Author Archives: thezman

The Die is Cast

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Watching the GOP “debate” the other night, I started thinking about how my bias will effect my judgement of the results. That’s what you always see with these things. Everyone wears their bias on their sleeve. I know Kasich fans who swear he carried the night. Trump fans are on twitter claiming Trump had a good night. Kevin Williamson needed his meds doubled in order to avoid being committed.

That last bit is a good example. Williamson hates Trump. It is an irrational, unhinged hatred, which would be fine except that Trump is doing well. Worse for Kevin is that his readers are mostly enjoying the show and see Trump as a protest vote. The result is Kevin sounds like a low-IQ lunatic. Bias can be very powerful stuff.

Anyway, I was watching and wondering how my bias is shaping my opinions. I want to like Perry, but he’s just not very good so I’m probably doing OK on that score. I want to like Walker and I’m probably willing to overlook his wobbly responses to the important questions. I want to hate Santorum, but I have to admit he says sensible things. I can at least see why people like him.

The truth is I don’t have a big investment in the Republicans. Thinking about my biases, that’s the conclusion I hit on. I’m probably more invested in Kevin Williamson’s nervous breakdown over Trump, as I used to enjoy reading Kevin’s columns. Who the GOP nominates for their guy is simply not all that important to me. I’m just not that into them anymore and they are not into guys like me either.

The last few elections, I went to vote out of habit and loyalty to the old ways. I was born into a country where people, who were like me, tried hard to win my vote. I now live in a country where people who hate me and are nothing like me chase the votes of people who hate me. Voting, for me, is mostly about remembering the way things used to be. Occasionally there’s something on the under-card worth considering.

The other night, thinking about this stuff, I was reminded of this Sean Trende piece from the last election. This table explains Trump and it predicts who the GOP must pick for their candidates in order to win:

Whites are starting to walk away from the process. Not all classes of whites. The Trende piece shows that it is the rural and working class whites, that is staying home. He characterizes them as the Perot vote, which would now be called the Trump vote. The folks on the Dissident Right, who would not be considered downscale in any other context, are certainly a part of this dynamic.

My guess is the GOP’s biggest problem is with white men. I know a lot of white guys who are generally disgusted with the Republicans. I was at lunch the other day with men who are typical middle-class suburbanites. The sort you think of as Chamber of Commerce types. All of them were fed up with the GOP and they were talking about Trump. They know he is a clown, but they’re just tired of the bullshit from the party.

Now, Trump will never be the nominee. That circus on Thursday night was just the appetizer. While Trump helps Bush and the surrender wing of the GOP right now, he is seen as an embarrassment so he has to go. Ideally, from their perspective, the air goes out of his balloon in the fall and he drops out over the holidays. That way he is a non-story for the primaries.

Can they win without these voters?

Here are some math to consider. These are states along with their electoral votes that are Democrat locks: WA(12), OR(7), CA(55), NM(5), ME(4), NH(4), VT(3), MA(11), RI(4), CT(7), NY(29) NJ(14), MD(10), DE(3), DC(3), HI(4). That’s 175 votes and they need 270 to win.That’s just the states that are a mortal lock. The GOP will not even campaign for president in these states.

Here are the “swing states” that the media locks in on every year. CO(9), MN(10), WI(10), MI(16), IA(6), MO(10), OH(18), PA(20), VA(13), NC(15), FL(15). That looks like a lot, but states like MN have not gone GOP since the 70’s. Demographics say this can change, but until it does there’s no reason to think it is going to in 2016. Adding back the heavy leaners to the Democrat total you get 240 electoral votes.

The GOP has to sweep Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida and make sure none of their more reliable states like Missouri swing the other way. Virginia has been invaded by Hispanics and Yankees, who vote Democrat exclusively. It went for Obama the last two times for that reason. Similarly, Florida went Obama the last two times.

Can the GOP win these states if they don’t drive up that white guy vote? Maybe, but the odds are against them. Can they win with a guy like Bush at the top of the ticket? There’s where things get interesting. A Bush – Kasich ticket will give the GOP the White House as they are sure to carry Ohio and Florida. Similarly, a Kasich – Rubio ticket will get them the White House. Any other combination is probably a loser.

So, there’s no reason to pay any attention to the GOP primary. The die is cast.

The Tourney O’Champions

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I’m not sure if there is a good way to handle a field of 17 candidates, as far as holding debates and candidate forums. It’s not like most of these candidates are fringe candidates with no shot to win. All of them have at least a puncher’s chance to win a primary or two. There’s just no way to have a debate with 17 people. Once you get past five or six it get too busy.

The bigger problem is having media people run these things. They want good TV and that means a bad forum for transmitting information.It also means using the “talent” used for the news programs and many of those people are as dumb as a plank. Stupid people asking liars their views on public policy is not a recipe for success, but it is how we do things in the Banana Republic.

The Kiddie Table

I felt sorry for this bunch. For some reason they held their debate in an empty auditorium so it underscored the fact that no one likes these candidates. It had a Model United Nations vibe to it, like they were high school kids learning about elections through a mock debate.The two airheads asking questions were what you would expect from announcers at the New Year’s Day parades.

Rick Perry: They asked Perry about Trump right away and he got angry and stayed angry the rest of the show. There was one point where I was sure he was going to fly into a rage. It was not until his closing remarks that he cracked a smile. Perry’s problem has always been that he cannot explain how anything he did as governor had anything to do with the Texas economy. He also has a little of the Bush mush-mouth to him and that brings up bad memories.

Rick Santorum: I don’t want to like this guy, but he is the best informed on the topics and he holds sensible opinions on most of them. He’s the one guy who truly understands that ours is a culture fight, not a math problem. On the immigration question you could tell he has thought about it. It was a good answer too. The trouble is he is detested by the press and the Republican establishment so he has no chance the get any traction.

Bobby Jindal: I got the sense that he was looking at Pataki and Gilmore and wondering if that’s not his future. Jindal has been a competent governor by the standards of Louisiana, but you have to have more than that to run for president. He’s a guy who would look great with a PowerPoint presentation explaining how accounting saved money on envelopes last quarter. His basic argument is he will run the Leviathan better than anyone else. He’s the Nehru version of Mitt Romney.

Carly Fiorina: I get why media think she is good. She’s what Washington thinks normal people sound like. Normal people think she sounds like the woman from HR. Her argument is that she will run the custodial state better than the others thus making Americans trust the rulers again. Like any technocrat, she thinks making the columns lineup on her spreadsheet is the solution to everything. She’s Mitt Romney in drag, but the media plans to drag her into the top tier because that’s the narrative.

Lindsey Graham: I take a back seat to no man in my loathing of Caitlin Graham, or the “Bro with no ho” as they say in the hood. But, I felt bad for him. He was nervous and his voice was cracking like a teenager. His answers bordered on the bizarre they were so rambling. The look on his face is what you expect from someone reading a note on a hostage tape. You have to wonder why he is doing this. He has no reason to run, nothing to say and he sucks at it.

George Pataki: Men who have spent their lives in politics, particularly in east coast states, get very good at these things. They have stood in front of empty rooms and packed houses. They have stood in front of old folks and high school kids, giving the banal speeches local pols give every day. Pataki is a very good speaker, but he would be better off in the Democrat party. His answer on abortion was what moderate Democrats used to say in the 80’s.

Jim Gilmore: People forget that Gilmore was a solid governor. It was a different time and a long time ago, but there’s something to say for being a good governor. That’s the trouble. It was a long time ago. He’s another guy who is a good candidate, doing all the little things you want from a politician, except he has no reason to be running. Come to think of it, he had no reason to run for governor.

Kiddie Table Post Game

The show after the show had the usual collection of chattering skulls from Fox. George Will made me laugh because he has been in the bubble for so long he’s not even sure what time it is. There was a time when Will was a big deal because he was the only non-liberal on TV chat shows. Today he looks like a guy who went to sleep in 1977 and just came out of the coma. It’s kind of tough to watch.

I predicted that they would all try to pump air in Fiorina’s tires and I was right. All of the skulls took turns slurping on Carly, insisting she stole the show. One of them was puzzled as to why voters have no idea why Fiorina is running. It’s one of those times where the media reveals something about themselves they try hard to conceal. In this case, they live in the media hive and see the rest of the country as an alien land. We’re talking monkeys to them.

The Adult Table

The pregame had A-list Fox stars and a packed house, which gave it the feel of a beauty pageant. I think if I were an atheist, I’d point to this as proof there is no God. If there was a God, he would rain down fire and brimstone on any country that picks its leaders this way. I have low standards for this stuff and I was embarrassed to be watching it. Maybe having a hereditary monarch is not such a bad idea after all.

Donald Trump: The problem business people have when running for office is they are not very good at being polite to losers. Trump is not used to humoring losers and so he gets ticked off dealing with the press. That’s fine on the stump, but in a debate he just ends up looking surly and unpleasant. Chris Wallace was there to submarine Trump and he did a good job at it. Trump did not help himself very much either. He did not kill his chances, but he is going to have be better at these things if he wants to be a serious candidate.

¡Yeb! Bush: I tend to think ¡Yeb! will be the nominee simply because he has the money, connections and the support of Conservative Inc. National Review has all their folks going off to ¡Yeb! camp through the summer so they can properly pimp him next year. The trouble is he is a dull as dirt. I can’t believe anyone walked away from this thinking he was their guy. I suspect his backers are getting very nervous right now.

Scott Walker: On paper, he should be the front runner. He’s a solid conservative. He’s getting better on immigration. he took the full blast of the Cult of Modern Liberalism and stood his ground. I doubt anyone remembers a thing he said in this debate. My sense watching him is he is playing for when Trump goes away so he can take down Bush one on one. He’s going to be the reasonable guy to the right of Bush.

Mike Huckabee: There’s a sizable Evangelical vote in the primary and Huckabee knows how to reach that vote. Like Rand Paul, he is a boutique candidate who can live off the land, hoping for something miraculous to happen. Nothing like that happened in this debate, but he did not say anything weird.

Ben Carson: I kept thinking Carson was invited because he promised to bring weed. I’m sure he is a nice man, but his answers were incoherent and he stumbled through his answers like a beauty pageant contestant. I’ve heard him a few times and he always sounds confused when answering off-the-cuff. I suspect he vaporized himself tonight as there are other options for people looking for a values candidate.

Ted Cruz: He’s the one guy who says exactly what he wants to say on every subject. He’s a trained lawyer and he is the smartest guy in the race. That shines through clearly when he is given time to speak. He comes off a bit too hot for these things and probably for most voters. he’s not a man blessed with charisma. I think he did enough to stick around for a while, but he really needs Trump to go so he can be the man of the right.

Marco Rubio: He pretty much disappeared. I never got the point of his candidacy. The reason the party is pushing him as Bush-lite is he is Hispanic, which they think is magical. The rest of us just think he is too young, too dumb and too inexperienced to be taken seriously. Like Carson, I think he goes flat quickly now that his voters have other choices that say the same things.

Rand Paul: Rand Paul is right about a lot of things. His highlight was when he disemboweled Tubby over the Fourth Amendment. There’s really nothing better than seeing someone knock a bully on his ass. After that he disappeared. I don’t know if it matters as he is a boutique candidate anyway. But, he probably did enough to stick around and that’s all that matters for him.

Chris Christie: The highlight of the night was Rand Paul slapping fatty around over search warrants. I can’t figure out why Christie is running. he should be going for the good government pitch, a prol version of ¡Yeb! Instead he is bellowing like a lunatic about things no normal person would get exorcised over. It’s like he thinks screaming is his thing and he has to do in order to be authentic.

John Kasich: What a jerk. That’s what I think every time I hear him speak. He could be a saint, but his TV vibe is fingernails on a chalkboard. He’s another guy who plays too hot for TV. He’s always shouting and pointing. No one wants someone in their living room who is shouting and pointing. I always wonder why no one asks him about being a big shot at Lehman right up until they collapsed.

Post Game

The media will declare Fiorina the big winner from the junior circuit. That was obvious before this started. They like the idea of the long-shot female candidate trying to break up the pale penis people club. It’s a great example of the hive mentality of the press corp.

The big loser is Trump. He looked like a jerk and he did not seem to know much about the issues. Immigration patriots will be disappointed, but they were fools if they thought he was going to win this thing. Trump is a vehicle to shaking up the race and in that regard he was the big winner. My guess is he starts to fade, unless he gets better quickly.

The other big loser was Bush. He was just another dull white guy on stage. If you were a Bush man going into this, you saw several options that were better and similar to Bush on policy. Even Fox, which is Bush country, had nothing to say about Bush after the show. I may be biased, but Bush was a big nothing.

Watching the Debate

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I’m not sure if I will watch the debates tonight. I have been meaning to clean the dryer vent for a while and maybe learn how to do a prostate self-exam. In all seriousness, I have a tough time watching these things as they have been turned into talent shows, without the talent. The preening clowns from the media, grinning like chimps for the cameras, asking a bunch of moist robots pointless questions is no way to run a country.

I’m not alone. Last cycle, the best numbers for a debate were early on when Gingrich was bashing the press. The debate in August of 2011 got seven million viewers. The rest struggled to break three million, which is 1 out of every 50 households. I doubt the debates have any impact on voter behavior. Romney waxed the floor with Obama in the debates and still lost handily.

I think one of the things to watch for tonight is how much of an ass Chris “Thanks Dad” Wallace makes of himself trying to be clever. He’s there to mug for the camera and that means trying to trip up the candidates with silly questions he thinks are clever. Trump’s presence will be too much for him to resist so I expect Wallace to show up wearing big floppy red shoes and a red rubber ball nose.

The night is, of course, all about Trump. He’ll get the business from Wallace and how he handles it will be the story. Having Wallace asks the questions probably works for Trump, but you never know. Trump’s act works when he fills the room. Being one guy on a stage of ten may make him look small. That’s what happened to Fred Thompson. Everyone expected the bigger than life TV guy and they got just another guy.

The other thing I’ll be watching is how Christie is treated and how he does with his one shot to get attention. I’ve always suspected the media liked him as “good TV, but totally safe on policy.” Take away the bombast and you have Rudy Giuliani in a fat suit. If ¡Yeb! can’t get his act together, the fat man is a good alternative for the party and their media sponsors. I don’t think primary voters feel the same way, but Republicans tend to fall in line, rather than fall in love.

That’s the other big story. Can ¡Yeb! arrest his decline. In the candidate forum the other day he was awful. I forgot just how bad the Bush Klan is at speaking in public. They have a way of making good news sound like a cancer diagnosis. Bush needs to give people a reason to like him. Right now he is trading on his name recognition and starting now the other names will become recognized. Personally, I hope he strips naked and runs screaming into the street.

The warm-up acts are another area of interest. The kiddie table Fox has set up for the candidates not polling well enough to get a seat at the adult table could be a story of their own. My hunch is the media will be looking for one they can start to champion just to have a story to tell. Narrative journalism requires at least one long shot and plucking a Carly Fiorina from the pack and promoting her fits the narrative. Plus, the press could use her to prove Republicans hate women.

I’m going to watch Walker and Cruz. I can’t say I’m a big fan of either guy, but they have a tale to tell. Cruz is the populist firebrand, at least by today’s soft feminine standards. TV is a cool medium that tends not to work well for firebrands. Walker is a boring dork who sounds like a robot, but he has the best resume of the bunch. I’m curious as to how they try to make this thing work for them.

Otherwise, this is the first weekend of the NCAA tournament for politics. It’s fun to sort through the candidates and think about how they could win, but we all know the game is rigged. Still, it is fun to see the underdogs score some points and give the big dogs a fight. Football season starts in a month so it fills the time between now and then.

Post-Christian West

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On this day 1374 years ago, give or take, A Northumbrian army assembled on a field in the West Midlands, which is on the west (left) side of England. North Umbria was in the northern most territory of England, bordering Scotland. Their leader was a man named Oswald and he was the king of Bernicia. He was the most powerful king on the island, the Bretwalda, and the man often credited with the Christianizing the north of England.

On the other side was King Penda of Mercia, one of the other kings of the heptarchy. Mercia covered the area that is now called the Midlands, which is conveniently located in the middle of England. Penda was a pagan, the last pagan king of England. Mercia was not very powerful, but they stood in the way of Oswald dominating the south, so they were a natural target for the Northumbrians.

On the day of the battle, Oswald, no doubt, stood before his men and prayed to the new God for victory over their pagan enemies. The custom of the age was to promise gifts to the Church and maybe a daughter or son to the Church in exchange for victory. This was one of the many pagan habits the Church tolerated in order to bring the people slowly into the Church.

On the other side, Penda most certainly made offerings to the old gods, along with promises of additional sacrifices if they were victorious. The origins of King Penda are a bit murky, but we do know he was a pagan, and the pagan faith of Britain was Wodenism. It most likely came over with the Saxons and there’s some evidence that Penda was a Saxon.

The Battle of Maserfield probably lasted just a short while. The “armies” of the day were warbands under the command of an Althing or head chief. No one really knows, but the consensus is that armies were at most a few thousand men and probably numbered in the hundreds. In the end, Penda was victorious. Bede describes the outcome as a field made white with the bones of the saints. Oswald, when the battle was lost, is claimed to have knelt and prayed for the souls of his soldiers. Penda had him chopped into pieces and displayed on stakes.

If you were alive at the time, particularly if you were a Mercian, you probably thought Christianity was on the run and the old gods were reasserting their dominion. Certainly, Christians had their doubts. But, a dozen years later Oswald’s brother killed Penda at the Battle of Winwaed and a dozen years after that Oswiu presided over the Synod of Whitby where the secular and Christian authorities codified Christianity for the whole of England, including Mercia.

The point of this blast from the past is to illustrate how the culture can seem to shift very quickly. Even in the slow moving medieval period, a nation could switch religions within a generation. One day you’re helping your father burn the Christian missionary, the next day your son is packing wood under your pagan feet at the behest of the local priest. In a world where the religion of the king is the religion of the people, things can change quickly.

A little closer to our time is the matter of homosexual marriage. In the US, as is usually the case, the rulers impose their fads on the people through the mockery of the court system. That makes it easier for the people to pretend they are a conservative people with a liberal government. The reality is Christianity is dead in America so the people in charge know they will face no resistance.

In Ireland, a place to played up by Hollywood as an austere Catholic country, the people rushed to the polls to vote for homosexual marriage. It’s not that they really cared about the gays or that they were smiting the Church. They simply stopped being Catholic. In 1990, 80% of the people went to church each week. Today it is half that number so voting for homosexual marriage was just what the cool kids were doing.

The point here is that what you see happening today is a lot like what happened with the spread of Christianity through Europe. It was slow and proceeded in fits and starts. Early Christianity in Britain, for example, was hilarious due to the heavy drinking and fornicating of the priests. The commoners could hardly be held to account by such men, at least on moral issues. Over time, a critical mass of true believers gained the upper hand and Christianity became a defining force in English life.

That’s what we’re seeing with the New Religion. It’s not ready to wipe Christianity out completely. It’s simply too ridiculous to be taken seriously by enough people. But it is making steady progress. If you look at this post from a blogger with a name that is too hard to spell, what you see is the steady erosion of Christianity in America. A third of people under 30 have “no religious affiliation” which means they are not Christian.

About half the country does not attend church at all. In New England, the home of liberal fanaticism, church attendance has collapsed, now resembling Europe. The number of church closings in America suggests that self-reporting of church attendance is wildly inflated. Even in the South, which has always been the most religious part of the country, there’s been a decline in church attendance.

The Battle of Maserfield seemed to stall or even possible signal a rollback of Christianity, but it was just a blip. Similarly, the eradication of Christianity by people of the New Religion has stalled from time to time, but it is winning and will win in time. Today Christians are stripped of their property for disobeying homosexuals. In a generation they will be banned from public. Like Wodenism, Christianity will be a weird part of the past for future generations.

Roundheads Versus the Cavaliers

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A central thesis of mine and a reason for this blog to exist is that most of America is entirely clueless as to why the 20% are making war on them. The daily assaults on the Four Olds by the Cult of Modern Liberalism is like a swarm of bees attacking from all directions. Logically, you know the numbers are small, but it feels like there are so many of them.

Jonah Goldberg wrote a book called Liberal Fascism a few years back. In it he documents how both American Liberalism and European Fascism share intellectual roots and how early Progressives borrowed from the Italian Fascists. There’s nothing new in the book, but it is a nice summary of the topic. Goldberg had to pull his punches, of course, given his career choice. Calling your employers fascists is never a good idea.

The trouble with so much of the analysis of the Left by the so-called Right is that it starts when their people arrived in America. It is a default assumption of “immigrant America” that the wave of Europeans that arrived at the end of the 19th and early 20 century forever reconfigured American culture. The story of America for them begins in the Jewish, Italian and Irish ghettos of New York, cutting off the 200-plus years of history that still defines the country.

If you read the Dissident Right, a common theme is the Cold Civil War between one group of whites (Progressives) and the other group of whites (Traditionalists). The assumption, and probably an accurate one, is that this term refers to the American Civil War. My guess is most people who think of the culture war this way are referring to the American Civil War. That event looms so large in the imaginations of the political elites, it is a reasonable way to start.

I would contend that the better place to start is the English Civil War, the fight between the Roundheads and the Cavaliers, the Parliamentarians versus the Royalists. The people that settled New England were English, who were on the side of the Roundheads. Some actually fought in Cromwell’s army. They also came from specific areas of England, thus having customs particular to that area, which they brought with them to the New World.

The other big colony founded at the time was the Tidewater area around the Chesapeake. The men who founded and developed Virginia and North Carolina were men of high birth and they created the sort of society you would expect from such men. The colonies of the Deep South were founded by plantation owners from Barbados. They not only shared the same sensibilities as the Tidewater gentry, they were also Royalists.

Just as the two sides of the English Civil War had a different political and religious vision, they had a different social vision. This was true of the American colonies. The Yankee world was one that was highly egalitarian and defined political liberty in terms of community freedom. The South was hierarchical, defining liberty as that of the gentry and their freedom as a ruling class.

The bigger divide was in their social views. Males in a Cavalier society were going to be what you imagine. Status was conferred on those who showed courage, daring and risk taking. In a Puritan society, males attained status through the sorts of things a highly egalitarian and fanatically religious people value. Instead of flamboyance, it was competence and community spirit that were the key to status.

This standoff between the New Model Army and the high risk cavalry charge is with us today. The assault on white males is not about race as much as it is about the concept of masculinity. This insane article from Salon gets at what I mean.

Toxic white masculinity defaults to violence as a means of maintaining social and political control. It clings to guns as a symbol of “real” male identity. It fears women as equals; it lashes out at non-whites who are somehow “stealing” white men’s jobs and power. Toxic white masculinity sees “liberals,” “progressives,” “social justice,” and “feminism” as enemies — out of a fear that “white masculinity” will somehow be made obsolete or extinct. The dream worlds and paranoid fantasies of angry white men are distractions that look to some type of Other as the preeminent threat to America’s safety and security. The reality is of course, very different.

There’s the old Roundhead versus Cavalier fight. The Progressive crazies making war on white males today are the spiritual descendents of those Roundheads, who executed King Charles. It’s not a political or cultural issue as much as it is a spiritual issue. The modern Progressive sees the flamboyant brash male as a threat to the spiritual well being of the community. In the Puritan tradition, men are humble, competent and risk adverse, as God expects from the elect.

Another Puritan attribute comes into play here and that’s a fanatic’s sense of obligation to enforce their ways on everyone else. The Puritans believed they were chosen by God to protect the common good through maintaining internal conformity and unity. When John Adams won the Presidency after Washington retired, he immediately set about enforcing Puritan culture on the rest of the country.

The Alien and Sedition Acts are exactly the sorts of laws you expect from religious fanatics. Modern Iranians or Saudis would perfectly understand the point. On the one hand Puritans wanted to keep foreigners from bringing foreign ideas, by forcing them to assimilate – or else. On the other hand, they wanted to stamp out dissent, particularly from those Cavalier males to their south.

Our Fascist Age

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One the stranger things about the Nazis was their opposition to chain and department stores. Anti-capitalist elements of the party pushed through special taxes on department stores and organized boycotts against the larger retail stores. It was not just Jewish business which came in for these assaults. Large industrial concerns were also attacked by elements in the party who wanted a return to the guild system of their imaginary past.

The Nazis had a lot of nutty ideas about all sorts of things, but they figured out that letting the populists run wild would result in economic chaos so they eventually adopted the ideas of other fascists, namely corporatism. The Nazis were never an intellectually rigorous bunch so it is no surprise that they were not very coherent when it came to economics, but they eventually fell into corporatism, which had been kicking around Europe since the 19th century.

The interesting thing is the Nazis had a romantic view of small business that was integral to their worldview. Yet, once they embraced corporatism, they turned on small business quickly. In 1936 they closed 36,000 small businesses and in 1937 they closed another 63,000. The reason was simply that they thought there were too many small businesses and that complicated their larger economic plans. In other words, the corporate state transcended everything, even ideology.

It’s something to keep in mind as America embraces the corporate state, combining it with the technological state. This interesting piece in 538 a while back provides some useful numbers to understand how this is unfolding.

Talk to anyone in Silicon Valley these days, and it’s hard to go more than two minutes without hearing about “disruption.” Uber is disrupting the taxi business. Airbnb is disrupting the hotel business. Apple’s iTunes disrupted the music industry, but now risks being disrupted by Spotify. Listen long enough, and it’s hard not to conclude that existing companies, no matter how big and powerful, are all but doomed, marking time until their inevitable overthrow by hoodie-wearing innovators.

In fact, the opposite is true. By a wide range of measures, the advantages of incumbency in corporate America have never been greater. “The business sector of the United States,” economists Ian Hathaway and Robert Litan wrote in a recent Brookings Institution paper, “appears to be getting ‘old and fat.’”1

Hathaway and Litan say the trend is worrisome, and other economists who have studied the issue agree. Entrepreneurship is a critical source of jobs in the economy. Perhaps even more importantly, it is a major driver of productivity growth. New companies, after all, often arise from an idea about how to do something better, whether it’s making cars or brewing coffee. Many of those ideas fail to pan out, but the ones that work can change entire industries — can be, in other words, “disruptive.”2

But recent research suggests that established businesses have less and less to fear from would-be disruptors. This is partly because, as I noted this spring, fewer Americans are launching businesses. In the late 1970s, according to data from the Census Bureau, 15 percent of all U.S. businesses were startups, meaning they had been founded in the past year. In 2011, the latest data available, the so-called startup rate had fallen to 8 percent. Measured in terms of employment, the drop has been even steeper.

But the issue isn’t just that there are fewer startups. It’s also that fewer of them are succeeding. In 2011, more than 27 percent of new companies went out of business in their first year, up from about 20 percent two decades earlier.3 Even companies that do make it to their first birthday are failing at higher rates than in the past, though that trend is more recent and hasn’t been as steady. The only groups of companies that haven’t seen their failure rate rise meaningfully, Hathaway and Litan found, were ones that had been in business more than 15 years.

Part of what’s happening is driven by ultra-low interest rates. Big companies can raise enormous amounts of cheap capital. That lowers risk so big business can be hyper aggressive with pricing to wipe out small competitors. It also means they can buy up small competitors. When money costs 10 points you have to buy companies at below market. When money costs two points you can buy above market.

There’s also the matter of access. Not far from where I live WalMart opened a giant store near a busy retail area. The state widened the road, put in some lights and added an extra lane for traffic entering the store parking area. A few clicks down the road a local business has been fighting zoning battles for a year trying to expand into the vacant lot next door. So far it has taken him more time to fight the zoning board than it took Walmart to built their store.

WalMart has an army of lawyers and lobbyists. They can grease all the palms that need to be greased and do so with a sophistication the local guy cannot match. The local guy pays more in taxes than WalMart, but he can’t offer no show jobs and other perks pols can hand out to their people. In the corporate state, the small business man is a nuisance, not an asset.

Something new to our time is the technological revolution. In Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, surveillance meant following people around and wiretapping their apartments. Today, the government has their corporate partners archive your e-mail, cell phone calls and internet habits. One can’t help but wonder if the erratic behavior of GOP legislators and judges of late has something to do with what the White House knows about their personal lives.

The sad irony of modern America is the technological revolution was kicked off at the same time the culture began to reminisce about the “greatest generation” and how they whipped the Nazis. Just as that generation is fading away, we are adopting the economics of the people they defeated in the war. Even more ironic is the fact that if you believe the things that generation believed, you are called a Nazi.

The Alien Future

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One of the fun things about reading history is you occasionally bump into names or places that still resonate today. For instance, I was recently reading about the English Civil War, the Roundheads versus the Cavaliers. Names like Richard Lee, John Washington and George Mason were Royalists on the side of the king. They were also ancestors of Robert E. Lee, George Washington and George Mason.

Americans are raised to think of the Founders as fierce republican patriots who detested monarchy on principle. In reality that was never the case. America was a hodgepodge of people and cultures from Europe with all sorts of weird ideas about how to best organize their societies. Events, however, helped change their thinking and their subsequent deeds shaped the new country to this day.

It’s a reminder that human societies are run by men with a long past and they shape their world for subsequent generations. Modern scholars dismiss the great man theory of history, but modern scholars are deeply marinated in all sorts of lunacy. The claim that men are merely the product of their environment misses the forest for the trees. Men are a product of and a shaper of their environment.

Learning about the great men of history is a great starting point. Study Washington, Jefferson, Mason and Randolph and you learn about the Tidewater region of America that produced them. From there you learn the history of the colony and its cultural ties to the Royalists of England. That helps explain why the Tidewater region joined the Yankee colonies in revolt, despite having very different views on liberty.

That’s the thing. Every society has its ruling elite and they are people who respond to events. They can change their minds and go off in a direction that history says is at odds with the tide of history. In modern America, for example, we now have gay marriage in spite of the fact most Americans think it is ridiculous. The people in charge want it, so they make it so, despite being opposed to it not so long ago.

History is, in many respects, the study of the shifting culture through the lens of the great men who shaped it. The ruling elite in the first half of the 20th century were men of the industrial age. Many were not that far removed from the shop floor or the plant offices. Those who inherited their wealth often served in the military with the same men who worked in their father’s plants. The men running the war against Hitler were men of their age even as they were fighting to reshape their age.

This brings me to the central question of our time. What sort of men run the world today?

The West has just gone through one the great revolutions in human history. The technological revolution has and is altering the basic relationships of human civilization. Europe and the Euro are not possible in an analog age. The growing surveillance state is a direct result of the technological revolution. The people who made this revolution and have risen to the elite in this age are also products of this new and different age.

This interesting post on the nature of this new ruling elite is both interesting and unsettling.

This post is a graphic summary of an upcoming data-driven book on Silicon Valley’s political end game: the path toward overhauling the Democratic Party and orienting our lives toward innovation.

At its core, the book argues that changes in the economy also changes the political ideology in power; some personalities and value systems thrive in different occupations and industries. The growth of the knowledge economy has empowered a novelty-seeking personality that places an extreme faith in the power of information to solve the world’s problems.

A growing demographic of highly-skilled college-educated liberals will transform government’s role to be about directly investing in citizens, funding them to become as entrepreneurial, civic, and healthy as possible.

The ultimate goal is to make life as close to the college experience as possible: a life dedicated to research, exploration, and creativity, while automation ensures that everyone has enough food and leisure time to pursue their unique contribution to the world.

The first thing to understand about this emerging ruling elite is they are nothing like normal people. Most grew up in upper middle-class homes, went to private schools and finished up in elite universities. These are folks who lived in a parallel America. They drove the same streets and ingested the same popular culture, but did so from an entirely alien perspective.

It’s tempting to think of this new elite as just an Apple version of the old elites, but that’s a mistake. Consider the media. In the industrial age, news reporters and columnists were jobs filled by men of the working classes who had high literacy. They lived in the same neighborhoods as their readers. Their kids played with the plumber’s kids. Many served in the same roles in the military as their readers. Today, the typical media person is a graduate of an elite school and only knows the sons of toil as servants.

The men and women running the technological age are people used to winning because they have known nothing else. They were sent to good private schools where they got good grades, which led them to excellent private colleges. Ellen Pao captured the imagination of our rulers because she was such an outlier. Her biography was supposed to end with her running a fortune 1000 firm, not as a disgraced grifter.

Pao is a good transition to others who grew up outside of America. Barak Obama is so wildly popular in Silicon Valley because he is a lot like many of these people. He was born somewhere, raised in various places by parents who were citizens of the world, if “citizen” was a real thing, which it is not. That’s the view of the technological elite. They may or may not be Americans (or British or Europeans or whatever), but that’s the accident of birth. They are citizens of their class, first and foremost.

This alienation of the ruling class is not new to history. It’s probably been the norm, at least in Eurasia. It is a departure from what most of us grew up understanding about our world. People used to getting their way and unprepared for failure are going to be different types of rulers than those who rose up through the ranks. It’s the difference between the man who built the business and the man or inherited it.

Not surprisingly, the companies of Silicon Valley look more like a college student union than the old fogey businesses of the past. You can’t really blame them for wanting to maintain this perpetual adolescence. The best of times, particularly for males is late teens through late 20’s. The college campus is now an idyllic playground of perpetual youth, where everyone’s primary duty is to wait on the special little snowflakes.

The trouble is “a life dedicated to research, exploration, and creativity” only works as long as someone is doing the hard work of civilization. Yale is a wonderful campus full of high-IQ, self-actualizing people, but it is guarded on the perimeter by hard men with guns. You don’t want to wander too far from campus as the neighborhoods get ugly very quick. Automation may be the solution, but it brings new problems.

That’s where the alienation is most obvious. Walk around a place like Yale or even a Georgetown and it feels synthetic. A normal person feels like an intruder because they are an outsider. They have responsibilities, struggles and all the petty hassles of life. They face failure, which is something wiped clean from the life of elite colleges. If you want to know why John the Savage hung himself, spend a few days on an Ivy League campus.

The world our new rulers imagine for us will be an alien place compared to what we are used to. We will all be strangers in our own lands, assuming it gets that far. I’m fond of pointing out that Huxley got most things right while Orwell got most things wrong. At the dawn of the technological age, most people would have said the opposite. Maybe as the technological age creeps forward, some third option will reveal itself.

Ghetto Pride Day

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One of the stranger things you see in the ghetto is the summer festival, which is always run by the civil authorities and called something that feels more like wishful thinking than reality. The “neighborhood block party” is really just a free event for the locals, who were thrown together mostly because of public housing or Section 8.

The social workers who organize these things think a day of face painting and free hot dogs will build community spirit. It says something about the organizer who call these neighborhoods “communities.” Typically the word “pride” is shoehorned in somewhere as if you can sprinkle it on the heads of the natives like fairy dust and they will suddenly be proud.

The “community pride” events in the ghetto are about what you would expect. There are loads of single mothers with kids, along with the people from the government to make sure it does not turn into a riot. That means the fire department, ostensibly to entertain the kids, and the cops, often on horseback or maybe motorcycles. Of course, the people are there for free stuff. Community groups that are trying in vain to build community are on always hand, working on their next grant application by taking pictures of kids at their booth.

The pride thing always makes me laugh as the locals haven’t the slightest clue what pride means. How could they? Pride is something you give yourself, through your accomplishments. People in the ghetto are mostly killing time. What they do understand is respect. They are willing to kill over it. The middle-class social workers would get better results if they called these things “community respect” parties, but that sounds scary to the nice white ladies in charge of organizing.

My little slice of heaven had their summer block party yesterday. The authorities setup some games for the kids and they had pony rides and face painting. A church that I did not recognize was giving away hot dogs and sodas. There was some sort of ticket scheme involved to keep the “community” from taking unlimited drinks and hot dogs. The one thing people in the ghetto do well is take free stuff.

Walking around, I was reminded of something that no one discusses today for fear of being called a racist. That’s the slow blending of the races in the underclass. I saw a lot of fat white women with caramel colored kids. You never see black women with caramel kids, of course, but I do see a lot of white women with them. They always have nose rings for some reason too. This is so common, I just assume a white women with a nose ring is down with the swirl.

The other thing I always notice about these things is they schedule them to start mid-morning and be done with by mid-afternoon. You don’t see a lot of males so I guess the timing is deliberate. They know the males roll out of bed closer to sundown, like vampires. If they let the block party roll into dusk it would be a ghetto version of True Blood, where the vampires walk around with their pants falling down, playing with themselves and looking for trouble.

There’s a substantial immigrant community adjacent to the ghetto, mostly people from the subcontinental but there are some Arabs in the mix. The Arabs kit out their women in burkas, which creeps the locals out when they see them. There’s nothing better than seeing the culture clash between the American underclass and immigrants from Asia or Arabia. I always imagine the immigrants wondering how in the hell they keep losing to us.

Looking out at the multicultural paradise today, I’m thinking we’re headed for a bad end. The women in burkas were clustered together and their men were clearly making sure they stayed that way. The subcontinentals seemed to be enjoying themselves, but they made no effort to fit in with the natives. The blacks and the whites in the underclass may be ready to create a new breed of ghetto rat, but the newcomers have other ideas. At some point, that’s going to be a problem.

That’s going to be the Hispanics. I did not see any of them at this thing today. Instead they were down at the soccer field doing their own cookout. I noticed only because I was riding my bike and a guy I know waved me over. For reasons I’ll never know, immigrants like me. Custodio is not afraid to offer his opinion of the natives and he is not wrong in his opinions. Hispanic immigrants may not be rocket scientists, but they’re not idiots either.

That’s another thing no one discusses. Hispanics don’t like blacks and they are not shy about it. Whites have been whipped into submission, but the people flowing over the southern border are not going to sign onto the same program. The Left imagines millions of brown guys lining up to vote for a nice white lady from the university, but I suspect it does not end up that way. Hispanics prefer leaders who sport a thick mustache.

But, maybe it will all workout well.

 

Interest Rate Trap

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This was on Drudge the other day. For it seems like forever, I have been reading stories about how the central banks are holding rates at near zero, but may be ready to raise rates at some point, but not now. I suspect most people have stopped paying attention because it just seems like the same story recycled once a quarter.

The Federal Reserve is keeping interest rates near zero and is waiting for further improvement in the labor market and inflation measures before allowing any increases, according to the latest Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) statement.

The Committee says it will evaluate the progress of the economy, focusing on its twin goals of maximum employment and 2 percent inflation, in determining how long to maintain the current low target range for the federal funds rate.

The Committee says it will raise rates when it is “reasonably confident” that these two criteria have been met.

Fed Chair Janet Yellen signaled that the Fed may raise rates later this year when she discussed the Fed’s semiannual report to Congress on July 15.

“If the economy evolves as we expect, economic conditions likely would make it appropriate at some point this year to raise the federal funds rate target, thereby beginning to normalize the stance of monetary policy,” said Yellen in her testimony. “Indeed, most participants in June projected that an increase in the federal funds target range would likely become appropriate before year-end.”

The Fed has held the federal funds rate near zero since December 2008.

Let that sink in for a second. We are going on seven years since the Fed lowered rates to what people thought was the floor of the possible. Now, we know central banks can and will lower rates below zero, but the US has yet to go down that road. Still, near zero for the better part of a decade is not without its consequences.

Tim Kane, an economist at the Hoover Institution, is one of these critics.

“The Fed funds rate has not been raised in nine years, and interest rates this low create an illusion that the escalating national debt is (and will remain) easy to bear,” states Kane. “With interest rates kept too low for too long, the Federal Reserve can turn a boom into a bubble.”

That’s not the half of it. Corporate and sovereign debt is now fully structured around near zero rates. Most of this debt is rolled over when it matures so a rising interest rate environment means suddenly rising interest payments. That’s what happened to Greece. Rates jumped and the operating deficit increased. That was met with more borrowing, which drove rates higher. Eventually, they could no longer borrow at rates they could pay.

In America, pension funds, which used to rely on the steady returns of bonds to remain solvent are now invested in all sorts of synthetic instruments based on equities, housing and speculation. Those pension funds are wildly underfunded and the returns are below market on their current investments. Rising rates will drive down the value of equities putting pension funds in deeper trouble. The word “catastrophe” gets throw around a lot in the pension world for a reason.

Rates will return to their natural level eventually. The question is whether it will be an orderly recession that comes with raising rates or whether it will be a chaotic depression as central banks lose control of monetary policy. Those are not great choices and they are political choices. The Fed is a political institution, which is why they keep delaying the pain. In politics, tomorrow is the best time to take the pain and tomorrow never comes.

This is a pretty good example of something Joseph Tainter described in The Collapse of Complex Societies. When the Fed first started cutting rates, they got a big return, in terms of the impact on the economy. As they kept lowering rates, the return got smaller, thus forcing them to chase the desired results by lowering rates further. As rates approached zero, returns reached zero. It appears to be a classic example of diminishing marginal returns.

At first blush it sounds like a simple thing to let rates return to normal, but that is not a cost free endeavor. At the same time, maintaining artificially low rates also has a cost. The spiraling sovereign debt is a pretty good example of the cost that comes from distorted debt markets. Some economist argue that the ultra low rates are actually hindering economic growth as evidenced by the anemic recovery.

The Fed understands this, but it is a political entity and the choices are all politically difficult. Slowly raise rates and you risk recession, which brings the political class down on the Fed. Leaving rates low means the cost of unwinding the low-rate regime keeps climbing. Worse yet, some new crisis will have to be addressed with cutting rates further, exacerbating the long term problems that come from ultra low rates.

The Romans never figured out how to make an orderly retreat from empire. They exhausted themselves financially and culturally trying to keep the empire together, eventually leading to collapse. America is not about to be invaded by Visigoths. Collapse is unlikely, but a very painful and disruptive reordering is on the horizon. The question is how painful and orderly.

Hash Tag You Suck

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If you are on twitter, you no doubt have seen the twitter meme #cuckservative popping up on or against right-wing (allegedly right-wing) twitter feeds. Or is it twitterers?  If you put the term into a Google machine you get a decent array of stories discussing it. This summary from VDare does a good job describing its origins. Here’s a bite-sized story on the origins of the “social media fire storm” otherwise known as a tempest in a tea kettle.

A year or so ago I was made aware of the cuckold fetish by the usual way we stumble onto strange things these days. I put the word into Google, which I often use for spell check or to research the etymology of a word. I had no idea there was such a “thing” as a cuckold fetish, so I was more than a little surprised at what came back from my search. I admit to being a bit of prude so maybe all the cool kids are into this and I’m the weirdo.

It’s that prudishness that causes me to turn my nose up at this trend and the phrase itself. The word itself, cuckservative, just sounds disgusting. Some words are naturally pleasing to the ear, even when they describe disgusting things, while other words sound harsh and crude. The term for this effect is synesthesia.  In this case, cuckservative sounds crude because it is crude.

That said, big-foot journalists are noticing it and feel the need to comment upon it. The people rallying to the cause tend to make for colorful stories in the liberal media about the need to crack down on racism so my guess is this turns into a fiasco for the people championing it. The media will find a couple of colorful nutters ranting about the “Negroes” and make them representative of the racist bogeymen the left swears are lurking around every corner.

That’s the media circus. The real story, I think, is that ultra-fringy types have been able to get the attention of the for-hire conservatives that have come to dominate Conservative Inc. The reaction seen on twitter suggests to me that these people have been caught entirely unaware of the deep resentment toward them amongst many on the Right. Erick Erickson, for example, has been going around thinking he is a man of the people only to learn that the people are laughing at him.

I’m picking on Erick Erickson here only because I saw his twitter spat the other night. For all I know he could be a rock-ribbed conservative with impeccable credentials. I don’t read his site very often. I just look at foaming at the mouth rants like this one he posted and I suspect he’s a guy who likes speaking down to people like me. If I’m wrong I will be grateful for the correction.

What’s striking about this to me is we saw something similar in Europe where utra-fringy groups, branded as off-limits to decent people, gained support mocking the ruling elite over issues like immigration. They had their share of cranks and wack-jobs dressing up as Hitler, but they also had snarky amused types who made sport of the very serious people  warning about the comedic threats on social media. Before long a lot of normal people started joining in on the fun.

The best example of this phenomenon is Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement. It’s best weapon has been mockery. It’s very hard to demonize someone who is laughing and having a good time. This was something the American Right said they learned from Reagan. They were running around calling each other happy warriors throughout the 90’s, but that was mostly to hide the surrendering. Now, the Right is nothing but dry technocrats.

Donald Trump is where he is right now because he is good at mocking the very serious people in the GOP and in the media. Ted Cruz is probably even more critical of his party and the media establishment, but he is about as funny as cancer.I saw him on television the other day and I was reminded of Mr. Burns from the Simpsons, except Cruz is not as self-deprecating.

The ground is shifting under the feet of the ruling classes. They can sense it, which explains the hysterics over Trump and to a lesser degree Sanders. Kevin Williamson, the very serious person at National Review, has written dress-over-the-head rants about both Trump and Sanders this month. In fact, he has written two rants about Sanders and two about Trump, all of them implying they are Nazis and their supporters insane.

Not being a seer, I have no idea what will come of this #cuckservative thing. My inclination is to say it will flame out and go away. Similarly, the people in charge will figure out how to deal with the growing tide of popular discontent. No matter how revolting the leaders, the people will not revolt. It’s no longer in the fiber of the people. But, maybe I’m wrong.