Category Archives: Politics

The Apostate

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Back in the late 1990’s, James Byrd was murdered by three white guys in Texas. It was a terrible crime and the three men involved were quickly arrested and put on trial. It was a quick trial with two getting the death penalty and one getting life in prison. One has been put down while the other lingers in the system. Whatever your views on capital punishment, the fact that it takes decades to administer it says a lot about our society.

Now, our betters should have been congratulating themselves for what they had done. A generation earlier and this crime may never have been prosecuted. Instead, the three white guys were treated like any black criminal in the same circumstances. The real test of equality before the law is not at the admissions department at Harvard. It’s in the courtroom.

That’s not what happened. The Left used this case to tar normal Americans as bigots and later tried to blame Republicans presidential candidate George Bush for the crime. They ran very ugly ads trying to convince people that Bush was responsible for what happened because he was a raging bigot and racist. Naturally, the Republicans howled in protest, calling it a Nixonian smear and dirty trick.

A couple of days ago Jonah Goldberg doubled down on the absurd claim that Donald Trump is a member of the KKK. He’s been doing this carefully choreographed routine where he pretends to merely be curious about the story but is really trying to spread the smear that Trump is a secret Klansman. As I pointed out in the comments, it’s the sort of odious smear David Brock used to pull on Bush ten years ago.

Somewhere else, responding to another commenter, I pointed out that Goldberg lives in a whites-only neighborhood in a wealthy suburb of DC. It’s the sort of neighborhood Steve Sailer says, “home prices discriminate so the residents don’t have to.”  Goldberg, I’ll note, makes armpit noises on TV and his wife was a Bush appointee. If you want to see an example of managerial class sponger, it’s Jonah Goldberg.

Writing that comment, it occurred to me that I used make this point with regards to liberal commentators back in the Bush years. Chris Mathews used to rant and rave about racism, despite living in one of the whitest towns in America. In other words, the one thing to change in the last ten years is the Buckley Conservatives now sound just like the Progressive from a decade ago. Put another way, I did not leave conservatism, conservatism left me.

What was plainly obvious in 2000 when Bush ran for President was that the Left was not upset about his politics. They were horrified that he was a class traitor or more accurately, an apostate. He was from a clan that is the epitome of Yankeedom, yet he declared himself a Texan, abandoned Public Protestantism for Evangelical Christianity and was throwing in with the bad whites.

No man is hated more than the apostate, even more so when the apostate was a former member in high standing. In every mass movement, the apostate is the villain, who must always be found and destroyed. The Scientologists don’t try so hard to ruin the lives of former members because they have free time. Stalin did not have Trotsky murdered because he thought he welshed on bet or left the seat up too many times.

Apostates are hated not because they reject the cause or the group. They are hated because their very existence calls into question the rightness of the cause.  After all, if the traitor is able to prosper outside the cause, maybe he is right and the people in charge have been lying. That’s why he must be destroyed and never allowed to prosper. Otherwise, the logic of the cause no longer makes any sense.

The interesting thing we are seeing with this smear campaign against Trump is that it is a copy of the one launched against Bush. Trump is supposed to be allied with Yankeedom. If he had backed Rubio or Bush, the people at National Review would be holding parties in his honor. They would laud him as a great “conservative” behind the campaign of Jeb Bush! Instead, they are driving around in the broken down progressive clown car from the previous decade.

That tells us something about our managerial elite. The Left side freaked out over Bush the apostate. Now the Right side is doing the same over Trump. Their loyalties are to their class. The Right side is now finding solace in the arms of the Left side as they huddle together in the castle. All the jibber-jabber about party loyalty, conservative principles and fair play from the Right side have been cast aside in order to defend their class interests.

The big difference this time is that Trump is not Bush and Buckley Conservatives are not Progressives. Trump is a very smart guy who is fully aware of what he is doing, while Bush was an amiable nitwit, who just wanted to make the family proud. Similarly, Buckley Conservatives lack the skill of their brothers on the Left. It’s not called the Stupid Party by accident.

At this point, it looks like the Right side may have permanently damaged itself with the people it counts on for support. The Left side was at least able to provide it’s partisans with a chance for a catharsis. They voted for Black Jesus, had a big party and jeered at their friends and neighbors, who had been Bush supporters. Smashing things up is great fun, which is why looters are always willing to mug for the cameras.

It’s tempting to think this is a one-off phenomenon, but the managerial class evolved as a two-headed monster. It is a game of bad cop/worse cop on the voters. If one side is permanently damaged, the other side can no longer function in its natural role. The near total lack of political and intellectual talent on the Left side may simply be what awaits the Right side. How it all holds together is the big question, which is why it is so important to snuff out the apostate.

The Hothouse Flowers

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It was never easy for me. I was born a poor black child. I remember the days, sittin’ on the porch with my family, singin’ and dancin’ down in Mississippi…

OK, OK. I’m kidding, of course. I was born into poverty and grew up in what is elegantly described as a white trash culture. There are a number of uninteresting reasons for it, but I was raised with decidedly lower class sensibilities. I still retain those sensibilities, despite a lifetime outside the world that created them. It’s why I live in the ghetto. It’s as close to home as I can get, even though I’m the minority.

The hillbillies have a saying, “don’t get above your raising” which means to never forget where you came from. The Irish like to say, “don’t outgrow your hat.” Those are the two that come to mind, but my guess is every culture has some pithy way of stating the obvious. While there is some random variation in all of us, we are products of the people and environment that made us.

A few years ago, I was at Yale visiting with someone doing work there and I had the chance to spend a long weekend on campus. I don’t do this very often so I come to campus life as a stranger. Most of what the students and professors take for granted jumps out to me as new and different. For them it is just daily life. For me it is a trip to the zoo to see exotic animals.

One night, my friend took me to what I think was a grad student/faculty mixer. I’m not really sure what it was exactly, but that’s what it seemed like. I fell into conversation with some people doing post doc work and I flattered them by appearing interested in their studies. It’s the thing a guest should do and I’m pretty good at it. Sometimes I even learn a few things. One of them was working on currency issues, a subject I enjoy a great deal so I got to pick his brain a bit.

Anyway, one of the things that I found astonishing was just how naive they were about the world outside the campus. One guy was in his early thirties and had never held a job off-campus. The other guy had never held a job at all and he was about to turn thirty. He was expecting to land in a teaching position either at Yale or Princeton. To them, I was a visitor from another planet. They were far more curious about me than I was about them.

We had a good time swilling beer and talking about ourselves, but I came away feeling like John the Savage in Brave New World. These were not my people. They could never be my people. I’m sure they felt the same way about me as they pretty much said it to me. The guy without a job said, “I have no idea how you make it out there. I never could do. I’d never want to do it.”

This is common and why so many end up in fields that are similar to college life. Think tanks in and around DC are pretty much just privately funded faculty lounges. Rich people get tax breaks for funding people to write papers that extol the virtues of rich people. Government, and the companies that live off government, have gone from dreary bureaucracies to self-actualizing, nurturing workplaces, where everyone feels safe.

It is an important thing to understand when watching the political turmoil going on in the West. Everyone in the British managerial class, for example, thinks ever closer Union is the sensible thing to do. They look at Brexit as a sop to the chavs who need to blow off some steam. My bet is Cameron and his cronies just assume they will win. After all, everyone they know is for staying in the EU.

There is another element to it and what I heard that night at Yale. The sneering contempt we see on our televisions is really just the false bravado of the timid. For them, the typical citizen is like a bad odor. They may not be able to describe it, but they instinctively recoil from it.

It’s what’s so horrifying about people like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage. It’s not what these guys say about the issues so much as the working class odor that causes the beautiful people to crinkle their noses and flee the room. The coarseness reminds the hothouse flower that on the other side of the glass, there’s danger.

It used to be that the political class was populated by men, who had made something of themselves in the regular world. Many politicians started out in life by serving in the army and then working as a lawyer or in business. The civil service was basically working class people who were willing to take less pay so they could avoid the factory or field.

Rich people and their children had a dominant place. of course, but they had to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi, often serving in the military or private business. Jack Kennedy served in the military with an eye on a career in politics. He entered the Senate very familiar with and comfortable around normal men.

That’s not the case today. The political class is just the bit of the managerial class above the waterline. Underneath it is this class of people who pop out of the hothouses of academia into the grow rooms of government, thinks tanks and government contracting. Even the people with military service went from law school to JAG and then back to a law firm that does government work.

This separation may be the undoing of the managerial class, assuming mass democracy and mass media are the future. These hothouse flowers look silly to the voters when standing next to Trump on stage at these debates. The reason is Trump lives in the world. He’s familiar to us. He’s normal. That just makes the actors on stage with him look even more ridiculous. Most people say Marco Rubio talking butch the other day and just laughed, thinking, “who is he kidding?”

Of course, the one way to protect the hothouse is to do away with mass democracy.

The Attack of the Dirt Monster

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When an army is defeated on the battlefield, the first thing that happens is the lines break and order breaks down. Some units surrender right away, while others try to reform and keep fighting. Still others will retreat, finding the quickest way to escape in order to avoid capture or potential slaughter. The military saying is that you learn everything about an army when they are defeated.

That’s true of political arrangements as well. A political party or an ideological movement takes on a very different character when it runs into trouble. That’s because we get to see inside once it is cracked open. The things that were hidden behind the rhetoric, tactics and institutions are not only made public, but the motivations behind them are made public. It’s never a pretty picture.

The feuding and bloodletting we are seeing in the American political class is one of those rare chances to see behind the curtain of power, at what really is going on with our rulers. The other day the NYTimes dropped a bombshell report on how Chuck Schumer, Marco Rubio and Roger Ailes tried to hoodwink conservatives into buying off on amnesty. The gist of the story is it was an orchestrated effort to have Fox News sell a Democrat policy to conservatives.

As much as this damages Fox News, it also damages the Left. Their voters loathe the idea that the fix is in and that both parties plot in secret to hose the voters. Liberals hate this more than conservatives, who tend to suspect it anyway. In the past, this is the sort of story that would never be reported, but today the lines are breaking and it is a free-for-all. The NYTimes is taking a shot at Fox, even if it helps Trump, who they hate.

Of course, the on-going implosion of conservative media offers the best glimpse into the reality of the so-called conservative movement. We see some of them pledging to support Hillary Clinton. Others have broken into the old liberal chants from the Bush years. Still others are claiming Trump is a member of the KKK, the Nazi Party, the Italian Mafia and a Progressive Democrat. I guess that’s what George Bush meant when he said he wanted to be a “uniter” not a divider.

The shocking part for many Americans is seeing people who have spent decades claiming to be their champion, suddenly turn on them and call them morons and fascists. But it’s what happens when the lines break down and there is no longer anyone around to maintain order. We see the true nature of the combatants. In this case, most of the people in conservative media never cared much for their customers. The audience is just there to be farmed, like cattle.

Scrape away the ranting and raving and what you see is that all of them have been committed to the open borders project. Mickey Kaus pointed out a year ago that the simplest way to derail Donald Trump was for the party to adopt the polices of Jeff Sessions. These are wildly popular with voters and well within the traditions of America. They could not do it. They were willing to go to war with their own voters in order to save the open borders dream.

There are plenty of examples from history where the ruling elite has decided that a popular belief had to be purged. Wodinism was purged from the British Isles by force. Whole villages were forcibly converted to the new religion. This only worked because the people doing the converting were believers too and their new religion offered something of value to the converted. If Christianity was good enough for the king, then the people could go along with it.

The fantasy of open borders turns this on its head. The managerial elites live in bunkered communities, immune from the costs of open borders. They live in these Potemkin villages that resemble college campuses, where the diversity is only skin deep. Everyone has an advanced degree, a job in government and a worldview to match it. The people they plan to forcibly convert are the people they intend to stick with the cost of it, while the elites plan to enjoy the benefits.

The insanity of this plan is that it assumes things about humans that, if true, would spell the end of the managerial class. After all, if people are willing to go along with having the value of their citizenship vaporized, that means they no longer see it as having any value. How in the world will the managerial class command loyalty from the people when there is no longer any point in being loyal? After all, you can’t have patriotic duty without patriotism and you can’t have that if it no longer has any value.

What we are seeing here is something about how the Cloud People view the Dirt People. Loyalty to a society has always been anchored in loyalty to the people in that society. A man is willing to take up the sword on behalf of the king, because the king is doing the same for his subjects. In other words, you’re not fighting for the king, you’re fighting for what the king embodies, what the king represents. Loyalty flows in both directions.

What’s happening is a realization on the part of the Dirt People that the Cloud People hold them in contempt. What started out as some small skirmishes over the last decade, have now turned into a full blown war and the lines of the political establishment have broken. We’re getting to see the ugly truth that lies behind them. For most people, this is infuriating and that’s why they have flocked to the evil dirt monster that is Donald Trump

It’s also why the bellowing from conservative media over Trump has backfired. The people are angry at the Republicans for their treachery. They are hardly going to listen to the party’s propaganda organs lecture them on the need to be loyal in the fight against the dirt monster. If anything, like the peasants in the Italian countryside when Alaric approached Rome, they will side with the wrecker.

Senator Billy Ray Valentine

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In the movie Trading Places, two old rich guys make a wager over the debate regarding nature versus nurture. Randolph, played by Don Ameche takes the side of nature, while Mortimer, played by Ralph Bellamy, takes the side of nurture. They decide to settle it by switching the lives of their managing director, Louis Winthorpe III, with the life of Billy Ray Valentine, a black street hustler played by Eddie Murphy.

It’s a classic comedy so this is not new material. It is another version of Pygmalion. That was made into the musical My Fair Lady, which is probably what most people would recognize as the classic of this genre. I have not seen Trading Places in many years, but my recollection is it was very funny. It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when Eddie Murphy was hilarious.

Watching Ricky Rubio talk butch about Donald Trump the other day made me think of this movie. Rubio, like Billy Ray Valentine in the movie, is a creation of some rich patrons, who found him useful. Normal Brahman is a gazillionaire in Florida and he was Rubio’s rabbi in politics. It is a common arrangement in state politics, particularly in the South. Bill Clinton was a creation of the same system.

Rubio has charm and enough sense to not start thinking for himself. Like a good actor, he knows how to internalize his lines so they come out sounding off-the-cuff. He understands his role and that is to make the audience believe. It is the job of other people to write the lines, figure out the policy positions and setup the political fights. Rubio’s job is to show up, say his lines with conviction and win the crowd.

Barak Obama is exactly the same guy. Former Weathermen Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers sponsored Obama in Chicago as their dream boat, a black radical who can charm middle-class white people. After some time in local politics, billionaire progressives backed Obama all the way to the White House. There’s a reason the man does not order lunch without his teleprompter. Obama is smart enough to know his words are never his own.

Kept men are nothing new in politics. Local politics across the Anglosphere have been dominated by this arrangement for centuries. The local rich people pay men to represent their interests in parliaments, town councils, city government and so forth. In America, state government is loaded with these guys. They lobby the other members on behalf of their employers.

What’s new is that the global rich now look at national parliaments in the same way wealthy planters or industrialists used to look at state government. The result is Congress is packed with kept men, who play the role written for them by their handlers. That’s how Obama and Rubio made it to Washington. Their handlers were prepping them for presidential runs. That was the plan for Marco Rubio.

Some things don’t scale up very well. The kept men in politics get away with it in low-profile areas like state government or town councils. In a mass media culture, it’s really hard to pull this off at the national level, at least for very long. That’s why Americans want to seal up Washington and burn the place to the ground right now. They’ve figured out that it is just theater, a sophisticated long con.

There’s also the problem that some gags work just once. Americans have had seven years to watch Obama strut about on stage, doing his version of Hamlet. They know how to spot guys like him now, which is why Rubio went nowhere, despite having the entire conservative media ecosystem coordinating their efforts for him. It turns out that Lincoln was right, even in our mass media culture.

Anyway, watching poor Rubio flail about in the final days of his campaign, I can’t help but feel some sympathy for the guy. He is penniless and now his political career is over. He chose not to run for re-election to his Senate seat so he could focus on his presidential run. His other source of income is his wife’s no-show job at a fake charity run by Norman Braman. Now that Marco is no longer of any use to Norman, that no-show job goes away.

Unlike Billy Ray Valentine, Rubio lacks the moxie and cleverness to turn the tables on his masters. Instead, he is running around the country calling Donald Trump a doo-doo head. The hope is he can earn some sympathy from the party and maybe they can hook him up in a no-show job at a bank. John Kasich, Jeb Bush and Eric Cantor got rich playing that game so Rubio probably thinks he can get a similar deal.

Right now, this is the scene Biltmore in Miami.

 

 

 

Brexit

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Fortune favors the bold is one of those expressions popular in political circles because it tends to confirm things people want to believe about themselves. The guy who wins wants to see himself as a swashbuckling risk taker. The guy that loses wants to see himself as an exception, a bold swashbuckler who was not rewarded by fortune. That way, he can try again another time.

The truth is politicians are risk adverse in the extreme. They hate risk and it is what often gets them into a jam. When one choice has a 90% chance of success, they will get hung up on the 10% and not act swiftly. Alternatively, they fixate on hugging the shore to the point where they are blind to looming danger. The Republican Party made this error with regards to Donald Trump.

There are two types of acceptable risk taking in politics. One is when the fix is in and the politician knows something before the public sees it. He comes out and takes a “bold stand” on X and has his media arm champion him as a great risk taker. When X happens, he is vindicated and promoted as a bold leader. Not everyone falls for this, of course, but enough people do. Bismarck was a master of this sort of risk taking.

The other type of risk is the reverse of this, when the pol figures out he is going to be on the losing end of something. With nothing to lose in the campaign, for example, he will champion some controversial policy so he can pretend to go down because of his bold fight against the forces of darkness. The whole point of this gambit it to set up the next fight. It’s putting your last chip on seven at the roulette table.

Smart politicians figure out that in uncertain times, even the safe bet is a gamble. In Europe, the turmoil created by the Million Muslim March makes all positions a risk. The public is unhappy, but not ready to break into a full nationalist mood. At the same time, the cultural elite is still drunk on the sangria of multiculturalism. There are no safe choices other than keeping a low profile and letting the greater fool theory play itself out.

That’s what makes David Cameron’s move to hold a referendum on the EU so bizarre. His own past election should have been a clue that he is living in very uncertain times. No one predicted he would win a majority and that the other main parties would implode. Unexpected results, even when welcome, should always be cautionary. If you don’t know why you won, you can’t know if you will win the next time.

The betting markets show volatility, which tracks with the polling. The “deal” Cameron negotiated with the EU has been laughed off as worthless so the vote is between the status quo and exit. That would seem to favor Cameron as people tend to like change in the abstract but hate it in practice. You could argue that Cameron is looking at the polling and figuring the fix is in so he can afford to look like a risk taker.

That brings us back to why this is happening in the first place. The nationalist waves roiling Britain forced Cameron and the Tories to promise this referendum in order to stave off the challenge of UKIP. The stunning result of the election was due to the public rallying to the two parties most identified with national identity. The Scots went for SNP and the English went for the Tories.

That dynamic should scare the hell out of Cameron. Every day his voters see pictures of migrants clustered on the other side of the channel, trying to get a ride to England. Rotterdam could very well be the Lindisfarne of the Muslim Age. There’s nothing more patriotic than defending your women and children from foreign barbarians. Voting for Brexit is the sort of thing people under threat will naturally do, no matter the promised cost.

The polling at the moment suggests most people are open to both sides of the debate. It’s tempting for a normal person to think this bodes well for Cameron, but the old lawyer line about never asking a question unless you already know the answer applies here. A wide open public, in a time of great uncertainty, where the conventional wisdom is routinely proved wrong is prone to vote on emotion, rather than logic. Donald Trump says hello.

One of the striking things about the ongoing crisis in the West is just how many unforced errors the political class is making on a regular basis. Merkel inviting the young men of Islam to pour into Europe is an obvious example of something that was easily avoided. All across the West the politicians seem to have lost their footing and this gambit by Cameron feels like another blunder, assuming Cameron wants Britain to remain in Europe.

It’s hard to know if this string of unforced errors is just randomness, ineptitude or an indication of a systemic failure. Republicans running on amnesty after 2012 can be written off to stupidity, given their history, but what about Merkel? She was making sensible noises about multiculturalism in 2010. Did she lose her marbles in the interim? Is there some disconnect in the normal feedback loop between politicians and the public?

This brings us back to a familiar theme around here. The feedback loop used to have the media trying to sell news to the public. Those market signals led them to pressure the political elite correspondingly. This was an indirect market signal to the polls. It may not have been perfect and the liberal media often scrambled the signal, but the pols could at least feel the heat of an angry electorate before they saw the flames.

Today, the press is just a megaphone for the political class. The feedback loop is broken. David Cameron is surrounded by people who read the Economist. Everyone they know in the media thinks Brexit is just a sop to the UKIP types. Consequently, he really has no idea what the people are thinking and that means he has no idea how to pitch his plan to them. Brexit could easily end up being yet another unforced error.

The Turd Sandwich Salesmen

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One of the interesting things about what’s happening in American politics is how the chattering skulls are struggling to understand it. In fact, they are not really trying to understand it. Their efforts are much closer to denial than genuine interest. They feel threatened, so they try to jam the bad news into a box they have labeled “bad think” hoping that will make it go away. At least it fits into their comfortable worldview, even if it is still stinking up the place.

The Trump story is the most obvious example. The crooks and hustlers of the Conservative Industrial Complex see him as a dire threat to their cozy lifestyles so they have been churning out copy “explaining” why Trump is evil and his voters are stupid. The hope being that people don’t want to be thought of as stupid so they will go along with the assertion that Trump is Hitler.

I don’t think guys like Matt Walsh are sitting around thinking it through. He’s not that bright. It’s a visceral reaction to dis-confirmation. Red Team leaders were supposed to wave their banners and the Red Team supporters were supposed to respond with the team cheers. Suddenly those people are at another rally, singing different cheers for different people and different banners.

There are two possible explanations for this unexpected event. One is the people running Red Team have failed in some way. They either have a bad product or they failed to know important things about their customers and supporters. The people are walking off because they don’t like what Red Team is offering.

The other answer is that the people are stupid or gullible and the guy leading them astray is evil. In this case, Trump is casting a spell on stupid people like the Pied Piper. Human nature being what it is, it’s no surprise that the response from Red Team has been to blame magic. The evil spirit called Trump has put the whammy on them.

Reality is something different. The problem both American parties face and what mainstream parties face all over the West is the dilemma of the turd sandwich. One side of the political class offers the voters a turd sandwich on rye. The other side offers a turd sandwich on whole wheat. Both sides lecture us nonstop that voting is our moral and civic duty. Therefore, we must eat our turd sandwich.

Of course, there would be riots in the streets if it is said candidly so both sides of the political class ignore the filling and focus on the bread. We are repeatedly told by Team Whole Wheat that rye is poison and only lunatics eat rye. Team Rye tells us that wheat eaters are bigots and want to put rye eaters in chains. Their hyperbole aside, there is a very real difference between rye and whole wheat. No would deny it.

In a mass media culture, you can keep a lot of people busy shouting back and forth over trivia, like rye versus whole wheat, to keep the analogy going. What’s going on right now is a big chunk of voters has decided to look at the filling. They don’t like their turd sandwich and they have no interest in debating which type of bread is better. The trouble is the menu at the political deli only has turd sandwiches.

That’s what the boys and girls of the commentariat cannot fathom. They ticked all the right boxes on their way into the club. They memorized all the arguments and they know how to tell you rye is better than wheat or wheat is better than rye. They are filling in all the right circles so everyone is supposed to fall in line. They just can’t understand that it’s not the sales pitch, it’s the product. The public is just not interested in their turd sandwich.

That’s why the pathological Trump bashing has had so little impact. In fact, it has probably helped him more than hurt. He represents a rejection of the party and its pitchmen in the media. The fact that they hate him is his best asset. Voting for Trump, for most people, has become a vehicle to express their disgust for what the party has been feeding them for 25 years.

If you are on the party payroll or you work in conservative media, you really can’t face that reality. You have to keep believing that it will once again be a debate about the merits of whole wheat versus rye. That’s why they keep trotting out new arguments for why Donald Trump is a fraud, evil or about to implode. That’s why they have gone all-in on a guy like Marco Rubio.

Otherwise, these self-proclaimed intellectuals and opinion makers have to face a terrible reality. That’s the fact they are not, in fact, intellectuals or opinion makers. They are just hired staff in paper hats selling turd sandwiches for the people signing their checks. That’s a lot to ask of people who think a lot of themselves but lack the sort of introspection required to admit error.

Feeling the Bern

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A topic that gets little attention but is probably at the core of what is going on in the West is the collapse of the intellectual Left. Not so long ago, at least for men my age, you really could not be an intellectual unless you embraced the economics of the Left, which meant some form of socialism. Even intellectuals well outside political-economy would make clear they were fine with some form of socialism.

It’s how, for example, you could be a good liberal, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and also a critic of what we now call multiculturalism. The Left in the West started with economics as the core of the ideology. There was simply no way to be a man of the Left and not embrace some form of economic socialism. It was the intellectual engine of the Left. It provided the goals and most of the justification for the great liberal project.

The collapse of the Soviet Union put a stake in the heart of socialism. The stagnation of the 70’s in the West did a lot to discredit socialism. The economic liberalization of the 80’s and subsequent economic boom had socialism on the ropes, but the collapse of the Soviets killed intellectual socialism forever. It still staggers on in the domestic policies of Western countries, but that’s just cultural inertia.

Progressives no longer have a coherent economic ideology. They have accepted global capitalism without thinking much about it. Many of them come close to arguing that economics is no longer in the domain of politics. Instead, it should be left to supra-national organizations like central banks and global trade organizations. The EU is the most obvious example.

Technocratic managerialism has absorbed the political and intellectual Left like an anaconda swallowing a small animal. Through the outlines of the creatures skin, we can still make out Marx, Engels, the old FDR coalition, the Fabians and so on, but each passing year it is more difficult to detect them. What’s left of political-economy is a debate over who has the better spreadsheet skills.

Progressives used to think they were on the side of the angels, because they wanted to bring economic prosperity to the masses. The central argument of the Left from Rousseau until the early 90’s was that the correct economic arrangements would result in surplus and prosperity. The math was therefore simple. The rich had too much and the poor too little so polices that addressed that imbalance were a moral duty of the Progressive.

The collapse of the Soviet Union took with it the economic arguments of the Left. If market capitalism was able to dominate the premier socialist enterprise, it was no longer possible to argue for socialism. Not only that, but the opening of the Soviet Block also revealed the true horrors of socialism. They even managed to rape the very earth on which they stood. Chernobyl, in many respects, came to symbolize the idiocy of socialism.

The problem for the Left was that the road to salvation could no longer run through the economics department. What was the point of massive government intervention in the lives of citizens if economic equality was no longer a legitimate goal? That’s when they lurched into identity politics. Salvation was now about making sure the black guy or the lesbian felt wanted.

The problem here is no serious man of science accepts the claims of the social justice warriors. That’s why the Left is now just a collection of fashion statements. It has no intellectual underpinning. It makes no claims to transcendent truth. It’s just a bunch of people, who think they can gain salvation by harassing other people. Modern liberalism is a cargo cult with no real point beyond salving the emotional wounds of the adherents.

That’s why Bernie Sanders is such a threat to Hillary Clinton. Free stuff from your neighbor is a terrible idea, but at least it is an idea. If you are a young person loaded down with college debt, debt relief sounds pretty good compared to Clinton’s weird howling about transgendered rights. Something always sounds better than nothing, even when that something is just a museum piece brought out of mothballs by a guy who looks like a character from another century.

That said, nuts and bolts commies like Sanders are seen as a threat to the boys and girls running the Cult of Modern Liberalism, because he exposes the core problem of their new religion. If the people start caring about material stuff again, they may not be willing to sign off on the cultural suicide that promises salvation. If politics is once again about material prosperity, the Left has nothing to contribute. That makes old school commies like Bernie dangerous.

The quest to invite the world into Western countries is in many respects an attempt to create a new victim class the Left can defend. In a world where the poor are fat and live long lives, being the champion of the little guy is not so glamorous. When the oppressed have their own cable channels and control the national culture, even the fanatic has a tough time feeling heroic on their behalf.

That I think is what lies at the heart of the open borders fanaticism. Angela Merkel and her coreligionists are inviting the Muslims in so they can be victims in need of protection. It’s Mother Theresa having run out of lepers giving the village a plague so she can tend to them. It’s Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Instead of being a nurse that poisons her patients, Merkel is a politician, who poisons her country so she can cure it.

That’s why guys like Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK are a symptom. The intellectual Left has collapsed. What’s left is the spiritual trappings that have nothing to offer other than short term spiritual relief to the adherent. While there is always a market for crackpot religions and suicide cults, you cannot build a large scale political movement on them. Bernie Sanders is the ghost of socialism past, warning the present they are headed for destruction.

Trump: The Low Risk Option

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Elections have become big business with tens of thousands of people making a living off politics. It’s not just the politicians and their handlers. There’s a massive consultant class that does nothing but setup and operate campaigns. Then you have the commentariat that exists solely to comment about campaigns. The result is a wall of Bravo Sierra obscuring even the most obvious things about elections.

Elections turn on three categories of issues that are bound together by a fourth issue, which I’ll touch on last. The three main categories are security, economics and culture. Everything we debate falls into one of those broad categories. Immigration, for example, is a culture issue, even though the political class tries hard to jam it into economics. That’s why Trump owns it and Rubio does not.

These categories work at all levels of politics. The small-town mayor will run on taxes, crime and the fact he grew up in the city. The Senate candidate will talk about spending caps, foreign affairs and reforming the culture of Washington. Depending upon the election and the events of the day, these broad categories have varying weights on the election. In bad times, for example, economics will dominate the discussion at the expense of culture.

It’s why single issue candidates can win elections. If one issue is dominating all else, the guy that is best on that issue is going to win. Sometimes a category falls off the table entirely like we saw in 1992 with security. The strong suit of Bush was off the table so the voters were willing to consider an amiable degenerate promising to “fix” the economy. Bill Clinton would have had no chance when the Cold War was raging.

When looking at the candidates, you can do a little math in your head to figure out why Rubio, for example, is doing better than Bush in the primary. Rubio appeals a certain type of Republican. The guys the alt-right call “cucks” on twitter see Rubio as the one they would like to bring home to the wife. Even though Bush is infinity more qualified and has all the same positions, he is out and Rubio is giving third place victory speeches.

The thing that holds it all together, that fourth issue I mentioned at the start, is trust. Can the candidate be trusted to be what he claims to be on these three categories of issues? That’s why experience in office is so important. Candidate X can say, “When I was town dog catcher, I did these things and when I’m mayor I’ll keep doing them.” If it’s true, people can trust him on that issue.

Mitt Romney’s main problem in 2012 was no one believed him. His record was the opposite, in many cases, of his positions as a candidate. Even though he had a carefully crafted platform that ticked all the boxes for a majority of voters, no one really believed he would do any of it. When that big fat women from CNN pushed him around in one of the debates, a lot of people were reminded why he could not be trusted.

That’s the problem the modern GOP has with the voters. No one believes them anymore. They have no credibility with their core voters. That’s why the voters are flocking to candidates the party seems to hate. In part it is spite, but it’s also a natural instinct. When confronted with a habitual liar, you naturally assume the opposite of what they say is close to the truth.

That’s what was so offensive about that Charlie Cooke article the other day. Buckley Conservatism is nothing but technocratic managerialism these days. They are convinced conservatism is just a collection of policy positions. Tick the right boxes and you are conservative. Tick other boxes and you’re a liberal. Of course, tick the bad boxes and you are a racist xenophobic hater. That’s not who we are!

That’s simply not how humans view the world. The tick list is fine for a trip to the market or a list of chores around the house. Human beings don’t judge one another that way outside the managerial class. It’s a gut instinct about whether you can be trusted to do what you say you will do. Nixon may have been a crook, but normal people could trust him to punch the hippies.

That’s the thing with Trump and why he is winning. He’s all over the map on the issues and some of his statements are nuts. People still support him because they trust he will be what they expect him to be in office. He’s a pugnacious fighter who loves the country as much as normal Americans. He’s pissed at the same stuff and he pisses off those jerks sneering at us on TV.

It’s entirely possible Trump will be another Obama or another Bush, once he gets into office. He may end up doing nothing about immigration, trade, spending, taxes etc. So what? The generic GOP option is not going to do anything good on those issues. In fact, they could start another war or pass open borders. Even if Trump is a dud in office, he’s still a safer bet than Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz.

The truth of modern mass media democracy is that voters only have a heckler’s veto. It’s simply too easy to dress up an actor with the help of party-run media and fool the voters. When sorting through the options for a vacancy, we’re rolling the dice, hoping the winner is not a fink. What we know is whether or not the guy holding the office has done what he said he would do. Our duty as voters is to vote out the bums and liars. It’s the best we can do.

Donald Trump is, in many respects, a vehicle to clear the decks of the GOP and the political class in general. He’s a protest vote that people hope will force reform on the GOP and maybe do some good in office. Voters are increasingly aware that he is the safe choice, if they want change. The downside is he turns out to be more of the same. The upside is we actually get something useful done.

Buckley Conservatism

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I have written a bit of late about the collapse of our political institutions, both domestic and international. We are living through an interesting time in that we are seeing great technological progress that is threatening to blow apart the societies and institutions that brought about the technological revolution. It once again illustrates that nature is all about trade-offs. In a finite world, an entry on one side must have an entry on the other.

The world around us, in terms of traditions, cultural institutions, political institutions and so forth, was here when we got here. Take something as mundane as banking. We just take banks for granted, as if they are eternal, because to us, from our point of view, they are eternal. They have always been a part of the economic life we have experienced. Like most everything around us, we take them for granted.

I was in a meeting once around President’s Day and someone brought up that we should go back to calling it Washington’s birthday or maybe Lincoln’s birthday. A young gal said that we would have to have one for a Republican president if we’re going to have a day for the Democrat presidents. There was one of those odd silences and then someone changed the subject so we could avoid correcting her.

The young woman who thought Washington and Lincoln were members of the Democrat party was not a moron. She just lived her whole life in a time and place in which the good guys were Democrats who helped black people. She therefore assumed the guy who freed the slaves must have been a liberal Democrat. A surprising number of people make this mistake, underscoring the power of culture to blinker even the intelligent people.

That’s what we are seeing with our political institutions and the men and women who have made careers in them. They were born into a political world, for example, where Left and Right were defined along a linear economic scale. Libertarians were at one end and Communists on the other. One end worshiped free markets, while the other end had the labor theory of value.

The boys and girls that went into politics learned the team cheers, the responses to the other team’s cheers, their respective uniform options and so on. Their world was a comforting binary universe of us and them. There was no need to rethink anything. In fact, questioning orthodoxy was a good way to get sent into exile. The good liberal or conservative just repeated their lines from the catechism.

Anyway, the great challenge to the Orthodox Right we see underway in the Republican primary is a good example of the hollowness of their dogma. Consider this piece by Charlie Cooke posted at National Review Online today. It is supposed to be a response (dismissal?), of the question supposedly posed by the Donald Trump campaign. What conservatism done for anyone?

The interesting thing about the article is how little the author can come up with as a response to the question he claims to answer. Here is the key paragraph:

When confronted by this challenge, one is tempted to list the monumental ideological victories that the Right has won over the past 40 years. And rightly so. Since Ronald Reagan made his first serious presidential run, in 1976, conservatism has produced a cornucopia of significant changes — not only to government policy, but to the baseline presumptions of American life. Among these alterations are the tarring and feathering of the reflexively technocratic mindset that obtained from the outset of the New Deal to the end of the 1970s; the marginalization of wage and price controls, and of other centralizing tools; the lowering of destructive tax rates on income and other forms of wealth; the deregulation of a significant number of major industries; a renewed focus on national sovereignty; the successful reform of the welfare system; a consensus around free trade; a much lower minimum wage; a focus on both the text and the original meaning of the Constitution when discussing limits on government power; the restoration of the right to keep and bear arms; the stronger protection of freedom of expression; a national partial-birth-abortion ban; the death of speech-killing “campaign-finance reform”; and, lest we forget, the peaceful dismantling of the Soviet Union. For some much-needed context, understand that the GOP’s standard-bearer in the early 1970s, Richard Nixon, was the mind behind the Environmental Protection Agency, whereas today’s Republican candidates are opposed to so many departments that they can’t always remember all of their names.

These claims fall into three categories: Nonsense, fantasy and inconsequential. An example of nonsense is the bit about “tarring and feathering of the reflexively technocratic mindset.” National Review employs Ramesh Ponnuru who pumps out mountains of copy in support of using the tax code for social engineering. The Conservative Industrial Complex is brimming with organizations like AEI that do nothing but sell technocracy.

The fantasy part, and I’m being kind when calling it fantasy, is the stuff about eliminating wage and price controls and other centralizing tools. They were simply replaced with more subtle tools. Reagan gave us the modern Fed that sets prices through currency manipulation. Similarly, Carter started the deregulation process with the airlines. Of course, the line about national sovereignty is just a laugh out loud whopper.

No one cares about the ideological points Red Team scored against Blue Team at their annual softball games so those items go down as inconsequential, along with stuff like welfare reform and tax rates. If your great achievement was reversed by the next president, you achieved nothing. That’s the reality of Buckley Conservatism. It has left no lasting mark on American society, with one exception and that’s the Cold War.

But the Cold War is over.

Whether or not you think Buckley Conservatism was a winner or loser, does not matter all that much in the present. Conservatism may have been all that Charlie Cooke and his coevals say, but that avoids the heart of the question. What does Buckley Conservatism have to say about today and tomorrow? The answer is mostly a replaying of old tunes and the telling of stories by the geezers about the time they met Reagan.

That’s the reality dawning on many Americans who have counted themselves as men of the Right. Buckley Conservatism was basically two things. Beat the Soviets and keep the Progressives from pulling the roof down on us. The Soviets are gone and the Progressives are too busy hooting about men in dresses to care about pulling the roof down. Buckley Conservatism, it turns out, is not a timeless philosophy after all.

I’m running long here so let me just finish with this. There was a time when the Whigs were an important check on the Jacksonian Democrats. No one knows what a Whig is today. Fifty years from now, it will be hard for people to understand “conservatism” and why it was important. The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.

Yesterday Men

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The old right, which I would define as Anglo-Saxon traditionalism, was obliterated in America during the first years of the 20th century. When Wilson abandoned traditional American isolationism in favor of Teddy Roosevelt’s jingoistic internationalism, American conservatism was finished as a dominant political ideology. It could not exist in a world where America was an active participant in European intrigues. It staggered along after Wilson, until the Great Depression delivered the final blow.

What replaced it was the mild corporatism of FDR that was an adaptation of what we would come to understand as European fascism. In America this meant that the government would be the referee between business and labor, but sometimes marshaling both sides in support of national goals, while other times putting a thumb on the scale to help one side or the other. Mussolini would fit right in with the Democrats, even today.

The “conservatism” that emerged post-war was nothing like the old version. Instead, it was intended as a brake on the part of American corporatism that was always on the lookout for monsters to destroy. It’s why conservatism has such a terrific losing streak. You beat crusades with brute force or by de-legitimizing them, neither of which is in the modern conservative toolkit.

The New Deal coalition carried on brilliantly in the two decades after the war, mostly because the rest of the world was in rubble. It’s not hard to be the economic superpower when everyone else is rebuilding from the greatest civilizational catastrophe in human history. America was winning by default. Then the rest of the world got back on its feet and the party was over. The 70’s saw a decade of economic and cultural decay not seen in America since the Depression.

The mathematics of the New Deal coalition simply could not hold up in a competitive world where cheap labor and cheap land was still available in huge quantities. The Japanese could deliver better cheaper commodity products like economy cars and transistor radios. The Europeans could deliver better middle brow items popular with the middle class.

The solution was not a dismantling of the New Deal system of governance. Instead, what emerged was a politics of necessity. Both sides of the political class settled on new currency arrangements formalized in the Louvre Accords. Credit money controlled by the Federal Reserve would allow America to wage the Cold War, maintain the New Deal politics at home and provide the American middle class with a standard of living the political system required.

This looked like a winner. The 80’s saw a booming economy with only a small hiccup at the end. That was followed by another boom that lasted until the tech bubble burst. Even so, the recovery in the Bush years convinced everyone the party was still going. What they did not see is that the New Deal economic arrangements were being supplanted by the emerging global capitalism created by credit money.

The brewing revolt is due, in large part, to the fact that American politics has remained locked in amber. The one side dreams of new noble causes to which they endeavor to rally the masses. The other side wrings its hands and makes snarky comments about those crazy liberals. On the one side it is the politics of old women thinking they can still dine out on their looks. On the other side it is the politics of old men complaining about the kid’s music today.

Sanders and Trump are not leaders of new political movements. Both are where they are because they are willing to put a finger in the chest of their respective party leaders. Neither man makes a great case for himself, but like those Muslim men wandering into Germany, threatening to collapse Europe, they correctly see that the old guard is a collection of yesterday men, unable to defend their position.

The wailing and moaning coming from the Conservative Industrial Complex conceals the terrible truth at the core of their thing. That is, there’s nothing there. The “movement” they carry on about has nothing to show for itself since the 80’s and now it is being knocked out of the box by a guy they call a “witless ape.” Whatever it was or intended to be, it’s just an artifact of a bygone era now. It’s a museum piece.

The noise on the Right has drowned out what’s happening on the other side. Sanders is an unreconstructed Stalinist for goodness sake. That said, his arguments sound pretty good against a party that thinks the plight of men in sundresses is a great crusade. Sanders offering free tuition sounds sensible compared to offering free rubbers to coeds. Sanders may have his head up his ass, but the rest of his party has theirs in their vagina.

America is long overdue for an overhaul of its political system. The yesterday men of both parties are like guests who won’t leave. Eventually, they have to be made to leave. That’s what we’re seeing today. The wrecking ball is swinging, preparing the way for what comes next. If Trump and Sanders are a clue, the future of American politics may look more like the 19th century than the 20th. We shall see.