It is generally assumed that revolutions are for poor, bedraggled countries where operating a flush toilet is a great challenge. The hilariously misnamed “Arab Spring” is a good recent example. One Arab craphole after another fell into chaos as the price of food shot up and the local potentates were unable to keep a lid on things. Big important countries don’t have revolutions anymore. They have democracy!

That’s not a foolish assumption. The last real revolt in Europe was the Bolshevik Revolution and a lot of people would argue that Russia is not a part of Europe. The Spanish Civil War is not counted as a revolution, but that’s debatable. Either way, it’s been a long time since westerners have felt the need to “spit on their hands, hoist the black flag and start slitting throats.”

The argument is that modern liberal democratic societies have built in checks against tyranny and systems for making structural reforms when necessary. If the main political parties are unresponsive, then new parties rise up to displace them and implement the needed reforms. Elections give the people the tools to reign in their rulers so there’s no need for revolution.

Just because this process has never happened does not mean it can’t happen. The argument here is that the main parties respond to changing attitudes and reform on their own so there’s no need for new parties. The Tories in Britain, for example, moved right when UKIP got going. In America, the Democrats lurched to the left when the Green Party sprouted up in the 90’s. The Republican Party is about to move right in response to the Trump-a-paloosa.

That’s the theory. The Greeks would point out that they kept voting for something different, but nothing changed. In fact, the more they voted, the more draconian the punishments from Europe. They would have been better off having a good old fashioned military coup. At least that would have made for good television. Instead, Greece is now Germany’s Puerto Rico.

The lesson the German politicians learned, or at least appear to have learned, is that democracy is nothing but a bluff. The Greeks could have started shooting, but instead they knuckled under to German demands, even when it was a matter of pride. They would rather stop being Greek by eliminating that which makes them Greek, than take on the burden of leaving Europe and reclaiming their sovereignty.

Angela Merkel appears to be taking the same stand with the German people. Here we have genuine social unrest due to the flood of migrants she invited into the country and her response is to go after Germans who speak out about it. The mayor of Cologne, sounding like Bill Clinton, told her female citizens to just lie back and try to enjoy the rape-a-thon going on in the city square.

Just in case you are inclined to think that’s a mischaracterization, Merkel has just made a big public show of not accepting limits on allowing more Muslim rapists immigrants into the country. The only conclusion to draw from this is she thinks there’s no amount of degradation and humiliation that will cause the German public to rise up and put an end to this madness. Given the Greek experience, she’s probably right.

It’s tempting to think there’s some difference between Germans and Greeks in the view of the people in charge, but that is a mistake. As far as Merkel is concerned, the people of Cologne are no different from the people of Athens. They are not even people. They are economic units to be shifted around and eliminated in order to maintain the ruling class. If the economic units in Athens can be bullied, why think the units of Cologne will not be bullied too?

What we are witnessing in the West is the great test of liberal democracy. On the one side, all over the West we see recalcitrant mainstream parties digging in their heels on polices that benefit the global elite at the expense of the local populations. On the other side you have local populations trying to force change on their government through the liberal democratic processes. The theory says the politicians, as a matter of survival, will yield.

So far, that has not been the way to bet. Instead the main parties find new ways to subvert the will of the voters. In Greece the Germans laid siege to the country until they broke the will of the people. Closer to home, the German government is unleashing a wave of Muslim terrorism on their people, presumably as a form of intimidation. In France, the main parties have teamed up to block the third party from winning.

You don’t have to be a seer to see what’s coming. If through the accepted democratic process the will of the people is thwarted, then the people will lose respect for those processes. If the people in charge already look upon these processes with contempt, there’s no one left to support the status quo and the whole things falls to pieces. Perhaps the post-democratic world imagined by the global elite is what emerges, but 100 years ago all the smart people had similar thoughts.

Minority populations in any society tend to nurse a grudge against the majority. It’s perfectly reasonable, as a sane society of any design will abide by and cater to the desires of the majority population. Therefore, the minority group will find themselves on the fringes or under constant pressure to assimilate. This natural friction also results in a bidirectional animosity between the majority and the majority.

It’s why a sane society avoids letting the minority population gain control of the levers of power. While there is some chance it works out just fine, there is a greater chance that the minority will try to exact revenge on the majority. Alternatively, it will appear they are favoring their group over the majority. To paraphrase Lee Kuan Yew, in a mult-ethnic state, people are loyal to their tribe first. Or, so it is assumed.

In modern America, this gets squirrely because the ruling cult we call Progressives, have turned minorities, particularly blacks, into objects of worship. It’s why we have been saddled with the jug-eared clodhopper, Barak Obama, for the last seven years. Progressives truly believed he was the fulfillment of prophecy and would cleanse the soul of the nation.

As a result, the tendency is to focus on Obama’s racial animosity toward whites, because like most black people in America, Obama nurses a grudge against white people. That was fairly clear when he was running for president. His comment about rural white guys being bitter clingers was largely viewed as one of the good white/bad white signals. Bad whites go to church, own guns and are racists because they are losers.

It’s why it is tempting to think Obama’s bizarre executive actions on firearms is just a way to spite the honkies. His policies will do nothing to abate violent crime. Black guys will keep shooting black guys for sneakers, respect and other dumbass reasons. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim. The only people who will notice these changes are law abiding crackers, who like hunting and shooting paper targets.

But that’s the thing. Obama is about as black as Ned Flanders. His tribe is the cult into which he was born and raised, the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Like the Alawites fighting the Sunni majority in Syria, he looks at the majority with contempt, believing they choose to live outside of grace. This is not a black thing. It is a Progressive thing. He thinks he is on the winning side of history, so that means his opponents are losers.

Alawites are Twelvers, an eschatological brand of Islam. They believe in twelve divinely ordained leaders, known as the Twelve Imams, and they believe that the last Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, lives in occultation and will reappear as the promised Mahdi. That will mark the end of ordinary reality and begin a reunion with the Divine. The faithful organize their lives around bringing about this final event.

Progressives are a similar cult. All their talk about being on the right side of history is just another way of saying they are the elect, the people who will enter the promised land in the end times. The proof of that is they organize their lives around bringing about those end times. Once they build their city on the hill, they can move in, lock the doors and leave the losers in flyover country to their own hell.

In the mean time, like their Calvinist ancestors, Progressives invest a lot of their energy in public acts of piety. Obama just got a most everything he ever dreamed of from his rent boy Paul Ryan so he should be happy with his legislative success. Instead, he is going out of his way to let everyone know he is on the side of the angels with regards to guns. To the fanatic, there’s always room for one more mass, one more hymn, one more sacrifice.

The trouble is, like we see in Syria, Obama’s ruling sect is wildly out of touch with the majority. Since he took office, 100 million guns have been sold to Americans. This is in a country that probably had three times that number in circulation when he was elected. As we see with the Alawites in Syria, mathematics does not yield to wishful thinking. Eventually, the majority decides to impose its will on the minority.

The vast majority of Americans are waking up to the reality of their position and beginning the process of sloughing off the current ruling class. America is a peaceful and prosperous country so there’s no need for a violent revolution. But if the fanatics do not yield, well, the people are heavily armed so the revolution, if it comes, will be brief. Just in case, you may want to stock up.

Over the holiday weekend I read a book titled The Art of the Con by Anthony Amore. It is a book about art theft, a specialty of the author, who makes his living protecting art and investigating art thefts. The book is what I call a bathroom book in that it is light reading broken into  small sections. I’m a lackadaisical reader and I knocked it out over the weekend.

If you like true crime and are looking for a quick easy read to kill time on a train, plane or stage coach, it is a good choice. The author has a good understanding of the world of fine art, but is level headed about it. For instance, he acknowledges that Abstract Expressionism is easy to fake because it takes so little talent to produce. The writing style is conversational and direct, as you would expect from an investigator.

One of the interesting data points in the book is that close to 50% of fine art is fraudulent in some way. Either it is an outright forgery, a copy or was produced against the wishes of the artist by associates and understudies. The Great Masters, for instance, often relied on understudies to do much of their work so passing off the work of an understudy as that of the master is common.

Of course, art fraud is so common because it is so lucrative. Rich people collect art as a way to display their wealth within their peer group. It not only tells the other rich guys that you have loads of disposable income, it also suggests you have cultured tastes. Therefore high demand from rich people, looking for an emotional high, drives up prices for fine art and that means huge potential gains for fakers.

The strangely interesting chapter to me is on lithography where it is suggested that there are more fakes on the market than real art. The reason is “real” is not easy to pin down. As far as I can tell, the difference between authentic and fake in most cases is simply a signature. Even there, the signatures are often done by someone other than the artist. Everything about it feels shady, but people keep spending money on it.

I don’t know if it was intended, but the vibe I get from reading this chapter is the modern artists are so greedy they are fine with opening themselves up to massive fraud, as long as they can make a quick buck. The suggestion is that artists are just a click less dishonest than the con men that sell fake art to suckers. Either way, it’s hard to feel sorry for the artists.

If you are a fan of true crime, the strongest chapters are the first chapters, In fact, the one knock on the book is that it seems like the author ran out of material at about 175 pages and then filled in the rest with musings about the internet and infomercials. I found myself skipping through those quickly. It’s a book that starts strong and finishes with a whimper.

Those strong first chapters are on some of the great confidence men of the modern art world, who swindled millions from people that were savvy about the art game. The thing that stands out in his retelling is that these grifters are biologically driven to deceive people. Whether or not they feel guilt is debatable, but they know what they are doing is illegal and considered to be immoral. Yet, they keep doing it.

Unlike the Hollywood version of confidence men, the real life con-men confess quickly when caught. These are professional liars gifted at reading others. Once they see the cops have the facts, they become very cooperative, trying to earn sympathy points from the court, which often happens. Their skill at manipulating the emotions of others comes in handy in front of a judge.

The thing with con men is they see themselves as the victim so when they are caught, pleading for mercy comes naturally. The same skills they used to win the confidence of their marks are used to win sympathy from their captors. The exception is when they get caught and there’s no deal to be made. That’s when they get as mean as a cornered rat, which is not a bad comparison.

Ultimately what works for con-men is normal people have trust in others. That trust is based on altruism, a concern for the well-being of others. Confidence men lack that quality even within their kin group. It’s not that they hate their marks. It’s that they have no regard for them whatsoever. The mark has what the con-man desires to possess so he employs the necessary strategy to get what he wants.

Anyway, if you’re have an interest in true crime and need an airplane book, The Art of the Con is a good choice.

I continue to read National Review On-Line, despite having dropped the subscription to the paper version years ago. The reason is it is a canary in the coal mine sort of publication. Their selection of topics and positions indicates the current thinking within the Republican Party. They have fluff and red meat type stuff too, but it is mostly about how to sell the GOP to the public.

The Weekly Standard, in contrast, is about influencing policy and is more of a trade journal for staffers in DC. They will take a long piece on policy or strategy and package it with a bunch of fluff that managerial class staffers will find interesting. My guess is their circulation is 90% within the DC metropolitan area. It now fills the role the New Republic filled before it was destroyed by the gay Nazi from Facebook.

Anyway, this ridiculously long-winded piece on immigration from one of the fake nerds at National Review is something that got my attention. I mostly skimmed it for two reasons. One is that a 3,500 word piece is too long by default. Second, it’s obvious the author has no grasp of the subject.

For years, elite conservatives have ignored grassroots opposition to mass immigration, and Trump’s rise is their reward. That GOP primary voters are in revolt over immigration, and that so many of them are spurning elected Republicans they no longer trust, should come as no surprise.

 

Does this mean that all conservatives need to do is call for closing the borders, and then all will be well? Not by a long shot. If Republicans who favor mass immigration have been blind to its downsides, many of those who are opposed to it have themselves been blinded by nostalgia — they have failed to recognize that the more culturally homogeneous America of the 1980s, when many older conservatives came of age, is gone.

 

The result is that anti-immigration conservatives have alienated potential allies. Many centrist and liberal African Americans share conservatives’ skepticism about immigration, yet they are reluctant to join forces with a movement they see as racially exclusive. Many Hispanics and Asians, whether foreign- or native-born, see the virtue in reducing less-skilled immigration while easing the way for skilled workers. Political scientists Jens Hainmueller and Daniel Hopkins have gathered considerable evidence that support for such a policy is widespread among Americans of all backgrounds. Yet immigration advocates have deliberately framed the immigration debate as all-or-nothing, and conservatives have let them get away with it.

I’ll just note that no where in the 3,500 word article do we find numbers in favor of mass immigration of any sort. The alluded to “evidence” in this quote is never mentioned again. Like the “evidence” in support of Big Foot and extraterrestrials, the evidence in support of mass immigration is always discussed, but never presented.

Again, it is an unnecessarily long article. The argument is that the GOP needs to adopt a policy of unlimited immigration that discriminates against low-skilled immigrants. That way, the knuckle-dragging rubes in flyover country will stop bitching about the foreigners and get back on the GOP bus. Again, there’s zero data in support of the claim that immigration is good for Americans. It’s just assumed.

None of this is new, but it indicates two things. One is the GOP is still baffled by the revolt of the peasants. They are convinced the trouble is the poor white dirt people in their trailers and shanties, being displaced by the brown people of the future. If the GOP can buy them off then the American middle class will gladly sign onto what the author concedes is cultural suicide.

The other thing we see here is there’s no real interest in peeping over the walls and seeing the faces of the revolting. They prefer to imagine the Trump vote is a bunch of old white guys on Rascal Scooters, waving around the Confederate Flag. There’s a sneering contempt for the rabble outside the walls. Therefore, it is only proper to assume the worst of them.

The contempt is most obvious when they deploy their favorite phrase, “fear and resentment” to those opposed to mass immigration. The implication is that only paranoid losers oppose mass immigration. They can’t keep up so they manufacture bogeymen they can point to as an enemy. Hilariously, the author finishes by calling his war on Americans “the compassionate case for integration and assimilation.”

This being the start of 2016, I have naturally been reading up on the year 1916. Even though it was clear that Russian society, for example, was buckling under the strain of war, the tsarists were incapable of seeing things through the eyes of the Russian people. To them, the peasants and workers may as well have been foreigners, for all the connection they felt toward them.

You see the same insularity in today’s managerial elite. Reihan Salam is better than most in that he concedes that the GOP should pay some attention to its voters on the issue of immigration. The trouble is the vast majority of the managerial elite look at the American people in the same way the tsarists looked at the starving peasants of St. Petersburg, as a burden and a nuisance.

You can make the argument that insurance made the modern world possible, because it made risk quantifiable. The insurer is making a bet that the return on his investment of your premiums will exceed the claims on those premiums. In order to make that bet, he has to have some way to calculate the amount he can reasonably expect to payout in claims.

That’s one half of the equation. The other half is the investment. In order to run a profitable insurance company, you have to invest conservatively. The same guys figuring out the probability of your death this year are using the same mathematical skills to find the safest investments. The result is large pools of premiums moving into the safe investments like bonds. [1]

Niall Ferguson in the Ascent of Money gives a great history of the first modern insurance company, the Scottish Ministers Widow’s Fund. Robert Wallace and Alexander Webster figured out a few things that revolutionized capital. One of the consequences of this innovation was that large pools of capital were created from thousands of small premiums. That capital could then be put to work in new businesses, new industries and new technology.

The interesting thing about the birth of modern insurance is even after centuries of experience, we still can’t understand the difference between insurance and taxation. Social welfare programs, for example, work on the principle of pay-as-you go where current taxpayers cover the expenses of current beneficiaries. Back when the Scots were inventing modern actuarial tables, they knew pay-as-you-go could never work in the long run. Yet, here we are.

It’s also why the public sector pension systems are teetering on collapse. The Scotts figured out that a fixed benefit system had to lock in the benefit side by pegging it to the amount of premiums paid into the system. Once you uncouple the premium from the benefit, the system will collapse. The only question is how long it will take, but the boundary always seems to be one working life, as we are seeing in America.

Similarly, insurance only works when it is voluntary. When the state comes in, points a gun at your head and says you have to buy an insurance policy from the companies they choose or from the state, that’s not insurance. That’s extortion. If you want to be kind, it is a tax. When the state takes money from citizens against their will, that’s a tax, regardless of the intentions.

It’s why American health insurance is collapsing. It has none of the features one must have for a successful insurance system. The insurers are forced to take all customers, regardless of risk. They are not allowed to dump reckless customers or even ask about risky behavior. At the same time, the customers are forced to buy insurance. In many areas, there’s only one or two companies and the rates are set by the state.

Of course, what makes health insurance an impossibility is we will all get sick and die eventually. You cannot insure against certainty. A true health insurance system would combine the logic of whole life insurance to cover the inevitable with the logic of term life insurance to address surprises, like getting hit by a bus. Again, these are things we have known for centuries.

Progressives are now talking about using the same nutty ideas to “remedy” gun violence in America. They want gun owners to carry liability insurance that would pay victims in the event the insured’s gun is used in a crime. No insurance company would sell a policy to a gun owner to cover the cost of them shooting someone. There’s simply no way to shoot someone without being negligent (criminally or civilly) or justified. In both cases, insurance has no role.

The point of this, of course, is to drive up the cost of gun ownership and create a gun registry, but even if it was an honest effort, the gun owner is being held liable for the actions of others. That’s just a click away from collective punishment and contrary to a couple thousand years of western civilization. More important, it is confusing insurance with taxation. In this case, taxing millions of gun owners so politicians can hand out tax dollars to the victims of gangbangers.

All of this brings me to something Steve Sailer has been pushing with regards to immigration and that is forcing immigrants to carry liability insurance. Unlike compulsory gun insurance, the attempt here is not to infringe on a natural right. Steve is cleverly trying to introduce the idea in order to help immigration opponents. In that regard, it is clever and I hope it catches on with the chattering skulls.

The problem here is similar to the other examples of compulsory insurance. It’s really just a tax. We already have a sponsor system where people can bring over relatives and employees, as long as they meet certain financial terms. Sponsors cannot be on welfare, for example. They have to have an income higher than the current poverty line.

Where the insurance should come into play is on the sponsor and employer. If Jose wants to bring his family over, he has to either get a liability policy with a million dollar combined single limit or post assets of the equivalent. Employers seeking H1 visas would do something similar. If Jose gets rich and wants to sponsor his relatives, Jose has to carry enough insurance to cover it. Similarly, the employer will have to factor insurance costs into their indentured servant costs.

[1] I know. I know.

When you’re in the blogging rackets, there are some things you have to do if you want to survive. The most important thing to do is let everyone know you’re a badass. You can, for instance, pick out the biggest blogger on the yard and beat the hell out of him to send a message to the other bloggers. Alternatively, I went for the hand over the candle move, as I found it more aesthetically in tune with my oeuvre.

The other thing you have to do is write a New Years prediction post. I did one last year and one the year before that. Last year I got most everything wrong, but in my defense I was not trying very hard. I was going for yuks. I did think the economy would perform better and the stock market to bubble up so I was wrong on both scores. The GDP will come in under 3% for the year and the DOW finished a shade below where it started.

On the political front, I missed the Trump story entirely, but I can be forgiven for that as he was not running when I wrote that post. On the other hand, I would never have predicted his campaign anyway. I have been right on the larger theme of disintegration, just not in the details. I figured the Democrats, for example, would be in full meltdown by now. I think Trump sucking all the air out of the room has been a great benefit to Clinton, so far.

That’s enough of that. Let’s dust off the crystal ball and look at what it says about 2016.

The Fed will settle into a pattern of incremental rate hikes, showing a willingness to err on that side in order to claw back toward normalcy. Obama is a lame duck so the politics are right for taking the pain of rate hikes in 2016. The quarter point hike was shrugged off by markets so we’ll see similar hikes through the first half of the year as long as the waters remain calm.

The Federal Reserve has a tricky problem to solve in that they have to rebuild their tool case so they can address the next emergency, but they have to do so slowly so they don’t touch off a new emergency, requiring them to blow their reserves. The best time to do that is when one party is on the way out and the other is on the way in. That way, a recession can be blamed on the loser.

The political class is in a full panic over the rise of Trump in the GOP and the disastrous performance so far by Hillary Clinton. Not much attention has been paid to Hillary and her terrible campaign thus far, but that’s about to change. Donald Trump has played the Bill Cosby card on the Clintons and so far the liberal press is playing along. The Post and the Times have signed off on discussing Bill’s rape problem as a legitimate campaign item.

I’ve been saying for years that the Cult will eventually purge the Clintons. As valuable as they have been to the Democrats, their verminous rapacity offends the sensibilities of the typical Progressive. In many respects, the Clintons represent a part of the past the Cult would like to memory hole and this election may be the perfect time. 2016 will be the year the liberal media turns on the Clintons, even if it scuttles the Democrats chances of winning the White House.

Speaking of Trump, I’m going to say he finishes third in Iowa, but close enough to make it meaningless. Cruz will win because he has the support of the religious groups and they tend to rally around one candidate. Rubio looks like the horse the establishment plans to ride. My guess is the Carson vote goes to him as they have always been the most skittish voters. The final totals will be a virtual three-way tie so while Trump will be third, he can pitch it as a tie.

Trump will win New Hampshire and by a big margin. His performance in Iowa will be enough to dispense with the idea that he will fade away. It will also reassure New Hampshire voters that he is not a religious wacko or beholden to them. This means more to these voters than commonly understood. Trumps big win in the Granite State will cause the Old Man of the Mountain to spontaneously reassemble.

Shifting to something lighter, I’ll pick the New England Patriots to make the Super Bowl and they will face the Arizona Cardinals. Similarly, I will pick the Red Sox to win the American League and make it to the World Series. The shocker will be that the New York Yankees become the first team in baseball history to finish 0-and-162.

English soccer leagues will not go bankrupt this year as I expect to be in attendance for games in the spring. That means I’ll either have to find some other excuse, but I’m leaning toward sucking it up and indulging in some good old fashioned hooliganism. If my British readers hear of an old man speaking with a funny accent leading a soccer riot, it’s probably me.

On the technology front, cord cutting will accelerate through the year and begin to threaten the current arrangements. The math of cord cutting is obvious and now the technology is making it easy. Old habits die hard, but they die faster when the new habit is easy to acquire. Plugging in a magic box and watching TV on demand is reaching the point where anyone can do it. By this time next year content providers will be scurrying to find a way to survive in an on-demand world.

Finally, let’s make some predictions about the foreigners. The collapse of oil prices will further destabilize the Middle East leading to more migrants flooding into Europe. The story of 2016 will be the sudden shift in the political consensus with regards to immigration as the established parties seek to check the rising parties of the Right. Suddenly, it will be Ok to talk about borders, deportations and assimilation.

The Russians will quietly begin to court the Kurds, offering low-level military aid with promises of more aid to defend against the Turks. The Turks will respond with even more aggressive acts against Russia air and sea assets. The first real crisis of NATO since the Cold War will be how to handle the potential outbreak of war between Turkey and Russia.

North Korea will test a fusion weapon setting off a true crisis in Asia. China can tolerate a crude atomic weapon in North Korea, but she cannot tolerate them having a fusion weapon. Similarly, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan will have to fundamentally rethink their defense posture. The great shift in 2016 will be from containing China to working with China to deal with the NORKS.

One of the more entertaining aspects of the Trump Effect is watching members of the so-called conservative media throw around the word “conservative” like a magic spell. Some utter the word within incantations intended to make Trump disappear. Others use it to ward off the hordes of Trump supporters they fear are about to break their beloved party.

The word “conservative’ has lost all meaning, which is what you see in this post on NRO the other day. Jim Geraghty is no Genius T. Coates so you have to look past the logical fallacies at the beginning, but you’ll note that what Geraghty thinks of as “conservative” is just a shopping list of Republican proposals with a healthy dollop of social engineering.

The panic among the chattering classes is obvious and the Geraghty piece has the feel of someone bargaining for his life. The only thing missing is the “I’ll give you anything you want” line that Hollywood imagines everyone says when facing death. A year ago, they were sure that one of the guys from central casting would be the nominee and now they see it all falling to pieces. The dirt people have breached the walls.

Whenever I read these columns, I keep thinking of the bit from Braveheart at the first battle. This was before Mel shows up to give his big speech. The troops are about to split after seeing the English forming up and one of the nobles pleads with them, “Do not flee. Wait until we’ve negotiated.”  That’s GOP Inc. these days. They want one last chance to surrender negotiate.

The problem for Conservative Inc is they conceded a critical principle a long time ago that puts them forever at odds with traditional American conservatism. That is, they surrendered on the fundamental right of association, which is the bedrock of American conservatism. Once the state can dictate to you with whom you can associate or disassociate, you are no longer a citizen. Every conceivable right depends on the ability to band together or walk away, as necessary.

The remedy was to grasp about for ways to gain the ends that naturally flow from freedom of association, without upsetting the Left over the issue of race. The trouble is that it was always a matter of time before the Left could close the loop and make everything about race. They even made the weather a racial issue so anything of consequence was going to be easy pickings for the Cult.

Long ago, the official Right came to an accommodation with the other side of the Yankee ruling class. A movement that fundamentally stands outside the traditions and instincts of Public Protestantism is forever trapped in that framework. Public intellectuals of the Right spend their lives trying to make their movement, their philosophy, comport with the ethics and aesthetics of the Progressives.

Once the Right gave into the Left on association, equating it with racism and therefore off-limits, the Right stopped being an opposition movement and became a partner. One side wants to use the power of the state to compel certain behavior, while the other sides either counsels caution or argues for different goals. Whether or not the state herds the people around is no longer an issue up for debate.

That’s what has the official Right in a panic over Trump and the growing resistance to immigration. If the people can debate who is and who is not allowed in for settlement, then freedom of association is back on the table. That means the average American can decide with whom he lives and, by extension, with whom he refuses to associate. More important, it calls into question the modern Right’s place in the ruling consensus.

In the novel The Sound and the Fury, Quentin Compson is the son of a once prominent Southern family who is at school at Harvard. Quentin wishes to reject his father’s antiquated philosophy, but the world he lives in seems constantly to affirm that view of the world. Eventually, unable to reconcile his place in the cultural timeline with the world in which he lives, he throws himself off a bridge and drowns in the Charles River.

The official Right finds itself in a similar dilemma. They desperately want to find some way to reject the past without succumbing to the present. The Bill Buckley experiment has been a generational attempt to accommodate traditional American conservatism with the dominant Public Protestantism that we now call Progressivism.

For a long time they were sure they unridddled it, but now here they are facing what they see as the Snopes clan. They look at Trump and his supporters as vermin who threaten the great project. Instead of strolling the ivy covered walls of elite institutions, the official Right is about to drown in the odor of honeysuckle. Like Quenton Compson, they see no way to resolve the past with the present.

After the American Civil War, the big issues, with regards to politics in the country, were decided. The vanquished portions of the nation would have a say in the running of the country, but only within the constraints of the settled upon political system. America would be a country with a strong central government that would dominate the federal system conceived by the Founders. The debate would be about how much it controls and how quickly.

The idea, for example, that the restraints on the national government listed in the Bill of Rights should now apply to state and local government would have seemed odd to the Founders. States, for example, had official religions. As late as the 1830s Massachusetts provided tax money to local Congregational churches. The 14th Amendment applied the Bill of Rights to states, thus altering the fundamental relationship between the states and the Federal government.

From the Civil War forward, politics in America was largely a domestic dispute between the factions within the victorious coalition. You see this in the choice of presidents. The First “southerner” to win on his own after the Civil War was Wilson in 1912 and he remains the greatest of outliers in American politics. Both Johnsons and Truman got there by virtue of death. The next true southerner to win was Carter and again we see very strange conditions.

You can probably argue that the post-Civil War arrangements would have collapsed in the 20th century except for the great wars of Europe and then the Cold War. The crisis in global capitalism leading up to The Great War and then the war itself, placed enormous power in the hands of the federal government. The rise of America as global hegemon after the Second War made Washington DC the capital of the world throughout the Cold War.

Then something happened, something no one seems to discuss much these days. That is, the collapse of the Soviet Union and along with it the end of ideological socialism. Up until the 1990, the world was defined as capitalism on one side and Marxism on the other. Suddenly, one end of the scale collapsed, at least in terms of economics and morality. In the blink of an eye, being a Marxist went from avant-garde to ridiculous.

The 1992 election was cast at the time as the point where the Baby Boomers took over and that was true to a point. It was also the point where the Democrats threw in the towel on socialism. They embraced global capitalism with the enthusiasm of a convert. It’s not an accident that the great banking “reforms” happened in the Clinton years, embraced by both parties.

The trouble for both parties is they lost their reason to exist when ideological Marxism collapsed. It is always argued that this has been worse for the GOP than for the Democrats, but the opposite is true. In the Clinton years the Democrats went from being the majority party to the minority party. From 1994 onward, the party was in a steady retreat politically and ideologically.

The 2000 presidential election felt like a pivotal one because you had a vestigial Southern Democrat versus a Yankee heretic. The main source of hatred toward Bush from the Cult was his apparent rejection of the culture of Yankeedom for the culture of Hooterville. The venomous hatred of Bush was what you see from the betrayed. The Left was the shrewish ex-wife and Bush was the philandering husband.

That anger was put to good use. By 2006 the New New Left had a sales pitch, even if they had nothing to pitch. Voters will pick energy over lethargy and the Democrats in the mid-2000’s had plenty of energy. Then they found Black Jesus and could run as moral crusaders, even though they could not articulate the point of the crusade. They had to search around the fringes for victims to champion and wrongs to be righted.

Homosexual marriage, tranny rights, ghetto rage, micro-aggressions and faux rape culture are all the result of grasping around at the edges of life looking for something, anything, which can be made into a banner. Each grasp deeper into the darkness returns something even more preposterous. Liberalism,  and by extension the Democratic Party, has become a road side freak of self-beclownment.

So-called serious progressivism today is mostly just nostalgia. Lefty plutocrats like Rahm Emmanuel, a man who made millions in a no-show job on Wall Street, vacations in Cuba while Chicago descends into a race war. George Soros, the great benefactor of modern progressivism, is a billionaire global capitalist.

The Left and by extension the Democrats, now embrace the same economics as the so-called Right. Both sides lust after riches in the financial markets. Both sides embrace global corporatism. The Left champions the liquidation of labor rights through advocacy of open borders. Think about that. There’s a reason it is hard to see the difference between the parties. There isn’t one.

Much is made of the circus going on in the GOP primary, but look at the Democratic side. The party that used to brag about its youth and creativity is offering a worn out old grifter and a ridiculous commie that looks like he strolled out of a 1940’s movie on communism. The two of them are out campaigning in mobility scooters. The one young guy in the race can’t draw flies.

The great reordering that is under way is due to the collapse of the raison d’être of the American ruling class. What animated politics in America for the last several generations has been the interplay between Progressives and the defenders of the status quo, played out in the shadow of the Cold War.

The Left collapsed as an intellectual movement when the Cold War ended, but the Right collapsed as a pragmatic alternative. You can’t have one without the other. In a single generation, the Left has adopted the economics of the Right and the Right has adopted the politics of the Left. Neither side has a reason to exist outside of naked greed.

The policy of containment, with respect to the Soviet Union and the Cold War, evolved at the end of World War II and into the post-war period because the other options were not practical. Sending the US army to push the Russians out of eastern Europe would have been an impossible sell to the American public, assuming it was even possible. Dropping a nuke on Moscow would have been a public relations disaster.

On the other hand, simply letting the Russians dominate Europe was out of the question politically, even though many within the American ruling elite were communists. There had to be a way to keep most of Europe free that did not result in a war with Russia. Containment was the near perfect solution. It kept the Russians in check, created thousands of jobs for the Yankee elite and fed the military-industrial complex.

That’s not intended to imply that the people who crafted and developed the Western response to the Soviets thought all this through in advance. It just evolved into the best solution. At the onset it scratched the itch, the need to respond to Soviet aggression, but over time it proved to be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of various constituencies within the ruling class.

The funny thing about the Cold War is it preserved the American ruling consensus long after the facts on the ground justified it. The public was not going to support overturning the apple cart as long as the threat of nuclear annihilation was very real. That naturally made anyone advocating great change a threat and they were easily painted as a hothead or commie.

The result was a self-policing where the Left kept their commies in the lower ranks and the Right kept their hot heads out of sight. Within living memory a ridiculous fop like Barak Obama would have been kept in the community organizing department where he could not cause trouble. Of course, fear of nuclear annihilation kept the public from questioning the arrangements, even if meant keeping the black man down.

Since the end of the Cold War a quarter century ago, the ruling elites have lost their footing, staggering around like drunks. In Europe, the main parties are imploding into a single party relying on skulduggery to overcome a lack of purpose. The recent French elections demonstrate their willingness to lock shields to preserve the status quo, even when they can’t come up with reason for maintaining it.

In America, the Democrats are a party for men in dresses and women in muumuus. The Republicans are the land of misfit toys, politicians just not weird enough for the other team. The ructions in the GOP primary reveal the party establishment to be hollow men with no reason to exist beyond habit. The Democrats look like God’s waiting room, an old pinko in a pantsuit versus an old an old pinko in pants.

For the past few decades, there’s been no real cost to excess, but that’s changing as the demographic explosion on the fringes of civilization threaten the West with an invasion of barbarians from over the horizon. Islam presents both a cultural and demographic challenge. Africa presents a demographic and biological challenge. So far, the ruling elites have failed to come to terms with this looming threat.

It strikes me that the rise of “far far far extreme right wing” parties in Europe and the rise of the “extreme right wing racist Donald Trump” in America may turn out to be a catalyst for how the ruling class responds to the next great challenge to civilization. While abandoning anti-racism, multiculturalism and egalitarianism is unthinkable, all three can be shoehorned into a new policy of containment.

Keeping the Mahommedan bottled up in his own lands, a new policy of containment, has obvious practical benefits to the West. Capping off Africa by making the Mediterranean a real barrier to entry (and maybe bribing the countries of the Maghreb), helps solve the African explosion as well. The Arabs would simply refocus their attention on making the Sahara a natural barrier again.

At the same time, containment means not mucking about in the affairs of the Mahommedan. In the Cold War, the West left the Eastern Bloc to the care of the Soviets. They had their sphere of influence and we had ours. The new containment would follow the same model. Let the Mahommedan manage his lands as he sees fit, but keep him bottled up in those lands, behind a technological, cultural and military curtain.

The benefit to the ruling class is it gives them a natural reason to exist. They are holding back the tides and sensible citizens will not want to risk that by supporting fringe candidates. It also brings back the natural self-policing that comes from permanent war. The Left will suppress their one-word fanatics, while the Right will keep their invade the world nutters under wraps.

Of course, the military and the diplomatic core will have plenty of reasons to get money and jobs for their people. Muffy Pemberton can pop out of Harvard and take a job in the diplomatic core, while Dwayne Haskins can make a career out of standing guard at the boarders. The Yankee ruling class gets the band back together, just focused on a different enemy. They can even, wink-wink, argue about which side has the best approach.

The sales pitch can center around the fact that it is more effective to send aid to these people than it is to resettle them in the West. There’s also the benefit of keeping their best and brightest in their home countries so they can help develop their societies. There’s the obvious safety angle, keeping the Mahommedan from exploding in your local coffee shop.It’s an easy sell with obvious benefits.

Containment. It’s not just for commies anymore.

I see that I have won an award for best blog. The details are here and this is the trophy:

I haven’t had an orthodox career, and I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect. The first time I didn’t feel it, but this time I feel it, and I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!