aide to more than two dozen “friends and former colleagues” from past campaigns and his time in the U.S. House and Senate.

“As you probably know, RJS is seriously considering a run for the White House in 2016,” Santorum adviser Matt Beynon wrote in the email, using Santorum’s initials.

“With the midterms and the new year behind us, he is beginning the final stages of preparation and consideration of another campaign,” Beynon wrote.

Santorum, he wrote, “would like to give you a personal update on his plans” at a “private briefing” on Jan. 13 at the offices of the American Continental Group, a lobbying and public affairs office in Washington.

Among the Santorum alumni invited to the session are a number of top lobbyists and political strategists who once worked for the former congressman and senator from Pennsylvania, including former George W. Bush spokesman Tony Fratto and former Republican National Committee finance director Rob Bickhart.

It’s important to understand that this is not a strategy session. Santorum is feeling these guys out to learn what the other guys are doing. He’s also signalling to Jeb his interests. Everyone assumes it is the GOP’s turn in 2016 so there will be a lot of jobs to be had in the next administration for Republicans. Santorum may be willing to run as a straw to sink Huckabee in Iowa, as long as the Bush people will help him out down the road.

This is looking a lot like 2000 to me. Everyone knew the Democrats would run Al Gore as the sober, more liberal Bill Clinton. When W started raising money in 1998 it became clear he was the establishment’s guy. George Schultz had recruited him and all the party big shots fell in line. By the time the campaign season started, everyone knew the game was rigged. Only McCain decided to challenge W, but he had no chance.

This time it is the open borders wing of the establishment recruiting a Bush to lead them in the GOP primary. They are deeply worried about what’s happening with the voters. The defeat of Eric Cantor was the shot heard around the Beltway. It’s why they have been pushing the House GOP to sign off on the ObamAmnesty. If they can make that stick, Jeb Bush can go around the voters to implement their agenda.

Here is the late great Tony Snow’s legendary column on Kwanzaa.

BLACKS IN AMERICA have suffered an endless series of insults and degradations, the latest of which goes by the name of Kwanzaa.

Ron Karenga (aka Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga) invented the seven-day feast (Dec. 26-Jan. 1) in 1966, branding it a black alternative to Christmas. The idea was to celebrate the end of what he considered the Christmas-season exploitation of African Americans.

According to the official Kwanzaa Web site — as opposed, say, to the Hallmark Cards Kwanzaa site — the celebration was designed to foster “conditions that would enhance the revolutionary social change for the masses of Black Americans” and provide a “reassessment, reclaiming, recommitment, remembrance, retrieval, resumption, resurrection and rejuvenation of those principles (Way of Life) utilized by Black Americans’ ancestors.”

Karenga postulated seven principles: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith, each of which gets its day during Kwanzaa week. He and his votaries also crafted a flag of black nationalism and a pledge: “We pledge allegiance to the red, black, and green, our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle, and to the land we must obtain; one nation of black people, with one G-d of us all, totally united in the struggle, for black love, black freedom, and black self-determination.”

Now, the point: There is no part of Kwanzaa that is not fraudulent. Begin with the name. The celebration comes from the Swahili term “matunda yakwanza,” or “first fruit,” and the festival’s trappings have Swahili names — such as “ujima” for “collective work and responsibility” or “muhindi,” which are ears of corn celebrants set aside for each child in a family.

Unfortunately, Swahili has little relevance for American blacks. Most slaves were ripped from the shores of West Africa. Swahili is an East African tongue.

To put that in perspective, the cultural gap between Senegal and Kenya is as dramatic as the chasm that separates, say, London and Tehran. Imagine singing “G-d Save the Queen” in Farsi, and you grasp the enormity of the gaffe.

Worse, Kwanzaa ceremonies have no discernible African roots. No culture on earth celebrates a harvesting ritual in December, for instance, and the implicit pledges about human dignity don’t necessarily jibe with such still-common practices as female circumcision and polygamy. The inventors of Kwanzaa weren’t promoting a return to roots; they were shilling for Marxism. They even appropriated the term “ujima,” which Julius Nyrere cited when he uprooted tens of thousands of Tanzanians and shipped them forcibly to collective farms, where they proved more adept at cultivating misery than banishing hunger.

Even the rituals using corn don’t fit. Corn isn’t indigenous to Africa. Mexican Indians developed it, and the crop was carried worldwide by white colonialists.

The fact is, there is no Ur-African culture. The continent remains stubbornly tribal. Hutus and Tutsis still slaughter one another for sport.

Go to Kenya, where I taught briefly as a young man, and you’ll see endless hostility between Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya and Masai. Even South African politics these days have more to do with tribal animosities than ideological differences.

Moreover, chaos too often prevails over order. Warlords hold sway in Somalia, Eritrea, Liberia and Zaire. Genocidal maniacs have wiped out millions in Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia. The once-shining hopes for Kenya have vanished.

Detroit native Keith Richburg writes in his extraordinary book, “Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,” that “this strange place defies even the staunchest of optimists; it drains you of hope …”

Richburg, who served for three years as the African bureau chief for The Washington Post, offers a challenge for the likes of Karenga: “Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I’ll throw it back in your face, and then I’ll rub your nose in the images of rotting flesh.”

His book concludes: “I have been here, and I have seen — and frankly, I want no part of it. …. By an accident of birth, I am a black man born in America, and everything I am today — my culture and my attitudes, my sensibilities, loves and desires — derives from that one simple and irrefutable fact.”

Nobody ever ennobled a people with a lie or restored stolen dignity through fraud. Kwanzaa is the ultimate chump holiday — Jim Crow with a false and festive wardrobe. It praises practices — “cooperative economics, and collective work and responsibility” — that have succeeded nowhere on earth and would mire American blacks in endless backwardness.

Our treatment of Kwanzaa provides a revealing sign of how far we have yet to travel on the road to reconciliation. The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just to cash in on the business, but to patronize black activists and shut them up.

This year, President Clinton signed his fourth Kwanzaa proclamation. He crooned: “The symbols and ceremony of Kwanzaa, evoking the rich history and heritage of African Americans, remind us that our nation draws much of its strength from our diversity.”

But our strength, as Richburg points out, comes from real principles: tolerance, brotherhood, hard work, personal responsibility, equality before the law. If Americans really cared about racial healing, they would focus on those ideas — and not on a made-up rite that mistakes segregationism for spirituality and fiction for history.

I’ve written a lot about the religious aspects 0f modern liberalism. The idea is not my creation. Rousseau wrote about Civil Religion in the Social Contract. His was a compromise between a religion of the state, the Catholic religion, with which he was most familiar, and Christianity in general. Later writers picked up on this theme. HG Wells pitched socialism as a universal religion. American Progressives in the early 20th century argued for a social gospel that was a fusion of Continental socialism and American Protestantism.

This concept was fairly well known and understood amongst leftist writers and thinkers into the 20th century, then it sort of disappeared. Talk to a modern liberal today and they will think you’re nuts if you compare their thing with religion. This is especially true of economists and fake nerds. They have it in their heads that their thing is a model of dispassionate logic, the very opposite of religion. That post the other day where I called Neil deGrasse Tyson a circus clown is a good example. To the people worshiping Tyson, religion is the opposite of science. In their binary world, the former is evil and the latter is good, Satan versus God.

Back in 2000 when Al Gore wandered off to Mt. Sinai to get the good word on climate change, I pointed out to the amazing number of new converts in my peer group that Al Gore was falling back on his religious training. He was playing the role of Old Testament prophet. It was pretty obvious that he was having a breakdown during the campaign. His bizarre behavior in the debates was later explained by his wife as him cracking under the pressure. She went onto to say that losing the election to Bush sent Gore into a tailspin and she thought he was having a breakdown. Instead, he came back as a convert to a new religion that looked a lot like the Old Testament.

Anyway, there’s a long piece in The Weekly Standard from a month back that comes at modern liberalism from the religious angle. I’m behind on my magazine reading so I’m just getting around to it. The fact that no one on the Right in the chattering classes has mentioned it says a lot, I think, about the general dimness of modern conservative movement. It’s well worth reading. The writer comes at it from a slightly different angle than I do, but it is a good take. Bottom, despite being a Catholic, really gets the messianic quality of 19th century American Protestantism.

I would quarrel with him on the apocalyptic section of his piece. I’m not so sure the Zero Hedge crowd is preaching doom because they think the gods are angry. They simply think they are right about the current economic arrangements.  Similarly, the preppers and doomsday types building bunkers in the woods have always been with us. They think the fragile nature of society will inevitably lead to collapse. That and many of them are just nuts. They are not motivated by religiosity. The various end of times fads on the left, however, are a part of their over all religious impulse.

The lack of interest by the professional Right in this way of looking at the American Left has always puzzled me. Reagan, having gone head to head with commies in Hollywood, knew they operated with a religious zeal. He was a big fan of Eric Hoffer, from whom I got my understanding of the Left. Reagan is practically worshiped by the professional Right, yet this part of Reagan’s thinking is never mentioned. That Bottom article should be the sort of thing to get the chattering skulls on the Right going as it is easily quotable. But, they skip past it.

There’s a reason for it, but I don’t know it.

Apparently, Harlem has a raccoon infestation.

West Harlem residents say a posse of raccoons has taken over their neighborhoods and in some cases even broken into their homes.

“These things think they live here and they actually walk in if you leave an opening,” said resident Lauren Flanigan.

Pictures from residents showed a raccoon making itself comfortable on the patio of a West Harlem home, and even coming up to the door. And that raccoon was not alone, residents said.

“They came in the kitchen, and they’re not that friendly, and they also pushed the window screens in,” Flanigan told CBS2’s Tracee Carrasco.

“They climb over the fences to the next backyard and they keep going from backyard to backyard, so that’s why it’s not one homeowner’s problem. It’s everybody’s problem,” Maria Freeman said.

Residents complained that the raccoons wreak havoc in the streets daily, and believe they make the trek from Central Park. They want the city to do something because the problem is only getting worse.

“These raccoons don’t behave normally. They’re out during the day time when they should be sleeping. They are not afraid of humans. They’re aggressive,” Flanigan said.

Residents are now asking the city to step in and pay for a trap-and-release service to get rid of the raccoons before mating season starts in January.

In a statement the city said they are “staunchly committed to addressing all constituent requests from New Yorkers across the five boroughs, including animal related complaints and inquiries.”

Residents say help can’t come soon enough.

For years, I have been stumbling around like a drunk on the deck of a ship. Now thanks to walking expert Wendy Bumgardner, I now can walk like a professional!

Congratulations, you have decided it is time to start walking for health, fitness, and perhaps for weight loss. Walking is a great, natural way to achieve the daily physical activity amount recommended for good health.
We will lead you through a program for absolute beginners, with the goal to have you walking comfortably for 30 minutes to an hour, the level of physical activity recommended to reduce risks of heart disease, type II diabetes, breast cancer and colon cancer.

1. Preparing to walk: what you need to do before you begin a walking program. This includes whether you need to get medical advice before starting a walking program, what to wear for walking, and what kind of shoes to wear.

2. Walking Technique: Next, you will learn a good walking technique with proper posture, use of arms and leg motion.

3. Beginner’s Walking Schedule: how often to walk, how fast and how far to build up to the level of 30-60 minutes per day.

I’ve read tons of books about walking, but Wendy really gets to the point. None of that overly technical stuff.

What should you wear for fitness walking? Your walking clothing should be comfortable and loose-fitting to allow you to move.
Depending on your climate, dress in layers so you may remove a layer as you warm up while walking, and put it back on if you feel cool.

If you do not plan to walk up a sweat, a system can be as simple as a t-shirt, light sweater, and windproof jacket.

If you sweat while walking, you should invest in CoolMax or polypropylene shirts to wick the sweat away from the body.

In cooler climates you may want an insulating layer of polar fleece or wool.

Socks should be comfortable, and the modern running socks made from CoolMax or other high-tech fibers are preferable to cotton, as they prevent blisters by keeping the feet drier. Before You Buy Walking Socks.

A hat is essential to preventing sun exposure or keeping you from losing heat.

Sunglasses for outdoor walking prevent UV exposure for your eyes.

Wear sunscreen.

Carry keys and other articles in pockets or a hip pack. Pack lightly for most walks and leave the heavy purse at home.

Carry water if you plan to be walking for a half hour or more with no water on your route. A hip pack with built-in water bottle holder is convenient.

OK, enough of that. Let’s jump right to the hard stuff.

The walking step is a rolling motion.

Strike the ground first with your heel.

Roll through the step from heel to toe.

Push off with your toe.

Bring the back leg forward to strike again with the heel.

Flexible shoes will ensure you are able to roll through the step.

If your feet are slapping down rather than rolling through the step, your shoes are likely too stiff.

At first, your shin muscles may tire and be sore until they are strengthened.

All these years, I kept trying to walk on my hands. Who knew that you’re supposed to use your feet??!!

Seriously, that’s got to be the dumbest health article ever written.

Over at National Review, where I occasionally post in the comment sections, I’ve taken some flak for pointing out that falling oil prices are not due to market forces and they are not necessarily a good thing. The people who post there tend to be running dog Republicans, worshipping at the alter of capitalism. They think suddenly cheap oil is vindication of their “drill baby, drill” chants from a decade ago.

This post from the Beeb explains one of the down-side effects of an oil glut.

Oil companies and service providers are cutting staff and investment to save money.

Robin Allan, chairman of the independent explorers’ association Brindex, told the BBC that the industry was “close to collapse”.

Almost no new projects in the North Sea are profitable with oil below $60 a barrel, he claims.

“It’s almost impossible to make money at these oil prices”, Mr Allan, who is a director of Premier Oil in addition to chairing Brindex, told the BBC. “It’s a huge crisis.”

“This has happened before, and the industry adapts, but the adaptation is one of slashing people, slashing projects and reducing costs wherever possible, and that’s painful for our staff, painful for companies and painful for the country.

“It’s close to collapse. In terms of new investments – there will be none, everyone is retreating, people are being laid off at most companies this week and in the coming weeks. Budgets for 2015 are being cut by everyone.”

The thing that people don’t understand about the business of digging stuff up and selling it is there are costs. It cost money to set-up an oil well – lots of money. If you can get a million barrels from a well and the cost of extraction is fifty million dollars over the life of the well, you need to sell that oil for $50 a barrel to break even. If you started your project assuming $100 prices and now the prices are $40, your business collapses and the well closes.

Almost all of the new oil sources coming on-line were planned and executed in a world of $60-$70 oil. That was the assumption of the investors. That’s an important piece of the puzzle that no one considers. Every BTU of energy is backed by a debt instrument these days. In fact, those debt instruments are backed by debt instruments.

The debt pyramid in the energy business probably looks like every other asset market. That means bankruptcies in the energy markets ripple through the financial world in the same way that foreclosures in Nevada brought down the housing market.

There’s that and there is the fact the oil glut is about things other than supply and demand. Demand is slightly down of late as the world economy has slowed. That has driven up relative supply. There’s also more supply due to speculators jumping into a hot market the last decade. But, there’s also the financial war with Russia lead by the US and Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis, of course, see this as manna from heaven. They can knock out the Russians who have been a source of mischief to them in the Middle East. A collapsing Russia would take Syria and Iran down, plus open the door for the Saudi pipeline projects.

An oil glut also knocks out North American producers who suddenly face margin calls. No one pumps at a loss so the high cost producers will have to shut down. An extended price slump means they go bankrupt. It also means credit flees the market, making even profitable operations less profitable. The Saudis can weather even $30 oil so this is good for them in the long run.

Cheap energy is always a good thing, but it is not without trade-offs. It’s why our next currency arrangement will probably be pegged to energy. If everything is priced in joules, price stability in the energy markets becomes the default state. Until then, energy is a tool of war and even cheap gas has negative consequences.

Steve Sailer argues that American politics is a battle of the fringe against the core with the Democrats as the party of the fringe. They have built a coalition of blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, single white women and weirdos. That’s their base of support. The math says they get to about 40% support with that collection of voters. The fact that Obama’s support has never dropped far below 40% supports the argument, at least the maths of the argument. Sailer’s latest stab at this is here.

This is not exactly new.  The first flowering of the Progressive faith was in the 19th century following the Civil War and Reconstruction. As the nation industrialized, Progressive ideas gained steam. Labor unions, temperance movements, efficiency movements and, of course, European socialism crept into the minds of those in charge, as well as those who wanted to be in charge. By the 20th century, we had guys like Teddy Roosevelt running around babbling about the “Square Deal” and sounding a lot like Elizabeth Warren.

The First Progressive Era “ended” with Woodrow Wilson and World War I. If you look at the coalition that supported the Progressives a century ago, you see the same fringe versus core dynamic. It was more explicitly populist because the country was mono-cultural. Blacks had few voting rights and women had limited voting rights. The fringe, therefore, was immigrants, Catholics and the newly emerging working class, versus the WASP core. Whipping up votes amongst the Irish in Boston was easier if you took aim at the Brahman in charge.

I put “ended” in quotes in the previous paragraph because it is simply false to say the Progressive Era ended with Wilson. The Return to Normalcy certainly put an end to Wilson’s reign of terror, but the ruling class was still firmly in the grip of the Progressive faith. Harding and Coolidge were restrained in their politics, but Hoover was a Progressive and FDR was obviously a true believer. The One True Faith never really dies. It just goes into hibernation after periods of activity and  dis-confirmation. The atrocities of the Wilson era made “Progressive” a dirty word, but the crisis of 1929 opened the door for a newly minted version of the old time religion.

The New Deal coalition was built on the Wilson coalition of fringe groups, but those fringes were quickly becoming the majority. In the northeast, Catholics were dominating city politics and beginning to control state politics. The New Deal was also a vehicle for Jews to rise to power in politics and finance. Henry Morgenthau made it to ambassador under Wilson, his son was Secretary of the Treasury under FDR. During the Depression, that was the second most important job in America. This iteration of the Progressive coalition was the most stable owing to the fact it was based on stable, sensible people. It’s why it hung together for so long.

Sailer, I suspect, is looking at current events and thinking back to events of his youth. Steve is 55, so he was a kid when the Civil Right movement exploded into riots in the late 60’s. He was a teenager when the LAPD raided a house in his neighborhood looking for Patty Hearst. By the time he was noticing events, the weirdos, lunatics and insane had taken over the New Left and taken over the news coverage. To a man his age, the Ferguson riots and the explosion of crazy in the culture probably looks like a replay of forty years ago.

That’s not unreasonable, but I’m not entirely on-board with it. The New Deal coalition largely collapsed as a result of a resurgence of liberalism in the 1960’s. If you read any of the books by David Horowitz, the thing that’s important is the New Left explicitly rejected the Old Left as well as the New Deal. They thought the old commies from the previous generation were hopelessly lost, with their focus on organizing whites into a universal proletarian state. Similarly, they looked at the New Deal as a bourgeois compromise with the capitalists. The New Left that emerged in the 60’s and 70’s was about identity and culture, not money and property.

Things don’t move quickly in real time. Reading about the transition of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire, the time between Sulla and Augustus, can be done in an evening, maybe two. In real time it took three generations. The average man alive in the time of the Social War could not possibly know what was coming over the horizon. People know what has happened in their lives and what they inherited from those who came before them. They act on it and build off it. Historians like to create narratives to tie it all together, but the people living it have no knowledge of that narrative.

The New Left in the 60’s and 70’s was simply reacting to the world they inherited. The young radicals that came along after World War II entered a world that was looking pretty good from an American perspective. In order to find the great dispossessed, you had to look beyond the quiet neighborhoods of Eisenhower’s America. You had to go to the black ghettos of northern cities and into the Old Confederacy to find people not happy with the status quo.

It’s not an accident that the current Left looks like a wrinkled, liver-spotted version of the New Left of 40 years ago. The people running the Left these days are mostly people who came of age in the 60’s and 70’s. It’s why this flowering of the old time religion looks so much like the last flowering. It’s also why it is so fragile and combustible. A coalition has to have more in common than an enemy. The members of that coalition are going to want their people in charge. Otherwise, the whole thing unravels with the first bit of adversity.

Those are the parallels Steve is observing, but there are differences as well. The New Left came along when both parties were ruled by men who had no interest in radical politics. The New Left was fighting the cops on the street while the party bosses sat inside. Today, the radicals are the party bosses, at least of one party. Similarly, radicals have command of all the high places in the culture. It’s not an accident that Obama uses a word like “shellacked” and we see a million occurrences of it in the press the following week. This story from the fall shows how insulated and monolithic the press is and that’s because they are all from the same cult.

That’s the fundamental difference between now and forty years ago. Back then the radicals were building a coalition in order to take control of the Democratic Party and then the country. Today, they run the country. The reason Washington looks like a high school cafeteria is because it is an adult version of what these people experienced as kids. The cool kids were the ones smoking weed and freaking out the squares, while the dorks publicly resented the fact they couldn’t join them, but privately wish they could. Those kids grew up and became Democrats and Republicans, respectively.

It’s why liberal hectoring sounds suicidal. The people in charge are railing about the people in charge. The people in charge are raising a mob from the dispossessed to assault the people in charge. The radicals of forty years ago at least had a rational aim in mind. Today it is an aging street fighter looking for a fight when there’s no one left to fight. It is both irrational and ridiculous.

It’s also why this may be the end of the Left and radical politics in America. It has burned itself out like we have seen with every Marxist-Leninist state. It’s ironic that Obama is normalizing relations with Cuba. Just as the American Radicals who were inspired by Castro are heading into an absurd decline, the end of the Castro brothers will be Walmart selling Che t-shirts in Havana.

Obama is normalizing relations with Cuba and Conservative Inc is flipping out about it. The usual suspects on the Right are focusing on the fact Obama is an Academic Socialist, sympathetic to unrepentant radicals like the Castro brothers. The line of attack is about Obama’s anti-American impulses, which are real, but not really what’s at work here. Many on the Right are anti-citizen, which makes them anti-American, by definition, so their yelping now is a bit hollow.

In reality, Obama is just doing the bidding of American business. The tourism rackets, gambling rackets and, of course, the bankers see big profits in Cuba. This news story from the spring lays out the case for normalizing relations so big business can cash in on Cuba. It is easy to forget that Cuba was a food exporter before Castro. They can also be a source of cheap labor for American business. Our rulers will also enjoy vacationing there as well.

This NYTimes story from 2010 reports on the machinations behind the long running drive to open up Cuba to American business. There are 11 million Cubans ready to buy Big Macs, Coke and whatever other crap we can sell them. How they will pay for it is a mystery, but presumably Cuba will quickly become a slightly better version of Puerto Rico. Cubans are better educated than Puerto Ricans so they should adapt quickly to American tourism.

Of course, the Democrats are reading the polls and seeing a shift in Cuban-American politics. Young Cubans don’t care about Castro. They care about getting on the victimization train. They look around at the free stuff other Hispanics are getting and they want in on the scam too. You can’t blame them for it. In a balkanized, post-national society, group rights count for everything. It will be a tribal spoils system so why not join the winning team?

I doubt Obama and the Democrats have thought it through on that end. This is just a money grab at this stage. 2016 is looking like a toss-up, with The Stupid Party probably nominating Jeb Bush. The Democrats don’t have to concede the election so giving the Chamber of Commerce a big fat gift will pay off down the road.