The other day, some one posted a link to this post by the late Larry Auster. I was not a frequent reader of Larry’s while he was alive, but I have read more of his work since his death. It’s a funny thing. I should have been a big fan of his work, but there’s only so many hours in a day and you can’t follow everyone. That and a dozen years ago I was a little wore down by paleo-con moaning about George Bush.

Anyway, his commentary about Jonah Goldberg reminded me that it has been a long time since I’ve read Goldberg. I was a regular reader up until his first book, which I thought was very good. If you want a good primer on 20th century Progressive history, it is a good option. Up until that point, Jonah was an irreverent slacker smart-ass, but after he wrote a book he tried to turn himself into a very serious person, which was a good decision. The money is better.

A couple of years ago he tried to get back to being an irreverent smart-ass again with his G-File columns, but they were painfully unfunny so I stopped reading them. They just felt hackneyed and corny, like seeing an old comic try to do his act after 20 years away from the stage. Tastes change, people change, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. All humorists have their time and once it is gone, they start to sound, well, hackneyed and corny.

A good example of that is P.J. O’Rourke, who has always struck me as a nasty, self-absorbed d-bag. Maybe there was a time when he was funny, but I’ve never stumbled upon an example of it. I’m told he was hilarious at National Lampoon when he penned stuff like this. There’s no accounting for taste, but there was never a time in my life when that was funny to me, not even as a child when cornball humor goes over well.

The other day the twitter machine was buzzing with this column written by O’Rourke that may be humor or maybe not. I really can’t tell. It just reads like a bitter old man saying nasty things about someone out of jealousy.

Toward Ann Coulter I had always taken a “suffer little children to come unto me” attitude. Not that she ever came on to me or anything. It’s just that she’s a kid. She was born in 1961. I’ve got skinny Brooks Brothers neckties in the back of my closet older than that.

Hilarious. O’Rourke is pointing out that he he very old and has old stuff. That’s a real knee-slapper.

Ann Coulter grew up during the “I-was-conservative-after-conservatism-was-cool” era, helping found the Cornell Review in the early 1980s. She’s noisy and she gives me a headache. But kids are, and kids do. I have several.

Actually, the 1980’s was pretty much when “conservatism” became cool. It’s also when he decided his left-leaning hippy routine was becoming dated so he went with the libertarian shtick.That way, he could make fun of the lefties, but also play the old crowd by mocking the Right. To quote myself, libertarianism is standing on the sidelines and pretending it is on principle.

That last line is a classic insecure old-manism. Coulter is a middle-aged woman so calling her a kid allows the old fart to dismiss her like a servant. It’s a defense mechanism you see with old men who fear they can no longer keep up. O’Rourke is not a dunce so he knows he is a yesterday man and he is bitter about it.

The rest of it is mostly sad. Writing is not a young man’s game, but it is not geriatric man’s game either. Some guys stay fresh well into their dotage or they stick to subjects where being a geezer works well. But, all of us lose our fastball eventually. For a guy that is mostly getting by on shtick, the fastball goes early. If O’Rourke ever had a fastball, it is long gone.

Of course, The Weekly Standard is not trying to send a fastball at Coulter’s head. They just want to let her know to take it easy on the Jew stuff. This brush back was more like throwing behind the batter so you know he won’t get hit, but he’ll get the message. Having the old washed up guy do it is safe because even if he plunks her, nothing is going to come of it.

In 2008, Mitt Romney ran as the guy to the right of John McCain, which was not too hard given McCain’s record. The trouble for Romney was that he was not much of a conservative, by anyone’s reckoning so the party splintered. Evangelicals could not stomach a Mormon so they lined up behind their coreligionist, Mike Huckabee. McCain had the party bosses behind him, who thought having a black president was too important to wage a serious challenge in the general.

In 2012, Romney re-purposed himself into Robo-Conservative. His programming was combed through for any defects and bugs so that no matter which buttons you pushed, out popped the standard “conservative” response. It was a bit creepy watching a guy from West World run for president, but they say we will be ruled over by robots soon enough so it was good practice. The thing with Romney is that he said the right things, but no one believed him.

That’s the problem with “evolution” in politics. If you start out as a gun enthusiast who tried to bargain with the gun-grabbers, but evolved into a 2A absolutist, people understand your journey and they believe you.  If you start out as a gun-grabber and then suddenly change positions, you better have a damned good story. Otherwise, you’re worse than wrong, you’re a liar.

The Romney career is a great example. For twenty years he kept evolving to meet the situation in which he found himself as a candidate. It was not that he evolved as a candidate that got him in trouble. It was that voters understood he would never stop evolving and that once in office he could turn out to be anything or nothing. To paraphrase Malcolm X, Romney believed in nothing so he would fall for anything.

Fiorina has the same problem, but it is not quite as evident to the voters. I pointed out the other day that she is a stalking horse for the party bosses. They are tarting her up to walk the same streets as Trump, hoping she can lure enough of his vote away to sink his candidacy. Some guy at Bloomberg, who maybe reads this blog or can see the obvious, has a similar take on the Fiorina show.

Carly Fiorina is looking like the insider’s outsider candidate.

On the surface, it’s clear why the national political mood has swept her, Donald Trump, and Ben Carson to the top of Republican presidential polls. A former California technology executive, she has never held elected office, a profile that a plurality of Americans say they prefer to a candidate with gubernatorial or U.S. Senate experience.

Yet, as she recently demonstrated when otherwise-feuding Republican lawmakers showed up to see her on Capitol Hill, she also has Washington credentials that have won her fans inside the Beltway, even as she seeks the nomination with a strategy that makes the GOP establishment a frequent punching bag.

I always thought that the problem with Romney, in the end, was that he was an insult to the voters. The people who championed Romney just assumed that the voters were too stupid to think about it too closely so they would line up behind him as their betters instructed. Most did, but many were disgusted by it all and stayed home. Whether or not it was enough to swing the result is debatable, but it was enough to be debatable.

Now the same folks that were ready to sell us Jeb Bush are now, in response to the revolt on the Right, selling Carly! Fiorina as the antidote to what ails the American Right. She is making many of the same noises that the angry rubes in hooterville find attractive in Trump, but she’s not one of those dirt people the modern GOP finds so disgusting. The trouble is, she is just Mitt Romney in drag.

Abortion is one of those issues that is a litmus test issue. If you think it is a barbaric act, you are never in favor of anything that makes it more attractive or available. There’s no wiggle room there. You can allow for its legality and acknowledge the moral ambiguity in certain circumstances, but you do so through gritted teeth. If you were waving the Planned UnParenthood banner around, your conversion to the pro-life cause better have happened on the road to Damascus. Otherwise, you’re just adding “liar” to your list of defects.

Coincidentally, abortion was the issue that really hamstrung Romney as he could never come up with a plausible answer for why he kept changing his opinion. By plausible, I mean one that did not indicate he was a soulless sociopath who would say anything to get elected. Fiorina is a more gifted liar than Romney, having climbed the greasy pole of corporate politics, which requires great skill at apple polishing. But her polling suggests she is not catching on with voters outside the Acela Corridor.

Placing the Carly! phenomenon in the timeline with Romney, the picture that emerges is of a party that has no idea why it is a party anymore. All they know is they are not Democrats. The Democrats are not much better as they are just a collection of fads designed to piss off the squares in normalville. One party is a revolt against commonsense, the other is a response to that revolt, with neither having anything to offer beyond hysterics.

Most men grow out of libertarianism, if they were ever so foolish, by their mid-20’s. It is at that age when you have enough experience in the world to see the foolishness of it. It takes longer for the young Progressive male to wake up because of the cultural reinforcements all around us. We live in lands controlled by the Cult of Modern Liberalism. To be something other than a Progressive tests the mind on a daily basis.

I’m fond of pointing out that liberalism and libertarianism are two sides of the same coin. People find that assertion bizarre, but both are utopian and both start with a hatred of humanity. That is the heart of materialism, after all. Materialism places efficency at the top of the moral hierarchy and people somewhere further down. The main difference between the faiths is the the liberal hates all men equally, while the libertarian simply detests the unfit.

This is on full display in this column by Kevin Williamson. The style is familiar where the curdled hatred of humanity is couched in an ad hoc critique of the bogeymen that haunt the dreams of reactionaries and libertarians alike. There’s also the standard layer of free market frosting about the glories of free trade and the free movement of people. It’s the part we’re supposed to notice, rather than the sadistic misanthropy at the core of the article.

Phillips, Inc., in the end decided it had no need for Phillips, Texas, and the town was scrubbed right off the map. The local homeowners owned their houses but not the land they sat on, which belonged to the company. (These sorts of arrangements were, and are, more common than you’d think, as in the case of the many Californians in the Coachella Valley who own their houses but lease their land from the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians.) Many of the residents of Phillips were uneager to be evicted from their homes, and they sued the company with the help of the famously theatrical Texas trial lawyer Racehorse Haynes, who informed the good people of Phillips: “They might whup us fair and square, but they better bring lunch.” Lunch was served, and Phillips is just gone.
It was the right thing to do. Some towns are better off dead.

That’s always been the truth at the heart of libertarianism, as well as the various implementations of Rousseau’s monstrous ideas. Libertarians have always imagined themselves as trapped with a bunch of fat lazy takers. Lacking the courage to confront the slackers themselves, they seek a system that will do the dirty work for them. Liberals have this same view. They see themselves as the saints of a fallen world and their system will take care of all those sinners.

Way back in the olden thymes, Whittaker Chambers unriddled this connection in his review of Ayn Rand.

Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In a age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

The liberal and the libertarian look at the messy arrangements of mankind and wish to clean the slate and start anew, because to work through the current arrangements is dirty and time consuming. One does not seek to alter the current arrangements out of a love or respect for the current arrangements. All utopians first aim to destroy and that is done best with a passion, which can only arise from contempt.

That’s what bleeds from Kevin Williamson’s writing. He looks at the “losers” in America with contempt. Some towns are better off dead. My guess is he thought that was a cheeky line, as he tends to the adolescent, but maybe he did think much about it. As Chambers noticed, libertarians are not full of introspection.

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left, first surprisingly resemble, then in action tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purposed, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

That last line sounds remarkably like Lenin’s adage, “who, whom?”

I’m not a fan of Jim Goad, mostly because I have no respect for wife beaters, but I have read his columns at Taki from time to time. His latest is here and it starts with this:

Just like menstrual cramps and labor contractions, feminism comes in waves. Apparently we’re at the end of the third wave and on the cusp of the fourth. I don’t know what any of this means, either, so I looked it up.

It’s a pretty typical example of his work. Goad loves the vulgar and the crude. Here’s another example from a previous column:

At least that’s the stock retort lobbed like a Molotov cocktail at anyone who dares to articulate the undeniable mathematical fact that Jewish per-capita income is about twice America’s national average. It’s the term smeared like rat feces across the face of anyone who dispassionately points out that for a group comprising around 2% of the American population, Jews wield academic, cultural, and financial power way beyond their numbers.

Now, I’m no expert on rats or their droppings, but I’m pretty sure it is close to impossible to smear rat feces on anything. The point of the absurd image, of course, is not to illuminate, but to revolt, which is pretty much the point of every Jim Goad column, as far as I can tell. It’s a genre of performance that I call groty realism. The point, it seems to me, is to drag everything into the muck in order to mock it. I could be all wrong on that, but that’s the sense I get.

Goad is not a solo act. Kathy Shaidle and Ann Sterzinger write for Taki and employ groty realism in their columns. They do a lot less of it, but enough to put both in that column. I guess Gavin McInnes should be in that club as well, but he’s more of a television personality to me than a writer. Still, in his Taki columns he likes to dwell on the coarse and the crude.

I’m fond of pointing out that there is no accounting for taste so I can’t say if this style of presentation is better or worse than some other style. I’m not fond of it, but I’m not fond of the quill pen style of writing either. I tend to like a conversational tone and in my daily conversations, people don’t compare things to menstrual cramps or diarrhea, even when talking about menstrual cramps and diarrhea.

I’m a bit torn on the term. I call it “groty realism” because it plays off the term “gritty realism” that has been around for while in literature. The realism movement got going in America in the early 20th century. The subject matter went progressively down the social ladder until we got something called Kmart Realism in the 80’s, where all the characters were poor, white trash losers. The logical leap down is where all the characters are chronic masterbaters and coprophiles.

For whatever reason it reminds me of a few summers ago at Hampton Beach in Massachusetts. Like all public beaches, it is mostly populated by the lower strata of American society. You see lots of white guys with bad tattoos trailing behind pram faced women pushing strollers. Of course, you see loads of caramel colored kids running around. All the preaching about antiracism has actually been applied at the lower levels of society.

But, it’s mostly a celebration of social pathologies. Few of the men work so they carry themselves like men with no purpose. It’s a swagger that tells the you that all they have to offer the world is on their back and it is usually a poorly drawn tattoo. The women chat endlessly into cell phones, stopping to eat and scream at their misbehaving children. The great American underclass is a hodgepodge of Progressive fads adopted by people who can’t afford them.

My grandfather used to remark that when he was a child a century ago that the poor looked up to the middle who looked up to the rich. Then something happened and the rich started taking their cues from the poor and before long every vulgar and base human instinct was held up up as something to be performed in public. He may have had just a seventh grade education, but he was good at noticing things.

I wonder if the “something happened” part of the story is not in some way tied to the ascent of realism in western culture. When artists, writers, singers, poets and so on were looking up, everyone looked up with them. When they started looking down, everyone’s eyes followed to the point where we search the gutter for the right metaphor to describe our existence.

On the other hand, art is a reflection of the culture that produces it so the decline of the west preceded the decline in the arts. 150 years ago there was no audience for talking about your bowel movements whilst smearing yourself with pudding. People had more dignity. They also had a reason to look up, at least they thought they did. Now all they see is nothing so I suppose it makes sense to look down. At least there’s something to look at, even if it just their reflection.

If you have lived in one of the Cult’s strongholds for any amount of time, you learn how to navigate around your local moonbats so as to avoid the harangue about whatever it is they are into at the moment. A decade ago when they started vibrating in ecstasy over homo marriage, the safe course was to say, “Let ’em be as miserable as the rest of us!” Then you could walk away without having to listen to the sermon.

Libertarians have built an entire philosophy around avoiding contact with the enemy. Gay marriage? They are against marriage licenses! Immigration? They are against borders! Whatever the issue, they always have some third implausible option they champion so everyone can ignore them. In the culture wars that have roiled the nation over the last fifty years, libertarians have been hiding under their beds.

Anyway, that may be a fine way to avoid conflict, but it makes public discourse impossible. A good example of it is in this screed about Matt Damon in America’s newspaper of record.

Matt Damon is an insufferable jerk. You know it. I know it. Rupert Everett most certainly does.

The Hollywood liberal (read: smug hypocrite) has interrupted the outer-space high surrounding Friday’s release of his Oscar-bait star turn, “The Martian,” to conduct a parallel “I’m Not a Homophobe” tour. But it’s only driving him deeper into the quicksand with LGBTQ types and those, like me, who couldn’t care less whom a performer loves. It’s 2015, Matt. Get over yourself!

He should grovel. GLAAD should dedicate a lecture series to him.

He should shut the hell up.

I’m betting that Andrea Peyser would care a lot if a celeb was found to be “loving” a sheep or a little boy. This affected indifference when it comes to homosexuals is exactly that, artificial. To have an opinion about homosexuals, other than the enthusiastic embrace, means you are evil, maybe even Hitler. If you can’t stomach being Hitler or you cannot embrace sodomy, then you choose the third option, which is to stand on the sidelines and pretend you do so on principle.

Now, Matt Damon is a lunk head and he says batty things. That just makes him a typical Hollywood performer. He’s in a business dominated by gay men so he is courting trouble by speaking publicly about the queers. He could stand up and say all Christians are Nazi pedophiles and his peers would applaud. Appear less than enthusiastic about buggery and you get to bunk with Mel Gibson. Shutting up is probably the best path for him to take.

If you want to live in some version of Iran, ceding the floor to the fanatics is a good way to do it. That is where we are headed. As the space for honest disagreement grows smaller, the number of people willing to risk getting the Hitler treatment grows smaller. Before long the only people left on stage are the guys with the clubs. Andrea Peyser’s admonition, “He should just shut up” becomes a way a life.

Whenever a lunatic goes bonkers and shoots up a public place, the usual suspects march around in public, waving their banners and making a nuisance of themselves. Whether or not we have more lunatics going on shooting rampages is debatable. The figures are always gaffed by the people presenting them so they can claim science! supports their side. What no one can dispute is that we have more people with more guns, but the lowest violent crimes rates since the 80’s. Whatever is causing the nuts to go bonkers, it is not the guns.

William Saletan, a minor moonbat writer at Slate, is a good example of the deranged logic of Progressives in defense of the One True Faith. His piece on the latest mass shooting is the sort of thing that you would expect from a college freshman, but it is pretty standard stuff from the modern Left. There’s the requisite bogeyman (Republicans), the hero (Obama) and a series of cheers that are supposed to be an argument.

He writes that Obama is “raising a question that Republican candidates for president ought to answer: Our country has a strikingly high rate of killings. If it’s not because of our prodigious stockpile of firearms, what’s your explanation?”

Think about the implication of that statement. The mere presence of guns causes some portion of the public to fly into a rage and murder people. That’s the only conclusion one can draw from that argument. Even nuttier, it means that shaping metal in a certain way imbues it with the magical power to make an otherwise passive man become violent and murderous. Of course, you also have the classic logical fallacy of declaring that only one possible cause can explain the observed result.

Now, it is unlikely that Saletan believes in magic, but he is a true believer. As such, the other possible reasons for American’s elevated crime rates are off-limits. It’s not a lot different than how ancient people would assume witchcraft as an explanation for extraordinary events. When you can’t come up with anything rational, the only thing you have left is the supernatural. For Progressives, guns are magic that make people commit crimes.

Another example of this superstitious fear of knowing the true cause of crime in America is this story from 538 back in the summer. You have the typical Nate Silver treatment of the issue with lots of weird charts and tables. Then you get to the end where he slips in a bit of forbidden knowledge, assuming his Progressive readers never bother to read the whole thing. He writes:

The Charleston killings were unusual in that it was a mass shooting — and also in that the suspect is of a different race than the victims (both black and white homicide victims are much more likely to be killed by someone of their own race.) But that doesn’t negate that the threat black Americans face from homicide is radically different from the one whites do.

Get that? Blacks are killed in much higher numbers than other races, but they are killed by other blacks because murder is almost always intra-racial. Whites tend to kill whites, blacks kill blacks and so forth. Since blacks are much more likely to be victims, and blacks kill other blacks, well, you know what follows. That truth is so horrifying to Progressives it can never be said. It can only be implied and only through oblique references.

The truth is America does not have a gun problem or even a murder problem. America has a black guy problem. According to the Federal government, young black males make up 3% of the population and commit 27% of the homicides. Put another way, if black crime rates fell to the same level of whites, America would have an overall crime rate of a typical European country.

I did a series of posts on Africa a long time ago and one of them listed the intentional homicide rates. Sub-Saharan Africa has some outlandish murder rates, but they are consistent with what we see in American in cities like Baltimore and Detroit. America’s blacks are actually less violent than blacks in the mother country so that speaks well of the civilizing effects of civilization, but it still means there is a biological component to violence.

Progressives, of course, cannot accept that as it means a big chunk of the One True Faith is invalid. Reality, however, is making that increasingly difficult.

Palm readers claim to be able to see a person’s future in the patterns on their hands, but it seems it is possible to also learn about their ancestral past too from their fingers. Fingerprints – already used as a way to identify individuals – appear to encode information about a person’s ancestral background. Researchers have found there are distinct differences in how fingerprint ridges split between people of European and African ancestry. The researchers claim their findings could prove useful not just for anthropologists but also for modern law enforcement when trying to profile suspects.

Professor Ann Ross, an anthropologist at North Carolina State University who led the study, said: ‘This is the first study to look at this issue at this level of detail, and the findings are extremely promising. ‘A lot of additional work needs to be done, but this holds promise for helping law enforcement. ‘This finding also tells us that there’s a level of variation in fingerprints that is of interest to anthropologists, particularly in the area of global population structures.’

The researchers, whose work is published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, examined the right index fingerprints of 243 individuals. They looked at both the level one details, such as pattern types and ridge counts, and the level two details, which are more specific variations such as bifurcations – where ridges split – ridge endings and other structures. They analysed the prints of 61 African American women, 61 African American men, 61 European American women and 60 European American men. While they could not find any significant differences between men and women, they did find significant differences in the level two details of fingerprints between people of European and African descent.

If fingerprints carry racial markers, it is no longer possible to argue that race is anything but biological reality. How the Cult of Modern Liberalism contends with the growing amount of data contradicting a major chunk of their worldview is not clear, but denial cannot go on forever. Otherwise, they will all sound as nutty as William Saletan and the next stop is marginalization. We can only hope.

The late great Joe Sobran argued that modern American liberalism embraced abnormality as a replacement for the allegiance to international communism. The Soviet Empire was a murderous and nullifying creation, but the American Left simply ignored its reality and instead pretended it was the path to some glorious future. When reality made that impossible. The Hive was left without a queen and found a variety of causes like gay rights around which to organize.

Sobran was mostly right in his description of the post-Soviet Progressives, but I don’t think he truly appreciated the nature of the American Left. As he wrote in one of his columns, for him the Left was an odor, something he could sense, but not fully describe. He was not alone. The Right was just as warped as the Left by the defeat of Nazism and the subsequent Cold War. It was the lens through which everything was viewed for half a century.

The big mistake, I think, is to assume the American Left is just a traveling partner of the European Left. The Right has turned “socialist” into an epithet that has no meaning. Calling Obama a socialist or his health care scheme socialism is just a way to lodge a protest. The Right and the Left have embraced the basics of socialism for close to a century now. The debate is over how far to go with it. The last serious politician to advocate the end of Social Security, for example, was Barry Goldwater.

When Christianity failed as a unifying force for Europe, nationalism filled the void. “If all of us can’t be God’s people, well, maybe some of us can be God’s people” was what bound the people to each other and their rulers. When nationalism failed, various forms of socialism filled the void. Fascism, socialism and communism are European heresies, with communism as the first serious effort to unify Europe under a single religion since the Thirty Years War.

In America, what emerged after the Civil War was Public Protestantism mainly in New England and Private Protestantism in the rest of the country. The old Puritans had always believed that each person’s salvation was predetermined. What mattered was carrying out God’s work on earth. Put another way, you signaled your salvation status through public piety and working toward the perfection of society. That’s why New England has always been the hotbed of utopian lunacy.

Private Protestantism is the mirror opposite, starting with the status of one’s soul. Your garden variety Evangelical thinks the point of your life is to get right with Jesus in order to gain salvation. Since heaven on earth is not just an impossibility, but against the will of God, efforts to perfect society are pointless and possible evil. It’s why populism, individualism and a fetish for individual rights is dominant in the South, Appalachia and the Southwest.

Now, it is certainly true that Jews and European immigrants of the 19^th and 20^th century brought socialism, fascism and communism with them. These ideas found a home in the Yankee culture of Public Protestantism. The philosophy of Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, for example, turns up in the Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century. Similarly, Reform Judaism of Abraham Geiger folded neatly into the American Progressive Movement, which has always been the technocratic arm of Public Protestantism.

The central defect the Puritans faced, the one they were never able to resolve, was that the human condition is immutable. They could kill as many Indians as they liked, but the nature of man was not going to change. Worse yet, Christianity was often at odds with utopian efforts to fix the world. In the 19^th century Christianity, began to take a back seat to saving the world, but that created a new problem. If the purpose of God’s anointed is to save the world, what’s the point if there is no longer a God to do the anointing?

In the 20^th century, Progressivism became Public Protestantism with a void at the core where God used to exist. Into that void first rushed an imaginary interpretation of Soviet Bolshevism that needed constant tending to avoid exposing the humanity crushing reality of it. Once that became impossible, what has rushed into the void is a series of vulgarities that serve no purpose other than to offend common sense. The God of the Left is now just the outrage of the decent.

It’s why the Left appears to be racing to the abyss. Today they clamor for what was unimaginable twenty years ago. That means twenty years from now they will be clamoring for what commonsense today says is beyond absurd. In 1995 gay marriage was a joke and today it is required. Today pedophilia is a monstrous taboo, but already the Left is clamoring to normalize it. The debate amongst Progressives is never about limits. It is about how far beyond the limits they can go.

The race to pile on society every imaginable indignity has its limits. Pop music performers, for example, tried to replace talent with outrageous behavior. Finally, there was no one left to outrage. The logic of the Progressive faith will follow the same path, but the end is the obliteration of society. Open borders fanaticism, for example, is just passing out the Kool-Aid at a national scale. One can’t help but wonder if Obama’s urge to give Iran the bomb does not include the hope that they use it.

It will not end well.

The other day, Kevin Williamson posted this column on National Review On-Line about balancing the Federal Budget. It is the typical snarling, snide polemic he is known for recently. Maybe he accidentally drank out of his ink bottle or took a blow to the head, but his work has been of this type for a while. This recent piece is mostly another deranged rant about Donald Trump.

The bulk of his column is crap, but this got my attention.

At the moment, our national fiscal situation is considerably less bad than it was during the Obama-Pelosi-Reid era of one-party Democratic rule; the 2010 and 2011 federal deficits were 8.7 and 8.5 percent of GDP, respectively, but the 2014 deficit was only 2.8 percent of GDP. Federal spending went from 24.4 percent of GDP in 2009 to 20.3 percent in 2014, thanks in no small part to budget sequestration, the one national policy in which Washington’s Democrats and Washington’s Republicans are united in loathing. The 2017 deficit is projected to be 2.3 percent of GDP.

That puts us within striking distance of having a balanced budget (albeit one that is balanced at a spending point that is too high for my own taste) or at least the reduction of budget deficits to trivial levels. All that is needed to get there is a little sober reform on the taxing front and a little sober reform on the spending front, with the hardest piece being reform of our entitlement programs, which in the long run will be the major drivers of deficits. I like the idea of radical tax reform, scrapping the tax code, abolishing the IRS, and starting over, and then privatizing Social Security and abolishing Medicare and Medicaid to boot. But you don’t actually have to do that to balance the budget.

That struck me as implausible so I did some mathing. The first thing we need to know is how much debt the Feds are piling on each year. In fact, that’s probably the only thing worth knowing as that is the tax on the future we may or may not be able to sustain. Greece stopped being a country, after all, because it could not service its debt, not because it spent too much or taxed too little. When you can no longer service your debt, you’re done as a country.

According to the Treasury, the amount of total debt held by the public has gone up 23.9% since the heroic budget deal Williamson is fond of touting. That’s better than the previous four years when debt rose by 37%, but there was also the big giant recession where tax receipts dropped. On the other hand, it is still well above the average over the last 35 years, so no one should be celebrating this modest reduction.

The larger point he is making is that with some small tweaks, the federal budget can be balanced. Well, over the last 35 years the annual increase in Federal debt has been 8.3%. In 1980 the debt was $907,701,000,000 and it is now $17,824,071,380,733, as of the end of the 2014 fiscal year. That’s a staggering amount of debt that happened during the two biggest economic booms in the nation’s history. Put another way, in the best of times we have run up debt at record levels.

For another way to look at it, here is the inflation adjusted debt since the 60’s:

There’s no way a sober person can look at the number and come away thinking we are a few tweaks away from solving the debt problem. If that were true, the graph above would not exist. Instead the line would bounce along in that 30% range as it had for so long. Something changed in the 1980’s and as a result debt as been on a steady run upward ever since, regardless of the party in charge and the amount of tweaking.

That raises another interesting question. If debt as a percentage of GDP is spiraling upward and neither party seems to have a way to stop it, what is driving the debt spiral? The most obvious place to look is the spending side as taxes have not changed a whole bunch in my lifetime. They lower rates, but remove deductions. Then they raise rates, but add back in a bunch of deductions. As Reason Magazine noted a few years ago, tax collection remains fairly constant over time.

Here’s one of my favorite charts. It is the per capita inflation adjusted spending. Using 1980 as the starting point, the size of the Federal government has doubled, even adjusting for inflation.

When you look at per capita, inflation adjusted GDP growth, you see something curious. The average growth rate has been 1.86% since 1980, which is interesting for a number of reasons, but what’s relevant here is that it explains the chart above. The cost, per capita, of government may have doubled in 35 years, but so has per capita, inflation adjusted GDP. The cost of the Federal government has simply kept pace with rise of incomes. The relative cost of government has not changed much.

So, what is driving the debt spiral?

The answer is the the debt spiral is self-perpetuating in a zero interest rate world. Imagine you have a personal income of $100,000 per year after taxes and expenses of $105,000 per year. You borrow $5,000 to cover the deficit. Every year your earnings go up 5%, but your expenses go up 5% as well. In 20 years, that annual deficit is $12,500, which sounds pretty good. Your annual deficit percentage has not changed, but your total debt is now $165,000!

Of course, it gets much worse because debt has interest. Even the government pays something in interest today. Using the above example and the historic norm of 7%, the total debt would balloon to over $200,000 in that 20 years and the debt payments would eat up a big chunk of the budget. Long before you got the 100% debt range, your little country would have been forced to cut back and pay down debt.

What’s happened in the free money era since the 1980’s is the cost of borrowing, in the view of politicians, has disappeared. In the age of market based borrowing rates, the bond markets forced the government to choose between competing options. Do you spend more on defense or more on roads? Do you make pension promises for ten years out or does the impact on borrowing make that untenable, because it cuts into current spending on other constituents?

That has not been the case for a generation. Instead of choosing between competing interests, pols just borrow to pacify both interests. The Republicans borrow to cut taxes for their patrons and the Democrats borrow to give goodies to their patrons. Elections, therefore, have no consequences as the parties never threaten each others interest. The voters are simply deciding who gets to spend time at the debt trough.

Of course, there’s a limit to how much debt a government can run up even in a zero interest world. If central banks begin to let rates rise, then the day of reckoning comes much sooner, which is why they can never let rates rise, at least not on purpose. That returns me to the original topic. The only “tweak” that can fix the debt problem is actually a radical change and that comes but one way.

Imagine this blog is a business and you are a stock holder who got in early when I was starting up. The blog is booming and that means the value of the stock is booming. I figure I can capitalize on the boom and start issuing more stock. That’s good for me, but there’s one problem. That dilutes the value of your stock. That would be a crappy thing for me to do to my stock holders, which is why companies tend to avoid doing this.

But, let’s assume I don’t care about my stock holders and I start issuing new stock. One thing that will happen is current stock holders will begin dumping the stock. After all, the value of the stock will most likely decline and the point of buying the stock in the first place is to get something for it, as in a return on the investment. If I keep issuing stock, the price will collapse and the stock will be worthless.

The same logic applies to citizenship. Being a Canadian has value. You get cheap maple syrup, high alcohol beer and good hockey. There’s also the protection of the Canadian government, law enforcement, economic benefits and social welfare benefits. In return, the citizen serves on juries, pays taxes and serves in the military when required. A country is a lot like a company and the citizens are stock holders. It’s not a perfect analogy, but a useful one.

What our rulers seek to do is dilute the value of citizenship by offering it to whoever staggers along.

Rep Luis V. Gutiérrez, one of Congress’ most outspoken advocates for immigrants, on Wednesday called for expanding the Affordable Care Act to cover all of the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants in the United States.

“The goal is to make integration and inclusion real for millions of families that are locked out under current law,” the Illinois Democrat said in a floor speech introducing his proposed legislation.

“As it stands right now, undocumented immigrants are not subject to the individual mandate and cannot buy into health insurance exchanges even if they use their own money.  My legislation will change that.  It says that we stand for inclusion.”

Citing last week’s papal address to Congress (the pope repeatedly urged U.S. lawmakers to follow “the Golden Rule”), Gutiérrez said: “Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you means moving forward with no restrictions on which brother and sister and neighbor we think of as ‘eligible’ or ‘deserving.’”

The Gutiérrez legislation faces long odds in the House, where proposals to overhaul immigration have been stymied by Republicans who insist the federal government must first address holes in border security.

If everyone on earth is eligible for the benefits of citizenship, as long as they get to America, what point is there in being a citizen? More important, why would anyone try to make the country better? The whole point of investing in a company or a country is to make it better. In the case of a country, better for your descendants. If the children of foreigners are going to take from your kids the fruit of your labor, why bother?

That would obviously spill into voting, as doing what’s best for the country would lose all value. Instead, factions would vote in blocks, at war with other factions, for the right to take what they can from whomever they can. That’s assuming people both voting. The only solution to that is authoritarianism where the national government uses force to compel cooperation from and among the people.

That’s what our betters have failed to understand. At some point, people will simply not respond to patriotic appeals or moral suasion. After all, loyalty to the state will have no basis as there is no benefit to citizenship. The relationship becomes purely transactional as both sides try to beat the other in their dealings. The only result of open borders is a Hobbesian world that looks more like the Middle East than Western Civilization.

What’s hard for normal people to wrap their heads around, I think, is how modern liberalism is not a set of fact-based opinions, but a crazy quilt of beliefs that are untethered from reality. Normal people tend to assume that people can look around, see the world as it is and act accordingly. Those who fail to acknowledge reality are either mistaken or insane. For as long as anyone reading this has been alive, conservatives have assumed liberals are mistaken and therefore they can be corrected.

Over the last decade, many on the right have come to the conclusion that the people we call Progressives are suffering from a mental disorder. Maybe it is the nutty aunt who thinks Obama is Jesus. Maybe it is that neighbor who has covered his Prius in “coexist” bumper stickers. These are not people with whom you can have a conversation because they find some way to preach Progressive craziness at you, even over the damned weather.

I tend to think of it a third way, which is as a religion. I call it the Cult of Modern Liberalism because what we call politically correct is what we used to call “pious” in another age. The PC enforcers deeply believe in egalitarianism, anti-racism and multiculturalism as pathways to salvation. It’s Congregationalism with God removed from the cosmology. Here’s a good example of it in the Washington Post.

This month, Jennifer Cramblett lost her “wrongful birth” lawsuit, which centered on a troubling ideology that has been creeping into mainstream discussions in ways not seen in decades. Cramblett claimed that the sperm used to inseminate her came from the wrong donor, leading to a biracial child, which she had not wanted. Her lawsuit claimed that this mix-up in the lab caused her and her family personal injuries of various kinds.

This lawsuit was shadowed by a troubling logic: the idea that race is a biological reality with particular traits and behaviors that can be avoided through proper breeding practices. In doing so, Cramblett’s claims echoed arguments made in a darker era of global history of “scientific” racism.

Here’s how the argument goes. Some people are born with outstanding talents, easily mastering basketball, mathematics, languages or piano, if given the right environment in which to grow. What biologist or social scientist could argue with that? But alongside that genetic understanding, an old and pernicious assumption has crept back into the American conversation, in which aptitudes are supposedly inherited by race: certain peoples are thought to have rhythm, or intellect, or speed or charm. That’s a fast track toward the old 19th- and early 20th-century problem of “scientific” racism.

First off, you’ll note the tone. These are two deeply religious people speaking to an audience they assume to share their religion. If instead of “racism” the bogeyman was the devil, it would be something you would expect from certain Christian sects. If the bogeyman was Western decadence, then this would read like a sermon from the local imam. Instead, the bogeyman is biology so it is a boiler plate lecture we’ve all come to expect from people who enjoy diversity seminars.

You’ll also note that the authors are both professors with degrees in nonsense fields like racism and sociology. These are not fields of study that add to the stock of human knowledge about the world. These are fields dedicated to enforcing religious orthodoxy. When your kids go off to college, they are forced to sit through diversity lectures by these types of people as part of the “orientation.”

The Washington Post gobbles up submissions like this because it helps the faithful resist the temptations of biological science, which is becoming a real threat to the Cult of Modern Liberalism. When genetics can trace your genealogy back to the home country by merely taking a mouth swab and correlate physiological attributes to intelligence, biology becomes the same sort of threat to the New Religion as it was to the Old Religion.

Because this new religion inherits so much from the old religion, it even comes with an apocalyptic element. This breathless story on “climate change” is a daily feature in Progressive media. Christianity used to keep people in line by promising eternal damnation in the fiery pits of Hell if you broke God’s laws. Progressives promise an extremely high air conditioning bill if you keep using the lawnmower.

The interesting thing about the New Religion is it is a throwback to the pre-Christian days. Before the Jews gave us a fixed, rational God who created a fixed and rational world, people truly thought appeals to the gods would change the laws of nature. Hang a bull’s penis around your neck and your next kid would be a son. Burn a couple of heretics and the rains would come and end the drought.

Climate change is paganism for guys and gals on the private jet circuit. They force the state to pass some regulation making it hard for you to cut your grass because that will appease, well, whatever is in the blank spot where Elagabalus used to sit. As has always been the case, the rich guy making the sacrifice to the gods is never sacrificing anything of his. It’s always some other guy stretched out on the altar, having his heart ripped out.