Usually when people us the word fanatic, it is intended to suggest unpredictable or irrational enthusiasm for something, often something trivial. The sports fan who paints himself in team colors and goes to the park shirtless in sub-zero temperatures. The guy who organizes items on his desk in a very specific way and gets upset when someone moves anything. There’s no logic behind that sort of activity. The means are extreme and the ends are pointless, maybe even self-defeating.

Then there is the religious fanatic, like the guys handling snakes or nailing themselves to a cross. From the outside it looks irrational and pointless. To the fanatic it makes perfect sense, but that’s just proof of the fanatic’s irrationality. In other words, there is an inverse relationship between what the outsider sees and what the fanatic sees as rational. The nuttier the behavior, from the perspective of people looking in, the more rational it seems to the people doing it. Again, the sense is a break with reason.

That’s something to keep in mind while reading this piece on Taki. Paul Krugman is a guy you meet and immediately the words “fanatic” springs to mind. If you did not know anything about him, you would assume he is under the care of a doctor. He has that bug-eyed stare and twitchy demeanor that suggest his medications need adjustment. He’s also prone to ranting and raving about things that have an imaginary feel to them. He’s just one of those guys who gives normal people the willies.

Because he is a culture warrior on the Left, he is immune from such scrutiny. His fellows in the cult admire his zeal and lap up his rhetoric. They also like to wave around his academic credentials as proof his work is gospel. The fact that he has been wrong about most everything and has become a punchline in his profession is ignored. In fact, the more he is wrong, the more zealous he becomes, suggesting there is some point in the future where police must be called to get him out his office.

That’s not just a way of dismissing him. It’s possible that he is quite mad, yet functional enough to carry on in his role. Blaize Pascal was ten times more brilliant than Krugman and he was a religious fanatic. Even in his age, when what we would consider extreme religiosity was common, Pascal was considered a bit over the top. The old line about there being a fine line between genius and crazy did not spring from nothing. Put another way, fanaticism is not a barrier to entry in the ruling classes.

History is shot through with men who were both crazy and brilliant. Diogenes was most likely a schizophrenic. Pythagoras was certainly a nut. That does not mean every genius is on the edge of sanity. It is just that you can be both brilliant and crazy as long the crazy is not debilitating. Pascal’s religiosity was driven by the same obsessive curiosity that drove his science and math. It was, for the most part, a harmless thing. People will tolerate a lot of eccentricity in exchange for brilliance or devotion to a cause.

In the case of Krugman, we see that he was generally liberal before going way out where the buses don’t run. Like his coreligionists, he was radicalized by the 2000 election. From that point, his writing became increasingly excited and paranoid. His nuttiness seems to feed some need on the Left. That and they seem to be in a race with one another to see who can stake out the most extreme position. If the finish line is crazy land, the guy running fastest toward it will look like a hero.

Still, one has to wonder how much crazy a society can tolerate. In the medieval person, excessively religious people were not uncommon, but the damage they could cause was limited by the technical realities of the age. Today, a crazy idea can not only rocket around the world in minutes, it can set of millions of other crazies just as fast. The internet is this constant positive feedback loop for these people. In other words, the madness of Paul Krugman becomes something like a pathogen. That can’t be good.

Gavin McInnes is a funny and interesting character on cable television. He just sort of appeared, but he allegedly was a star of some sort in the New York underground publishing scene. It’s hard to know if that is true, since everyone on TV has a fake back story. Regardless, McInnes is funny and outlandish, but also strikingly sensible, in contrast to the robots on cable news channels. He does his best when he feigns outrage and goes full-on Archie Bunker. It’s a fun act that works well for him.

His writing, however, is a different story. His website looks like what old people do to try and appear hip. The design is cheesy and dated, but the content is like something Boomers thought was funny in their youth. Putting pics of half-naked women in the pages of a men’s magazine was edgy in the 1990’s. There’s a lazy man’s edginess to that sort of presentation.  The whole site has an “try too hard” feel to it, like old people trying to appeal to young people. It’s aging hipsters talking about their glory days.

In fact, that seems to be a running theme in his columns and postings. On the one hand he is at the age when he can no longer pretend to be young. On the other hand, he is not ready to be old and finds the whole experience to be mystifying. Sadly, he suffers from that common modern malady of thinking that everything new to him is, in fact, totally new, so he talks about the mundane as if it is a revelation. We live in an age in which no one can seem to remember last week, much less trends from previous generations.

His latest on Taki is a good example of cultural amnesia. Everyone is carry on as if Miley Cyrus is something new, when she is just another version of the same act the entertainment complex has been churning out for decades. Female entertainers using sexual charged lyrics, dress and antics to attract a crowd probably dates to the dawn of civilization. In fact, sex and pop music have been a paring sine the dawn of the recording industry. Just listen to an old jazz or blues collection and you see it.

In the modern era, acts like Wendy O. Williams were selling raunchy sexuality on stage in the 1970’s. Madonna ripped off a big part of her act from Williams. Later female entertainers ripped off Madonna’s naughty school girl act. The only thing new about the Cyrus act is that it is so cheesy and fake. The female sex acts of previous generations at least had some talent and looked good. Cyrus is kind of gross looking and she sounds like a bag of cats. She looks like a bar skank on amateur night at the titty bar.

The thing is though, McInness is not an amnesiac. He’s simply responding to what he sees around him and that is a strange collective amnesia. It’s like American culture has suddenly forgotten the last 30-40 years and is now pretending to be scandalized squares from the 1950’s. Maybe the taste makers of the cultural class have decided that being scandalized was too much fun to let slip away, so everyone now has to pretend these new bawdy acts are new.

On the other hand, it could simply be that the technological age is destroying collective memory. Why remember anything when you can look it up on your phone? No one can follow directions or read a map anymore thanks to GPS. The young literally have never had a need to read a map or understand north and south. It’s not unrealistic to think we are headed to a place where everyone lives in the moment. Once something happens and is experienced, it is forgotten so it can be replaced by the next thing.

If you are conservative in America, you have grown used to the fact that the conservative commentariat is more concerned with staying in good with the Left than making the conservative case on behalf of their supporters. They are endlessly lecturing the Right about their tone and their tactics. If some “unauthorized” right-wingers, like talk show hosts or bloggers, comes up with some way to tweak the Left, Conservative Inc. starts lecturing everyone about the need for good behavior.

When the base complains about all this fraternizing with the enemy, guys like Jonah Goldberg claim that the job of the conservatives like himself is to sell ideas, win the argument. That means engaging the Left anywhere and everywhere using facts and reason to change minds. Further, they say that to do this they have to keep the debate civil and make sure they are on good terms with the other side. After all, we’re all on the same team. It’s just a difference of opinion.

The counter to that is that by going on these shows and engaging Lefty on his terms, they are accepting the premises of the Left. Once you accept the premise the argument is already lost. What’s left is a negotiated surrender. For example, by accepting the premise that racism is immoral, so-called conservatives end up having to sign off on every Progressive social project, for fear of being called racist. If they reject that premise, they don’t get invited to cable chat shows, so they roll over and play dead for Lefty.

Anyway, this story is getting a lot of attention on all sides. The Libertarians think it means their winning, but they have been expecting the “libertarian moment” for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. On the other hand, conservatives wonder why they are not winning anything, despite the fact the mood is swinging their way. Of course, the Left fears they are not winning enough. They have to work harder to defeat the Right. Again, the premise of the study is suspect, but it is a useful point.

Anyway, Kevin Williamson has picked up on it and written a column about the difference between winning the argument and winning elections. He also notes how support for the GOP at the national level has waned a bit as local support has grown a bit. Again, he assumes the premise is correct. Like everyone else on the right waving around this study, he really wants it to be true. More important, they want to think they are the ones responsible for altering public opinion by making those clever arguments to Lefty.

Again, the study and the chattering about it is nonsense, but it reveals a truth about the political system in modern America. It gets back to the start of this post. The Left runs everything and the Right works mostly as a brake to slow the process here and there, but never stop anything. For that to work, the Right has to be willing to play the role in the media. That’s why they are always worried about not upsetting the Left. Their job is to police the right and make sure no one tries to challenge the system.

Now, one thing about that study which could be useful is this. The demographic changes happening in the country could be causing a change among white voters. In other words, the study is picking up a shift in white attitudes. That has nothing to do with the chattering classes, at least not directly, but it will have an impact on them at some point. If the white population is shifting politically, it means the financial system of Conservative Inc is in for a major disruption, but that’s a topic for another day.

Steve Sailer has a post up about the trials and tribulations of girls in science. His post is commentary on this very long article by a woman calling herself Eileen Pollack. The general thrust of that piece that girls don’t go into STEM field in great numbers, because there is some invisible force filed that repels them. This invisible force field cannot be seen, because it is invisible, but it can be described by women with the right credentials from the women’s studies department. They call this force field “male privilege.’

Of course, as Sailer points out, Mx. Pollack started out in life as an undergrad in physics, but lost interest and moved onto creative writing. It turns out that women are not as good at math, on average, as boys, but they are also less interested in it. That means the number of girls in the STEM fields is going to much lower than expected, just using test scores for mathematical aptitude. Feminism, ironically, can not tolerate women choosing to be women, so they insist women are being tricked in some way.

Feminism stopped being a serious topic long before anyone reading this was alive and now it is quite silly. A century ago, changing the law to better serve women in the industrial age was a worthy topic. In the agrarian age, divorce, for example, was not an issue for most people. Property rights and legal rights were also far less important. As cities grew and social relationships changed, the law needed to change to address the needs of both men and women, so feminism made some sense.

Today it is just the stereotypical “feminists” grousing about men. In college, feminism is where the low self-esteem gals go when they don’t want to become lesbians. Some thing that has been true for a long time is the easiest women to get are the ones hanging around the women’s studies department. Despite all the man-hating and sisterhood talk, they will jump in the sack with the first guy showing interest. All their talk about independence and not needing a man is just an act.

Now, it is worth mentioning that the scrambling of the sex roles has made sorting these things more difficult. Men are far less manly, especially at elite universities where feminism is rampant. They are also far less worldly. From the female perspective, being out-competed in these cognitive fields by wimps and socially awkward losers could very well look like a conspiracy. The girls are atop the status system on campus and more aggressive than these males, but they can’t compete.

Even so, the main driver of the gender equity delusions is a studied and rampant ignorance of biological reality. The starting point is always the assumption that some mysterious force or perhaps a hidden conspiracy is preventing the egalitarian paradise from emerging. The default is the dream, rather than observable reality. Even the basic relationship  between the sexes is excluded. The fact that boys like pretty girls and girls like high status males is not a mystery.

The new study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against women in the sciences. Only one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American; of all the physics professors in the United States, only 14 percent are women. The numbers of black and Hispanic scientists are even lower; in a typical year, 13 African-Americans and 20 Latinos of either sex receive Ph.D.’s in physics. The reasons for those shortages are hardly mysterious — many minority students attend secondary schools that leave them too far behind to catch up in science, and the effects of prejudice at every stage of their education are well documented. But what could still be keeping women out of the STEM fields (“STEM” being the current shorthand for “science, technology, engineering and mathematics”), which offer so much in the way of job prospects, prestige, intellectual stimulation and income?

Imagine if someone said, “Our study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against whites in the National Basketball Association…” Everyone gets that blacks are, on average, better equipped by nature to excel at some sports. No one thinks this is odd, but in the cognitive fields, it is blasphemy to suggest there are differences between the sexes and races. It suggests the problem of gender equity is really just  a problem with women accepting reality.

[subscribe2]In every time and every place there have been those predicting doom just over the horizon. Eventually, one of them is right and is often remembered long after by future prophets of doom. No one remembers the millions who were wrong, unless they flamed out in a particularly spectacular fashion or a psychologist wrote a book about them. I’ve often drawn on the later to harass liberals by comparing them to a cult. If you read the book, the comparisons hold up to a frightening degree, but that’s for another day. Today I’m reading JayMan’s treatise on why we are doomed. I’m sure the Zero Hedge types will be memorizing passages from it all week. After all, if you don’t like the current arrangements, they must not be sustainable and therefore must be on the verge of collapse. The classic in this genre is Marx, whose alienation drove him to create a worldwide suicide cult that eventually snuffed out millions. L. Ron Hubbard was a piker by comparison.

I have not read the whole thing or had much time to mull over his arguments, but what jumps out to me immediately is the Great Depression Syndrome. This is a cognitive bias I just made up to describe the myopic view of economics history. The economics profession is hobbled by it. I suspect it is because it is the big economic event that gave birth to their profession. That and they don’t have reliable data for prior events. Still, you would think someone would notice that the world was buggering along for a few thousand years before Keynes. The other issue is the cultural overhang. America the super power starts with World War II. The Boomers grew up hearing tales about their parents making it through the Depression to then beat the Nazis. This era that is headed for its denouement should be known as the Boomer Era as it has been defined by the quirks of that generation.

Anyway, the point of that last bit is the Great Depression is not the standard we should be applying today. Further, the Great Depression was not as great as the romantics claim. Previous depressions were as unpleasant and some worse. The Long Depression was worse, which is why it was known as the Great Depression, until the next collapse came along and that generation decided to celebrate itself after the war. It is probably fair to say that it is a better analogue to today than the Great Depression. Instead of one dive over the cliff, followed by a period of adjustment, there were a variety of shocks around the world that fed on one another. Today, Europe has different troubles than the US, which has different problems than Japan. Even so, it is not a great analogue. There are lessons to be drawn, but policy makers never learn from the past so it is left to history buffs. Read Currency Wars and you can get a nice easy to read history of the Long Depression as well as the Great Depression. Draw whatever lessons you like.

Then we have the Kitten of the Blogosphere’s take. I’ve long thought that reality would eventually beat the smug out of his generation, but he keeps proving me wrong. I guess that’s why I read his blog. Anyway, he too suffers from Great Depression Syndrome. In his case, no pics of bread lines today means it is better than the 30′s, because he remembers seeing all of those pics of breadlines back in school. The 1930′s did not have sprawling black ghettos either. They did not have trailer parks full of meth labs. My grandparents lived through the depression and never stopped yapping about it. The main take away for me is it was not that bad for the hard working and ambitious. After all, 80% of the population did have a job.  The poor were still poor, the rich were still rich and the working class was still working class. The middle class, however, was reminded that they are not upper class and never will be. That’s the lesson all the old people in my family took away from the Great Depression. The rich are always at war with the middle and they use the poor as a weapon.

Anyway, plenty of good stuff for the doom and gloom types. My view is we are going to experience shocks and adjustments for the next decade as the Boomer Era comes to a close. The political class will try every option to stave off the mathematical reality facing the nation until they are forced to do that which is necessary. Riots and revolution are unlikely. Instead it will be a slow winding down of Empire that will go through fits and starts. The next decade will see a contraction of US involvement in the world’s dung heaps. Domestically taxes will be raised, but real cuts will happen for the first time as it becomes clear we cannot have it all.

The American Left is not longer an ideological movement with a practical political platform and a list of demands. Instead, it has become a secular religion, that engages in ritual and gesture to signal piety to those within the movement. To outsiders, these gestures often seem weird or dangerous, but to insiders they are the coin of the realm. The right gesture can lead to a rise in the movement, while the wrong gesture can spell doom.

Gesture politics, however, is not without its costs. It is one thing to look down your nose at those downscale whites voting Republican and shopping at WalMart. It is quite another to vote in people who seek to act on the rhetoric. White liberals voted for Obama and the Democrats because they hated the people who supported George Bush. They had no other reason to support a guy unprepared for even minor office, much less president.

They did it because it felt good. When Obama was inaugurated, Progressive around the country held parties as if he was the savior and the rapture was upon us. It’s not that they thought he was Jesus or that he had supernatural power. They certainly acted like it, because that signaled their devotion. In a way, Progressivism is a meta-religion, in that it has all the rituals and spiritualism of a conventional religion, without the supernatural core, like a deity or a pantheon of deities. It’s very esoteric and mystical.

But, all that gesturing comes with a price when it results in public policy. ObamaCare was never a thought out policy. What passed was nothing like he ran on as a candidate. His proposal was a gesture to show his virtue. The final product was a collection of give aways to Democratic constituencies. The result is wrecking ball unleashed on an already fragile health care system. The cost for that is now coming due.

But people with no pre-existing conditions like Vinson, a 60-year-old retired teacher, and Waschura, a 52-year-old self-employed engineer, are making up the difference.

“I was laughing at Boehner — until the mail came today,”

Waschura said, referring to House Speaker John Boehner, who is leading the Republican charge to defund Obamacare.

“I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy.”

Both Vinson and Waschura have adjusted gross incomes greater than four times the federal poverty level — the cutoff for a tax credit. And while both said they anticipated their rates would go up, they didn’t realize they would rise so much.

“Of course, I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the

one who was going to pay for it personally.”

Amazingly, whole generations of Americans have been raised to think insurance is this magic well of money that is there for you when you don’t feel like spending your money on stuff like health care. Of course everyone should have access to this magical resource. It would be unfair to do otherwise. The Left really thought the only reason everyone did not have insurance was that the dastardly insurance companies were withholding it.

One of the strangest aspects of health care debates is that no one can comes to terms with the fact that all goods and services are rationed. There are no exceptions. They are either rationed by price, as in a market, or they are rationed by a monopoly of supply, usually a state monopoly. In the former, charity can mitigate the realities of the market place. This was common until it was outlawed. In the latter, there is no mitigation and the result is always pretty dreadful. Those are the choices for health care.

Is Facebook a real company? That sounds like ridiculous question, because they have a huge market cap and have thousands of employees. That certain looks like real company, even if they are not wildly profitable. Enron had a huge market cap and hired thousands of people, but they turned out to be an accounting fiction. No one thinks Facebook is cooking their books, but there is good reason to wonder if they are what they seem.

For example, dig around in how they make money and what you learn is they are mostly an advertising platform. Newspapers and magazines are advertising platforms too, but none are worth tens of billions. In fact, most are worth nothing as they can’t generate enough cash to cover their expenses. That does not mean Facebook is a cash furnace, but it raises the question of why they can make this model work and no one can figure it out, except for Google, which is a monopoly player on the internet.

Then there is the fact that it is an awful advertising platform. Go find a single person who has every looked at, much less clicked on, one of their ads. People talk about TV and radio ads all the time. The talk around every Super Bowl is about the commercials. No one has ever mentioned a Facebook ad – ever. There’s never been a viral video or ad that started on Facebook. In fact, it is always the other way around. The ad is created on traditional platforms and is hared by users of the new platforms.

That’s worth something, for sure, but is it really so unique to Facebook that they can command a huge market cap? More important, why would ad makers bother paying to be on Facebook, when a clever ad will end up on social media anyway? It seems that the main business model of Facebook depends on ad makers never noticing that ads on social media have no impact on their sales. At some point, they will notice and go back to those traditional advertising methods and not pay Facebook for their service.

Then there is the fact that no one knows how many people are actually on Facebook or any of these social media sites. They say about 80 million accounts are fake, but they are not counting the tens of millions of dead accounts. They are not counting the millions of accounts dedicated to pets or dead people or hobbies. Anyone who as ever run a message board knows that about 10% of accounts create 90% of the posts.

Talk radio has similar numbers. They say 1% of listeners will ever attempt to call the show and comment. In fact, this is so well known that the number of calls is considered more reliable than the ratings numbers. Similarly, comment sections in news sites see the same sorts of numbers. It’s called the Pareto Principle. That probably means the number of active users on Facebook is a fraction of what is claimed. Worldwide it is still a big number, but no where near what the ad men think they are getting.

Now we have the ultimate fake company going to market. Twitter is pretty much just an open RSS feed for idiots. Unlike Facebook, Twitter does have the ability to jam ads in your face on a mobile platform. That’s the Achilles heal of Facebook. These social media sites are best used on a phone or tablet. That limits ad space to nothing. Those microscopic ads at the bottom of apps are hilarious in their pointlessness. Twitter crams them into your feed and makes you look at them.

In theory, twitter can claim they are forcing users to see the ads and they can estimate how many people see them, based on user activity. Facebook really can’t do that as their ads are on the side or exist as corporate pages. Twitter still loses money, but at least they can plausibly claim someone is looking at their ads. The trouble is, most of their users may be fake. Rachel Maddow famously pumped up her Twitter followers by paying for fake accounts to follow her.

Again, we see the same problem as with Facebook. There’s no way to know how many users are really on their system. By the way, web sites had this problem too. Sites would claim millions of hits when it was just bogus traffic stuffing. Advertisers figured it out and sites can no longer fake their stats. The same scams are at work with social media, bu the ad buyers simply don’t understand how this stuff works, so they have not been able to see the problem. It will happen and when it does, the ad money goes away.

That gets back to the original question. Are these real companies or just elaborate confidence games designed to skim from the ad market? A real business provides a product or service. Facebook and Twitter provide a gateway and they operate like toll takes, but no one really knows if there is anything on the other side. Even if there is, why should these firms have exclusive rights to charge tolls? In the end, they don’t offer a product or service that has vale, so eventually, they go away.

Pop culture is not for old people. The reason is, pop culture is not terribly sophisticated, so it is highly repetitive. When you are 15, it all seems new, because it is new to you. By the time you hit your 30’s, you have seen a few cycles of pop culture, so it is not new to you and it feels a little trite. It’s why old people listen to the music of their youth rather than the new stuff. It’s not that they are out of touch, but it all sounds the same. The difference is, those old songs remind them of their salad days.

In this age, many supposedly mature adults self-infantilize by obsessing over the latest shows, fads and causes. It’s a sad attempt to sound young and hip. Hearing a middle-aged man using ghetto slang on ESPN is creepy and weird. Seeing Jonah Goldberg write columns about TV shows is another example. Someone his age writing, at a supposedly serious publication, for an adult audience, should not be obsessing over TV shows like he is a lonely teenager. It’s just not normal, but here we are anyway.

That’s why most normal adults make jokes about Madonna’s pathetic attempts to remain current. It is sad and cringe inducing to see a 50 year old women spread her legs on TV for money. Madonna was never a very attractive women, even in her prime. She has an average body, a plain face and a ghostly complexion that borders on the creepy. As you see with Sarah Silverman, you can be too white. In her twenties, her act was vulgar, but in her 50’s her act is gross and bizarre.

The thing about Madonna is she was never really a risk taker. Instead, she aimed for the safe spot near the edge of respectable. She also ripped off her stage act from Wendy Williams. The scanty outfits, bullet bras and sexual antics were done first and better by the Plasmatics. Madonna took the act, stripped out the stuff that scared middle America and made a PG-13 act out of it. Throw in conventional pop ditties with a few allusions to acceptably breakable taboos and you have 1980’s Madonna.

Give her credit for figuring it out and selling it, but it was just conventional pop stuff with better marketing. In many respects, she did what Steve Speilberg figured out with action movies. In his case, the movie was just a long commercial for all the branded merchandise. It’s what Disney did with theme parks and cartoons. the real money was in the merchandise and branding. The other stuff was marketing expense.

As far as Madonna, she managed to hang around longer than most pop stars, primarily because she is a dedicated performer and sound business woman. The mid-90’s through the mid-00’s were not a good time, based on her chart hits, but she had a few songs in that decade. For the last decade she has been trying to find another way to claw back into relevance, but has mostly been the butt of jokes.

Even in these tame, sedate times, the kids are not interested in hearing a granny talk about her vagina. If she was really anything but a corporate product, she would be entering that stage where she could reminisce about her wild days, entertain her generation with stories of the good old days and maybe do a tour singing her old hits. That’s what real rebels do if they make it this far. Corporate shills have to dust off the old marketing plans and hope no one remembers them.

The great Eric Hoffer wrote The True Believer, a classic meditation on the fanatic. Hoffer is a bit of a mystery as there seems to be some dispute about his early life. What we know is the fascist and communist movements were in full bloom during the first half of his life. He would have been 15 when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar. He was in his twenties when Fascism got going in Italy and Germany. He was in his 30’s when Hitler reigned over Europe.

In 1952, when he wrote the book, that was the frame of reference from which he worked. He was a longshoreman, so he would have been very familiar with the union movement in America and the men who were attracted to it. Some would argue that Jacobinism was the first secular religion, but it is fair to say that communism and fascism were the first to sink roots outside their native lands. They are certainly the only ones to have real staying power.

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then. Marxism and communism have lost all credibility because of mathematics. The claims to science by the early promoters of those religions seem laughable today. That’s true even if you are skeptical of global capitalism. The piles of corpses make it impossible to accept the premises of these great secular religions from the last century.

Fascism suffered a similar fate for obvious reasons. Like a virus, however, it had mutated several times prior to the denouement of German fascism. In Spain and Portugal, it took on a distinctly Catholic nature. In America, it attached itself to Progressivism, like an ideological parasite, influencing the Left in minor ways. Despite what Jonah Goldberg claims in his book, Liberal Fascism, the American Left is not fascist.

Fascism had another problem for Americans. In Europe, you have relatively small states with people conditioned to living under the rule of an elite. They are fairly homogenous and all white. America through the 19th century was a hodgepodge of voluntary associations. The national government was limited to managing trade and foreign affairs. State government was limited to public works. Everything else was hashed out by individuals and their neighbors as they saw fit.

That changed with the waves of immigration, but that old ethos was still strong among the ruling elite into the 20^th century. It was very strong in the heartland among normal Americans. Throw in the ethnic, racial and cultural divisions and a unifying religion like fascism could never work the same wit worked in Europe. Then you have to throw in the fact that America was always a very Christian nation. Secular religions cannot coexist with Christianity.

The virus mutated, however, from what we think of as fascism, and attached itself to the ruling ideology of the American empire. There was a subset of fascism that preached an internationalism, which was more like a federation of fascist nations, bound together by a common interest among the fascist elites. That seems to be what survived and is now flourishing in American and Europe.

Today’s American Progressive is as much a true believer as the Nazis though. They sign onto the cause out of a desire to belong to something they see as superior to themselves. Joining a movement is an act of self-abnegation. The adherent swaps their identity for that of the group. In the case of the modern Progressive, they seek salvation. Taking on the identity of the group allows the adherent to be saved from his sinful self. Rigorously enforcing the internal codes of conduct is the proof. The Calvinist element of Progressivism remains.

Over the last half century scholars have described the Nazi, the Bolshevik and the fascist fairly well. We really don’t have a similar taxonomy for the modern Progressives. Like pornography, you immediately know one when you mean them, but they are hard to describe. Everyone knows that person who was a little flaky and little lefty, but then they went full-on crazy with some form of radical politics. It’s like a form of mental illness than gets progressively worse.

Mental illness is not a bad metaphor. When you run across posts in mainstream publications titled “Taking Carbon Personally” you have to assume the author and audience are struggling to keep it together. These bare the people with “COEXIST” stickers on their car, but they live in the whitest neighborhoods on earth. That worry about racism, but would not be caught dead on a street named after Malcom X. It’s as if they can’t see themselves or hear what they are saying.

As the roll out of ObamaCare looks more and more like a roll over a cliff, keep in mind that this is probably the best of times for the program. In time, the reality of the program will be impossible to deny. Quietly, so as not to offend the racial sensitivities of blacks, the program will be gutted and rolled back. It can’t work and it can’t last, because it will be an albatross on the political class. It’s like creating a food shortage and thinking it will be good politics to run on building better bread lines.

How is it possible that anyone is surprised that this is a gigantic flop?

No one alive today can recall a government project that came in on time, under budget or worked anything like it was promised. For as long as anyone has been a live, there have been jokes about $500 hammers and $1000 toilet seats. The image of the government worker asleep on the job has been a stock character for a century. Yet serious adults have been walking about for three years believing the government could pull off a monumentally complex IT project without a glitch.

It really is amazing.

Steve Sailer likes to bring up the fact that we seem to forget a lot of important things as a society. It is clear we are getting collectively dumber. People in Boston today lived through the Big Dig. As public works projects go, it was one of the greatest boondoggles in the nation’s history. For close to two decades, every local yokel with a shovel found someway to get his beak wet on the thing while slowing down completion. This old blog post does a nice job covering the finer points.

Yet, those very same people who saw that nonsense for close to two decades have total faith in government to handle health care. It is as if they have brain damage. Not only that, the same people,e preaching for government run health care will fly into a purple faced rage over the evil of corporation health care. They will often do it from the pages of corporate media platforms. It’s as if they are incapable of remember what they said five minutes ago or recognizing their own staggering hypocrisy.

It is not just government projects. People rhapsodizing about how well Tip O’Neil and Reagan got along and made government work. They say, “Tip and Reagan would not let the government shut down.” Anyone alive then should know that the two men went at one another hammer and tong for eight years. It was often vicious. They had quite a few government shutdowns in the process.Politics were probably worse then than now as Democrats regularly claimed Reagan was a nut hell bent on blowing up the world.

Of course, collective amnesia is a feature of politics. You see that with the treatment of Ted Cruz by the media. Not long ago, the moderate Democrat was wither a social conservative, but fiscal liberal, or a social liberal but pro-business. That was considered the moderate wing of the party and there were a lot of them. That’s Ted Cruz. Thirty years ago he would have been a moderate. Today he is a far right Republican.

Of course, that points to just how far Left the political class has moved over the last several decades. That march Left relies on a collective amnesia, so it is probably just a natural part of the Progressive ruling coalition. They control the media, so they get to decide what is forgotten, which is everything inconvenient to current efforts. Forgetting the past, however, just means repeating past mistakes over and over until something really bad happens, like a revolution or wide scale social unrest.

But history is not for the amnesiac.