Category Archives: Culture

Theory Versus Reality

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This excellent blog post is a reminder of that old joke the difference between theory and reality. Anyone familiar with business analyst types knows exactly why ObamaCare is collapsing. In the dreaded private sector, there are people who are experts on business theory, marketing their technology theory and so on. They make a nice living creating models of reality that can never exist in the real world. What they never do, of course, is run an actual enterprise that exists in the real world.

Government, free of the need to turn a profit, are loaded with these sorts of experts and theorists. The army of health care experts and policy wonks has been desperate to test out their theories on the American public for decades. The result is a system that incorporates all of the latest fads. This is the norm in all government initiates. Anyone who has worked on a government project knows the drill. The design included in the original contract fails on contact with reality. Then bids go out to fix it.

Social democracies like ours take this approach with all projects. It is why government seems to be getting increasingly inept. Fifty years ago NASA could go from zero to moon landing in five years. Seventy years ago America went from no army and in depression to conquering the world while beating Hitler and Tojo within a decade. Today, they can’t build a website in five years. Here we are 12 years on and the World Trade Center is not completed. The Empire State building was built in a year, start to occupancy.

Contra the blogger, it is not just technology. It is everything. Obama announced last week that he and his team were stunned to learn that insurance is complicated. Amazingly, he thought this was an insight. How is it possible that an American could possibly have made it to adulthood not knowing this? That’s the reality of political class. They are so divorced from reality that they are stunned to learn that insurance is completed. The administrative layer is even more oblivious to the reality of the modern world.

That’s the lesson here with ObamaCare. The people in charge only have a vague understanding of how our highly complex modern society works. They know America through polling, policy debates and campaigning. The political class is thoroughly insulated from the land over which they rule. Because these people are inoculated from the consequences, they can be cavalier in their ignorance. Their loyalties, however, are to the political class as evidenced by the Census and IRS scandals.

In that regard, ObamaCare is emblematic of what’s wrong and a good proxy for what we can expect going forward.

Our Most Dangerous President

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The argument for forcing Nixon out of office was that he was an imperial president, who violated the norms of democracy. That is, he had no respect for the law and as a result a lawless environment evolved in the White House. It was, of course, a justification intended to hide the truth. Nixon was hated by the Left because he was an aggressive anti-communist in the 1950’s. The Left could never forgive him for his attacks on the Left, so they could never accept him as a legitimate president. He had to go.

The charges against Nixon were always nonsense, even on the dubious moral grounds promoted by the Left. Woodrow Wilson was recklessly used his power to suppress the media. He jailed 10,000 Americans for opposing his war. FDR trampled all over the concept of republic, promoting a program that looked a like Italian fascism. Compared to those two, Nixon was a piker. Most of the stuff Nixon was doing was done under his predecessors. Kennedy and Johnson loved spying on people.

That said, a healthy self-governing society should have a fair amount of transparency and the political class should be deeply invested in the rules. Once the people in office lose respect for the rules, the road to authoritarianism opens, as the rules lose their moral power. In other words, adherence to the rules is purely practical, rather than a matter of status within the ruling class itself. People obey the rules if they benefit them and violate the rules if that works. No one is ashamed of breaking the rules.

We’re seeing this with Team Obama. They figured out how to use the IRS as a political weapon, stocking the upper ranks with their people who set about harassing the political enemies of Obama. Today brings word that the Census Bureau has come in for similar treatment. They faked the unemployment numbers leading up to the election. That naturally calls into question all of the other economic reports. It may also explain how the regional reports never seem to square with the national statistics.

This is very serious stuff. In a modern economy, information is currency. Like money, it can be debased. When people lose faith in the currency, they lose faith in the entity issuing it. Trust in government is near record lows and that’s with a national media out waving pom-poms for the ruling class. Imagine where things go if the press throws in the towel on these people. It may not matter as no one trusts the press anymore anyway.

Of course, that same poll shows that the people no longer trust the most democratic institution in the nation – Congress. Fifty years ago, the alleged culture of lawlessness in the Nixon White House was enough to force out the president. Here we have actual corruption, real violations of the basic trust. Yet, the political class cannot bring itself to even discuss it, much less act on it. The old line about silence being consent is overused, but it applies here. Lawlessness is now the law of the land.

Of course, you have to wonder what else they are doing. if they are willing to abuse the IRS, are they willing to abuse the FBI or the CIA? They corrupted the FBI by installing true believers into the leadership layer. What happens if they do the same with the FBI? What are the chances the media would look into it? If they are willing to excuse the abuse of the IRS, why would they raise an alarm over other abuse? This sounds far-fetched, but ten years ago the IRA stuff seemed far-fetched, but here we are anyway.

Why Conservatism is Dead

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Political movements have a life cycle. They are born of the particular circumstances of their time. They thrive to whatever extent they can, but then they fade and die. The main reason they run their course is people don’t live forever. That and careers in public life are short, usually lasting no more than two effective decades. There are some exceptions, but twenty years is a good number. That means the people who start the movement and bring it to preeminence are usually half way done by that point.

Liberalism, for example, has gone through a number of reinventions over the last century because the trends run their course and the people move on. Wilsonian Democracy petered out with World War I and was replaced two decades later with the New Deal liberalism of FDR. That ran out of steam and was replaced with the New Left and the sixties counter culture. That fell apart in the 70’s with Carter. The neoliberal movement of today is a replacement for the largely defunct New Left radicalism of the 60’s.

The fact that today’s liberal spasm is sort of a walk down memory lane for aging lefty boomers suggests this phase of Progressive politics is the last. Instead of supplanting the nold movement and old people, with something new championed by new people, the modern Left is more of an echo. It’s a reconstitution of old ideas from past movements into something of a Frankenstein’s monster of politics. Regardless, the point is mass movements have a life cycle and they eventually either die or stagnate.

Conservatism, at least was passes for it these days, has clearly run out of steam and is now just a husk of a movement.  A good example of this is National Review. It was one of the founding publications of the conservative movement, a response to New Deal liberalism. The insanity of the sixties breathed life into the movement eventually leading to Reagan and the conservative reformation of the 1980’s. Throughout those years National Review was the platform for radical conservative thinkers to spread their ideas.

Today, it is a market platform for conventional mediocrities looking for talking head gigs on the cable channels. Anyone that is slightly edgy gets tossed out and the magazine mostly functions to promote dullards like Ramesh Ponnuro and Rich Lowry. Neither of whom have said or written anything anyone has bothered to remember. As John Derbyshire once told me, they are just career men with mortgages and families. He was being nice about that. They are squatter living in the ruins Buckley old mansion.

One magazine is no big deal, but it is emblematic. They have a piece up by that technocrat Newt Gingrich. For two decades now Gingrich has been peddling his brand of right-wing technocracy. He obviously had success with this, as it put him in the Speaker’s chair. The fact that his tenure was a failure and he had to leave under a cloud should be judgement on him and his ideas. Instead, he’s another guy shuffling around the remains of Conservative Inc., repeating the old lines from the old program.

The fact that there’s nothing remotely conservative about him seems to be lost on everyone. Within living memory, the editors of National Review would have been railing against Gingrich and his crackpot ideas. Today, they collude with him to sell books. The gist Gingrich’s pitch is that the state should meddle in your life so you do things Newt things are a good idea. It really is incredible what passes for right-wing these days. In the 1980’s, Ronald Reagan would have labeled Gingrich as a nanny-state liberal.

That’s why the Right is dying. It ran out of ways to jam conservative goals into the Progressive moral framework, so it is reduced to repackaging liberalism as “big government conservatism.”  Young people, we are told, are more libertarian and maybe that is true, but libertarianism is mostly childish nonsense. What they mean by libertarian is what people used to call libertine. Of course young people want to party, fornicate and avoid responsibility, duty and sacrifice. That’s what it means to be young.

Getting high and hanging out with friends is not the foundation of a political ideology or a cultural movement. If anything, it is further proof that the Right is dead and this new thing called neoliberalism is not getting many takers. In fact, what passes for both Left and Right are now just excuses for the people in charge increasing their power and privilege, while not having top fulfill their duties to those over they rule. It’s just a series of complex arguments based only in the authority of the people making them.

That’s why conservatism is dead. It was, at its heart, the promise to create a legitimate alternative to the prevailing Progressive orthodoxy. That’s why it flourished in the 1980’s and carried Reagan to victory. For a lot of reasons, it never fulfilled that promise. Instead, it was co-opted and corrupted into predictable opposition, willing to throw every fight to the Left. That’s increasingly obvious as the demographic changes cry out for a new opposition to the ruling class. The conservatives are instead defenders of the status quo.

The Death of Reactionary Liberalsim?

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One of the oddities of the Barak Obama platform was that is was reactionary. Everything he talked about was in reaction to some slight or affront to liberalism over the last few decades. It was if they were keeping a list starting in the Reagan years and were nursing a grudge over each and every failure. His policies were both anti-intellectual and anti-ideological. Most was either the opposite of whatever Bush or Reagan had done or a promise to redress some failure to implement liberal dogma in the past.

Once he was in office that become more obvious. The whole Russian “reset” nonsense was particularly strange. The Russians accepted the fact they lost the Cold War and they were pretty happy about it. After all, it made Russian rulers much wealthier. On the other hand, the American Left was still angry over the end of the Cold War. They resented the fact Reagan threw them overboard and confronted the Soviets. They insisted that they would have ended it better, thus the talk of “fixing” relations with Russia.

The last five years have seen a series of such moves by this administration. In foreign policy, doing the opposite of Bush is the default. They threw away the peace deal in Iraq and tripled up on the pointless Afghan campaign. They threw over every ally we had left in the Middle East and embraced the Arab Spring nonsense. In Europe, all of our traditional relationships were cast aside to the point where even the French hate Obama. The Iran policy is an attempt to vindicate Carter and repudiate the Reagan critique of him.

On domestic policy, we see the same things. ObamaCare is just a re-do of the failed HillaryCare initiative the Left pushed in the 1990’s. The Left was convinced that they were wronged by the Clintons and wrongly blamed for the failure of HillaryCare. Here, the narrative gets weird. The Left argued that the failure to pass an unpopular proposal was the cause of the 1994 election. If only had rammed it through, they would have been fine, so they were determined to ram through ObamaCare.

For the last five years, liberal policy has been driven by reaction to the past or simply doing the opposite of the Republicans. From the stimulus bill forward, if Republicans are for it, the Left is against it. If liberals of a bygone era were thwarted in their past attempts, then now it is time to pass it, even when it made no sense at all. Undermining welfare reform, for example, is counterproductive. That was the one “reform” in the 1990’s that made any sense and was embraced by both parties and state government.

Liberalism today is nothing more than a grab bag of slights and grudges. It’s a strange form of reactionary politics, in that they are not actually protecting the status quo against reforms. It’s as if they think they need to rewind everything to some starting point in the 1960’s and have a do-over. They long for a present that never came to be, so they seek to go back and recreate the past in order to arrive at a new present. It’s a very oriental form of reaction, when you think about it. It’s spiritual and mystical.

Some right-wing Progressives like Jonah Goldberg argue that American Liberalism may be in a final stage and about to expire. The surge of liberal candidates was a rear guard action signaling the end. That’s mostly wishful thinking. A key argument of the ossified Right is that doing nothing will result in victory. It is a weird appropriation of the old Progressive line about being on the right side of history. It an appeal to authority, but the authority is an unmentioned spirit force that is just assumed to exist.

Now Charles Krauthammer is peddling the same idea. It’s an odd thing that all of the neocons have suddenly embraced this weird new right-wing mysticism. They also entangle tangible politics with ideological currents. That’s what Krauthammer is doing with ObamaCare and the Democrats. It is bad for the party, but it has nothing to do with what Progressive is becoming. If anything, the death of the old pragmatic politics of the Left, in favor of this new reactionary mysticism says the Left is reborn.

Maybe this type of politics is doomed. The weirdness of addressing all of these old sins and old slights is too obvious. Politics is about bread and circuses, not mystical trips to the before time in order to recreate a new present. That stuff is for grad school seminars on ontology, not practical politics. Still, the intensity of this new type of liberalism, however, suggest it is just getting started, rather that headed to the dust bin of history. The Left has believed in nuttier things than mystical reaction.

The Opposite Rule of Liberalism

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At various times, I’ve rolled out my rule about how to interpret statements by liberals regarding non-liberals. That rule is the title of this post and it goes like this. Take whatever they say, assume the opposite and you will get close to the truth. When liberals said the Tea Party was “AstroTurf” and liberal groups were genuine grassroots, you could flip it around to mean their gang was a rent-a-mob and the weirdos in the 17th century outfits were just regular folks pissed off and making some noise.

That was in fact the case. The Left has well funded “volunteer” operations to bus in protesters when needed. Often they are paid by their union, like we saw in Wisconsin with the teacher unions. It is a form of projection, for the most part, but in politics it is a way to shift the focus away from whatever crooked stuff their doing. One of the oldest tricks in politics is to falsely accuse your opponent of something, so the story is about the other guy denying it, not about whatever you are doing.

A great example of this comes from a post by Steve Sailer. For as long as I’ve been alive, there have been theories about why there is a Left and Right in American politics. All of these theories claim the mantel of science and all of them come from the Left. The reason for this is, at some level, the Left knows they are not working from facts and reason, but rather a set of beliefs. Rather than confront that, they accuse everyone that opposes them of holding irrational beliefs and acting from emotion.

The formula goes like this. They assign to themselves qualities they wish they possessed, but don’t. “Open minded” always makes the list along with “smart” and “unconventional.” Who would not want to be a smart, open minded guy, who is a little off-beat? Gosh that sounds just like the protagonist of every cool TV show and movie! Then they usually assign some bad qualities to the mythical right-winger or conservative. Then they produce a “study” that confirms all of this as science!

I’ll note that liberals have a long list of words for the people on the other side of the hive walls. You never hear liberals talk about the differences between libertarians and paleo-cons or neocons and paleos. To the liberal, they are part of the undifferentiated other on the other side of the wall. Often they avoid this and rely on their cartoon version of the conservative, which is usually a blend of the 1950’s sitcom dad and a prison guard. It’s Ward Cleaver with a closet full of Nazi uniforms.

Once the basic descriptions are established, they lard it up with pseudo-science and rotten statistics. In a prior age, they would have psychiatrists put their stamp of approval on it. Today, the fake nerd is all the rage on the Left so they conjure up a few characters from the social sciences. Almost always a little digging finds that Doctor Nick Riviera relied on a handful of grad students he paid to answer some questions. But, he was kind enough to lard it up with jargon so the left can claim it is science.

It is not just the normal stuff you see in team sport politics. Liberals invest a lot of time and energy promoting things about themselves that are not true. In fact, the opposite is usually the case. Go look at that Sailer post and the qualities listed under liberal.  Liberals are the most dogmatic people with very narrow opinions on just about everything. Open minded is, unsurprisingly, the exact opposite of a liberal. They think that by embracing things that normal people hate, that makes them open minded. In fact, it just makes them dicks.

The fact that they tend to dress alike and repeat the same things is an example of their narrow mindedness, not their willingness to try new things or be unconventional. When was the last time a liberal surprised you with a non-liberal opinion on something? When was the last time the NYTimes or MSNBC was unpredictable? The people running around accusing others of narrow mindedness are always from this hive minded authoritarian cult that is viciously intolerant and anything that smacks of deviationism.

The most glaring example of the opposite rule of liberalism is how they describe themselves as highly individualistic. Put a liberal in a room full of non-liberals and they are a shrinking violet. Reverse the roles and the liberals will harangue the non-liberal like a group of Crips attacking a Chinese delivery guy. Liberals congregate like all herd animals. They seek protection in numbers. It is why they are over represented in politics, soft-sciences and journalism. These are activities best done in groups.They are also high conformity activities which appeal to the hive mind.

The most important facet of this rule is that whatever the Left is ranting about, whatever bogeyman or vice they see as a great threat, is most likely something they are doing or have recently done. For instance, when the Left is accusing Republicans of abusing government power, it means liberals have either been doing it or are planning to it. All of the vices the Left accuses others of doing are habits common on the Left. Properly understood, the hooting from the Left is both a confession and a warning.

There you have an expanded definition of the Opposite Rule of Liberalism.

Racism in America

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Growing up when and where I did, I’m familiar with racism. I never experienced it or witnessed anyone cause harm to another because of their race, but I grew up hearing stories about it, mostly in school. In my home, my parents took the view that treating people of different races poorly was rude. In public, you never aired your opinions about race or other races. It was just rude and we were instructed to never do it.

My first real exposure to a real honest to goodness racist was through a black schoolmate. His father or uncle, I no longer remember, refused to speak with or do business with white people. This was most likely just a boast, as I don’t think it would be possible, even today. My friend told it to me because he thought it was funny and assumed I would think it was funny, which I did. At that age, it was ridiculous.

But, in adulthood I learned like everyone else that race is a thorny subject. All the school lectures remained mythical for someone my age or younger. Only old people now recall when discrimination was permitted. Anyone under the age of fifty grew up watching integrated sports and entertainment, went to integrated schools and worked in jobs with people of other races. Still, race hovers over everything. Jim Crow has been talked to death, but other race issues have been forbidden for so long people no longer know how to discuss them.

One such example is black racism. In America it is OK for a black person to be a public bigot. Al Sharpton has made a career out of being a public bigot. Blacks gladly embrace their racism and think nothing of it. In fact, the people in charge encourage blacks and now the other non-whites groups, to root for their own team and root against whites.  This story buried in the news is a perfect example. Black voters elected a white guy because they thought he was black.

What’s left unsaid, but everyone knows, is he would have had no shot running as a white guy. Despite the fact the voters agreed with him, they would never have voted for him over a black guy. The old white guy obviously knew this and acted accordingly. There’s some attempt to say other factors decided the election, but the fact that the winner actively concealed the fact he is white says he knew what he was doing. He rightly figured out that the incumbent was unpopular, but blacks would never vote against one of their own.

My own view is we would be wise to decouple official racism from personal opinion. Times change and opinions change. Young people today don’t think the word “nigger” has any more emotional value than any other word. I hear young people, white and black, use it amongst themselves. In my day that was a sign of poor upbringing. Whites and black avoided the term out of self-respect. Young people are probably right to devalue it. Some things should be left in the past and archaic racial terms are a good candidate for the memory hole.

At the same time, rooting for your own side or wanting to be around your own kind is perfectly normal. Private discrimination is just a fact of life. Lecturing people about just creates this weird sense of terror. If your private words or private actions are revealed, your life can be destroyed, because you will be condemned as a racist. Unless you’re black or Hispanic or whatever else is washing up in American. Peaceful separation should be the norm and not condemned.

Official racism, however, is not something we should tolerate because it is incompatible with a free society. Even if you think the free society stuff is just nonsense, official racism is unworkable and always fails. As a white guy, I don’t want my government discriminating on racial lines, because it makes my government unnecessarily expensive. That and it gives them an excuse to play favorites within my tribe, not just for my tribe.

That said, I know this will never happen.

No Country For Men

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It’s increasingly difficult to be a normal man and engage in the general culture. One reason is the people in the content business, especially the news business, seem like they are from another planet. They say things that are so at odds with daily reality you wonder if they ever go outside. Of course, most of what they write and say is propaganda. They don’t think of it that way. They are just enthusiastically repeating the articles of faith of their class. The news is just a hallelujah chorus for the cult of modern liberalism.

A good example is the brouhaha over the Miami Dolphins drama. The sports press, despite not knowing any details, has crafted this elaborate narrative into which they are going to force the participants. The “culture in the locker room” is one element. All of those terrible alpha males, you see. Of course, the white guy is pure evil because he used the magic word, despite doing in front of black guys who were laughing and egging him on while everyone is partying. The semi-black guy is the victim, despite no one on his team coming to his defense.

One reason for this weird disconnect is that the sporting press is dominated by beta males who find traditional male behavior threatening and distasteful. There’s a class element too. Football players may have gone to college, but football is decidedly working class. You don’t excel in the sport without being a physically tough man. To be a physically tough man means rejecting a central part of modern liberal culture. Like cops, football players accept the human condition at face value, which means accepting the biological diversity.

Another reason for this is Progressive culture is feminine. Women can be ruthless, but they don’t have the same hierarchical view of social organization as males. Men compete to establish the pecking order in the group. Women compete for the attention of males. That’s how the general culture operates now. George Bush once said, something along the lines that if one person hurts, government must act. That’s the general view of the over class. It is not winners and losers, it is just losers. As long as there are losers, no one can be a winner.

That’s why sports reporting is so weird. Normal men look at this story and just assume the one guys is a pussy and the other guys are assholes. Every normal man knows the world is divided into predators, victims and the men who make the world run. At the fringes, like a locker-room or a prison, the predators attack the weak.  So many of the people in the sports media grew up as victims of the playground bullies, they can’t understand what they are covering.

Anarcho-Tyranny

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I’ve never been a believer in supplements. The reason is I’m a natural skeptic and the claims always set of my BS detector. The other reason is I know a bit about nutrition and science. Humans have evolved as omnivores. We can get the nutrition we need from a wide range of sources. In modern times, with so much food available to us, the odds of missing something important are close to zero. It’s why no one calls in sick because their rickets or scurvy is acting up. We have more than enough food.

All of those fat people waddling in and out of Walmart are not lacking in essential vitamins or minerals. Similarly, the health benefits of these things are dubious. It is rare that you see real science backing a claim. Even in cases where there is some correlation between a supplement and a positive life outcome, the benefits are weak. Take a vitamin may help in some small way, but not enough to worry about not taking one. That said, most of it is harmless so taking a multivitamin every day is not going to kill you.

At least that’s what I used to think. I read stuff like this and wonder how many people have been harmed by this crap. Whenever I watch TV, I see ambulance chasers looking for victims of one drug or another. Often, the causes of the alleged injury is something I heard marketed just the year before. Maybe it is just another scam, but some portion are legitimate. Given that these companies appear to be jamming whatever they can find into gelcaps and selling it to the public, I suspect a lot more harm is being done than we know.

Among their findings were bottles of echinacea supplements, used by millions of Americans to prevent and treat colds, that contained ground up bitter weed, Parthenium hysterophorus, an invasive plant found in India and Australia that has been linked to rashes, nausea and flatulence.

Two bottles labeled as St. John’s wort, which studies have shown may treat mild depression, contained none of the medicinal herb. Instead, the pills in one bottle were made of nothing but rice, and another bottle contained only Alexandrian senna, an Egyptian yellow shrub that is a powerful laxative. Gingko biloba supplements, promoted as memory enhancers, were mixed with fillers and black walnut, a potentially deadly hazard for people with nut allergies.

I suppose a terrible farting spell is not the end of the world, but it is not something you should expect from a pill being sold in America. We have this massive regulatory state and yet they allow crooks to sell fart pills to the public without any consequences. Giving people a “powerful laxative” when they are hoping for a little help with their depression is downright monstrous. Unless what is bringing you low is a lack of fiber, and that seems highly unlikely, giving depressed person the runs sounds quite cruel.

All of this is fraud and is easily policed. The trouble is we have a government that is no longer interested in this basic functions. These require effort and risk by the bureaucrats within the custodial state. These companies have money and lawyers. They can fight back. Crimes like fraud are allowed to go on because the state has no desire to enforce these laws. Yet, someone with a real drug that can help real people will be faced with the wall of regulation promulgated by the state.

The Madness of the West

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Every society has its lunacy. Almost always, it stems from ignorance. Ancient people believed that the gods arrange the stars and made the sun rise and set. They lacked the capacity to understand the science we now take for granted. Their mythologies provided a useful explanation to a natural phenomenon. What seems nutty to people of today, made perfect sense 2500 years ago. It explained what they saw and that was enough.

Late 19th century Americans fell for all sorts of patent medicines, thinking they would improve their health. In most cases they were harmless scams. In some cases they were poison. Today, people believe organic food is better than the regular stuff. They don’t know that most of what they buy as organic is the same stuff as the non-organic produce sitting in the next bin. Again, it is mostly ignorance. You’ll find that the people with the weird food fetishes know the least about how food gets from farm to market.

That said, this is weird beyond words. Since the dawn of time, we have known that humans come in one of two sexes. We know a lot about the genetic differences between men and women. The Olympics actually tests female athletes to ensure they are not dudes. There is some very tiny portion of people who possess both male and female genetics, but you have a better chance of being struck by lightning twice on your way to cashing your winning lottery ticket than every meeting such a person.

The people going in for “gender reassignment” are not in that group. They are mentally ill in the same way people who think they are space aliens or animals. No matter how earnest and sincere an “otherkin” may be, they are not animals. Indulging them is not an act of kindness. It is cruelty. Allowing someone to live in a disturbed state of delusion is cruel and we should not do it. Encouraging people to mutilate themselves in order to act out their delusions is monstrous. The people promoting it should be stoned.

That said, you can see where this is headed. First there is the demand that these degenerates be tolerated. Then they have to be accepted. Then the morality flips and you are no longer a good person for being indifferent. Now you must celebrate their degeneracy as some sort of moral good. In the near future, normal people will have their lives ruined for not showing the proper enthusiasm for the guy in the sundress chasing after the kids at the playground. This madness can’t end fast enough.

Collapse Takes Time

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One costly side effect of spread of mass media is that likable stupid people have the opportunity to spread nutty ideas. Walter Cronkite was a hugely popular because he perfected the avuncular style that people naturally trust. He seemed like a nice, thoughtful older man who was only there to inform the viewers. We now know he was a pathological liar and willfully misinformed his viewers on behalf of the Left

The cable news channels and network news operations are always looking for that person who can gain the trust of the viewer. If they can peddle the old time religion at the same time, that person is getting very rich on TV. A good example on the Right is financial pundit Larry Kudlow. On TV and radio he comes off as a super-nice, old financial hand, whose wealth of experience makes him uniquely qualified to assess the economy. He gets treated as a sage, despite being wrong about most of the things he discusses.

For all his wrongness, he is a good bellwether. He can be counted on to pitch the company line. In his case, the company is the GOP and the go along to get along gang of Conservative Inc. Seeing this today, we can assume that the GOP will be satisfied to say they are right, but otherwise do nothing to claw back some of the last five years. The signals are being sent to the party and its cheerleaders that the cost is clear. No one will expect them to actually do anything once they have some power.

The usual suspects will churn out some books about how to repeal this or reform that liberal policy. The GOP will offer up candidates long on complaints about the welfare state, but short on desire to do anything about it. The GOP will soon offer up a laundry list of things to fix it. The dynamic of the next 15 years as the boomers age off will be one where one party promises to fix it and the other promises to expand it. The logic of it is now off-limits. Instead, we are looking at a long losing fight against mathematics.

The line now from Conservative Inc is, “it will collapse under its own weight.” That’s true, but it will take 15 years. In a business, pushing off bankruptcy for fifteen years is a good thing. Most businesses don’t last that long. For government, the longer reform is delayed, the worse the cost of collapse is when it comes. In fifteen years, there will be a lot of white people expecting their checks and a lot of brown people expecting their free stuff. When the money runs out, things will get ugly in a hurry.

That’s the insidiousness of social democracy. You get the benefits up front, but push the cost way past the point when current office holders are gone. Whatever the structure, democracy ends up as a some type of tragedy of the commons. All of the incentives are for living in the moment and pushing the costs off to the next generation. It’s why every democracy ends in dictatorship. It’s also why the so-called conservatives are just fraudsters. They know this, yet they go along with it because it pays well.