Category Archives: Politics

The Stupid Are Always Unlucky

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“Fortune favors the bold” is a well known phrase passed down from the Romans. Some version of it often turns up as the motto of military groups, clans, social clubs and so forth. A variation coined by Louis Pasteur is “Chance favors a prepared mind.” I used to hear that one in physics class from my prep school instructor. It was never a good sign.

My variation is “the stupid are always unlucky.” The people who find a way to pick the worst option among the many good ones are always the ones complaining about their bad luck. The classic example is the salesman that is not good at his job and never has a deal just fall in his lap, like the guys who are closing deals every day. The bad salesman swears he is just unlucky.

The Stupid Party makes this point regularly and we now have a great example of why the stupid are unlucky. For decades they have been hosing their voters, mostly because they can’t run a competent political party. Some portion of what they do is just a grift. They tell the voters one thing and then take a bribe to do the opposite. That’s just corruption.

Most of the GOP’s problems, however, are the result of incompetence. When presented with three options, all good, they find a fourth that is self-defeating. The political ineptitude is so breathtaking that many of their voters have concluded it must be deliberate. No one can be this dumb this often by accident. It’s why they have a revolt brewing in their primary.

Here’s where the bad luck comes in. Justice Scalia died last night and now the GOP is faced with an impossible dilemma. Their voters, fed up up with the shenanigans, are ready to bolt the party. If the GOP signs off on Obama appointing another justice, the party is finished. There would simply be no reason for anyone to bother voting Republican again.

On the other hand, the timing of Scalia’s death makes it hard for the pussies of the GOP to punt on this. If this had happened in the summer, they could just drag their feet for a few months and not have to face the wrath of the national media. Now, Mitch McConnell is going to have to stand up and tell the Washington Post to go pound sand.

This would not be an issue if the Republicans had been running a responsible shop, making sure they had competent and effective leaders in place. That’s not to imply Scalia would still be alive today if Boehner was never made speaker. It’s that the party would have more options and more trust from their voters. Instead, they have no good will and no good options.

The Tories in the mother country have a similar problem. They find themselves, like the Republicans, in a majority mostly by accident. The Scottish Nationalist Party eviscerated the Lib-Dems and Labour, which led English voters to back the party most identified with England. The result is a Conservative government that is not doing much to pass conservative polices.

Cameron, however, is an idiot and everyone seems to know it, except the party MP’s who insist he and the other idiots remain in power. It’s why they have no wiggle room in their dealings with the EU. Because they have been so duplicitous in the past, no one trusts them. That means they have no ability to finesses a weak deal with the EU. As a result, Cameron’s popularity has collapsed.

As we see with the GOP over Scalia’s replacement, the Tories are finding themselves in an impossible dilemma. They promised to hold a referendum on EU membership, but their own perfidy has made it unlikely they can win the referendum. The alternative is to break their promise to hold the referendum, which means the end of the party. There would simply be no reason to vote for them anymore.

You can be sure that the Tory leaders, like the GOP leaders, are privately moaning about their bad fortune. If only they could catch a break! That is always the lament of the stupid and reckless. Rather than face up to their own ineptitude, they blame magic. That may be excusable for Cameron or McConnell. After all, it’s hard for anyone to admit their own incompetence. Their parties, however, have no excuse.

In the end, the public gets what it wants. It may take a while and it may be a bloody mess in the process, but the mathematics of human society are immutable. In a mass media democracy, someone comes along willing to do the bidding of the majority. Whether it is the “conservatives” in the Anglosphere is really not all that important.

Size Matters

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I’m fond of pointing out that history favors ever larger human organizational units. In fact, nature seems to favor it. Early humans lived in groups no larger than 200, with most groups being under 100. We know this by using some basic math about how hunter-gatherer people live. Once you get beyond the 200 number, managing resources gets difficult because you suddenly need people who only manager other people.

We also have observations of hunter-gatherers in modern times. Even in areas with plenty of resources, the size of tribes ranges from between 100 and 200. The speculation is that in times of plenty when populations could outgrow the natural constraints, groups would split off forming new tribes in new lands. This is the most logical explanation for the migration of humans out of Africa and across the globe.

Human settlement changed the mathematics of human organization. Suddenly, bigger was better. Anyone who has done manual labor knows that the right tools and techniques can allow two men to perform the work of three. Agriculture suddenly made surplus possible. It also allowed for the planned storage of labor in the form of shelters, provisions, trade items, etc. Large groups of people coordinating their efforts was made practical and profitable by agriculture.

Or maybe the desire for larger organizational units drove the transition to settlement. It’s not always easy to know these things. It’s entirely possible that people figured out that different resource allocation methods would allow for big groups. Instead of Cousin Trog and his clan splitting off from the group, Grog and Trog could work together to grow vegetables and raise animals.

Bronze Age people had empires but running large scale societies was tough due to communications and distance. There was also the fact that Bronze Age societies were largely palace economies. That does not scale up very well. The solution was to have a collection of palace economies under the rule of a dominant clan or city-state. Ultimately, that system proved too fragile. The late Bronze Age collapse was most likely the result of massive inefficiency.

The Romans managed to run a massive empire for a long time, despite the problems of communications and distance. They solved some of this with road building. All of a sudden, they could get word to distant outposts relatively quickly. They also had money, which makes the storage and transfer of wealth possible at a scale impossible in barter economies. Even so, the Romans outgrew the capacity of their organizing model and bankrupted themselves trying to make it work.

After the collapse of Rome, Europe went through a reorganization. Eventually, the new model allowed them to go from scattered tribes to small kingdoms, to unified nations. The Brits are great example to consider. Under Roman rule they were just tribes without much of an organizational structure. They slowly evolved into small kingdoms after the Romans. Then it was the Heptarchy for a long stretch and finally a unified England.

Europe, of course, is trying to break free of the country model. Many on the Right argue that this can never work due to the vast differences in culture across Europe. The Greeks are not Germans so they cannot make a German economic and political system work. Critics consider the EU an empire disguised as a bureaucracy. Sort of like the Department of Motor Vehicles conquering Europe.

There’s a problem with that critique. The new model has new digital money and new digital communications. Fifty years ago, the single currency could never work. It’s why the gold standards failed. Digital credit money lets central banks adjust the money supply much faster and more precisely. It’s not perfect and may be a fantasy but is a big difference in human organization.

Rapid communication and mass media also change things. Fifty years ago, many people in the West lacked a telephone or television. Today, everyone has a mobile phone and internet access. This allows local governments to coordinate their message across languages and cultures. The fact that the German government runs the German media should come as no surprise. A popular media these days works hand and glove with government.

It’s why there is some reason to think the open border types are close to right. They imagine a world without borders, but maybe they are just a click too fast. A European border with the rest of the world is necessary, but internal borders are not. Similarly, a border between the US and Canada is pointless, but a border with Mexico is a necessity, for now.

Samuel Huntington imagined a world that would be organized in zones. The West would be one zone. East Asia another. The Middle East another. Future conflicts would be along the borders where zones meet, like Ukraine and Syria. Whether or not it is by design or accident, it does appear to be the shape of things to come. Just look at the political debates. Underneath it all are the basic questions. Who is us and who is them?

Of course, this tendency toward larger organizational units could be a dead end. The dinosaurs would have something to say about it, I bet, if they were still around. It could very well turn out that the EU is no match for young men walking into Europe looking for a good time. It’s also possible that the EU was an answer to a problem that no longer exists. History, however, suggest that bigger is the way to bet.

Revenge of the Dirt People

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One of the things I have been looking at in the polling data is the fact Trump seems to have a steady vote share across demographics, excluding race. Despite all the blather from the Conservative Industrial Complex about Trump relying on low-skill angry losers, he polls well with the college educated and he does well with higher income earners. In the GOP field, Trump is the broadest based candidate running.

That said, he seems to be locked into a range from 25% to 35%, with some polls in some places ticking up a little higher. Members of the CIC have started to look at this and cheer, thinking that once the field narrows, their guy will get the other 65% and charge to victory in the later primaries. It’s a comforting thought, I bet, so it is easy to see why they are clinging to it. Whether or not that happens is debatable.

Humans tend to emulate one another, which is why candidates get a “bump” after doing well in public opinion surveys, early primaries and the on-line polls after a good debate performance. If a lot of people like Candidate X, you will at least give Candidate X a look. Trump winning New Hampshire and then winning South Carolina would send a powerful signal to other voters that it is OK to vote for Trump.

Putting that aside, the question no one wants to ask is whether the GOP can win without the Trump vote. If you look at a Trump rally, it looks a lot like the Buchanan and Perot rallies back in the early 90’s. By that I mean there are more garden variety white guys than you typically see at a political rally. No notices that rallies are mostly middle aged women and young people bused in so the campaign can seem hip.

Trumps’ rallies are much more a normal mix of adults, which means more males than you usually see at these things. These are the people Sam Francis described in his essay, Message From MARS, with “MARS” meaning Middle American Radicals. (I don’t have a link for it, but you can probably find if you look for it.) These are normal people who try to ignore politics until they have no choice.

I don’t want to get too deep into the anthropological weeds, but there are a class of men with varying degrees of economic and cultural success, rooted in what we used to call working class values. These are men who get married to one biological women, have kids and do what was necessary to make sure the wife and kids have a good life. They may have been in the service, some went to college, while others went into the trades. These are the Dirt People

In 1992, the GOP pissed off these voters and many either skipped the election or voted Perot. Enormous effort was put into denying this reality to the point where the Conservative Industrial Complex internalized it as part of their dogma. They did not need to be more like Reagan. No, they needed to be more like Clinton! Eventually, Democrats offered up a bad candidate and we got George Bush the Minor, a sort of booby prize for Dirt People sticking with the party.

That’s the real lesson of 2000 and 2004. Al Gore appeared to be having a nervous breakdown during the debates with Bush. That and his loopy policy proposals allowed an otherwise uninteresting George Bush to win the election. In 2004, the Democrats offered up a ridiculous gigolo that no one in their right mind would elect to dog catcher. The fact that it was still a close election says a lot about what people truly thought of George Bush the Minor.

Regardless, the Conservative Industrial Complex drew a different lesson. Seeing waves of little brown guys washing up on our shores, changing the ethnic mix of the nation, they decided that the lesson of the last quarter century was that white guys were finished. Their time had passed. The future of the party and country was a Latin Yugoslavia with as many Africans and Muslims that could make the swim.

The Right concluded that in order to keep pace with the Left, they had to race into the vibrant future where the only pale penis people that matter are the homosexuals. For over a decade they have been yapping about how immigrants are natural conservatives, apparently not understanding the glaring contradiction in that assertion. The result was a push for amnesty, open borders and the whole buffet of multicultural nonsense.

The disaster that is unfolding for the GOP and the CIC is not simply due to getting too far over their skis. Mitt Romney built his campaign around polling, and he knew he needed to be against amnesty. He tried to split the difference between what the data said and what the party leaders said. The result was no one believed him, and he lost a winnable election.

The GOP concluded, amazingly, that the reason Romney lost was he did not embrace amnesty. Trump, for all his defects, was smart enough to see that the future is not now and America is not yet the vibrant multi-culti paradise. This revolt of the Dirt People is based on the obvious fact that a growing majority of people are thinking it is time to put the brakes on the madcap dash to the vibrant future.

Whatever the long term outcome, some basic math says the GOP can’t win without the Trump vote. Even if 10% of it abandons the GOP, it means millions of votes that never materialize. Given that Trump has enjoyed far more success than Perot or Buchanan, you have to assume that the potential boycott numbers could be quite large if the party screws the Dirt People.

Tonight, the Dirt People have spoken.

Gaming New Hampshire

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New Hampshire is a funny primary. They let anyone vote, including people from out of state. They have been trying to fix that problem, but I don’t know how successful that effort has been. Still, the state has a great many Massholes who moved over the border to avoid taxes. They still dream of voting for a Kennedy, just not paying for the privilege. There are plenty of Calvin Coolidge conservatives too, but the state is slowly turning into Vermont.

The party men have figured this to be the firewall for their boys. Back in the fall when Trump started getting attention, they were predicting that he would follow the Howard Dean path. That is, a collapse in Iowa and a final flame out in New Hampshire. Rubio, Bush, Kasich or Christie would be the guy to emerge from the Granite State as their champion. Up until Saturday night, they were banking on Rubio.

The people in charge have already decided to ignore Trump and look at second place as that is the new first place, unless their boy finishes third. Looking at 538, the predicted order is Rubio, Cruz, Kasich and Bush, but the separation is tiny, so it is a dead heat for second place. No one is approaching 20% from that group so it will be tough to sell second as a victory. Then again, Clinton sold himself as the comeback kid after finishing third.

At the other end, this is the last hope for Christie, Carson and Farina. Christie needs to finish at least third and probably second. Farina is done, barring a miracle. She and Carson have been mostly decorations for the last few months and their utility has come to an end. Both will drop out this week and most likely endorse the party man. Farina just wants a cabinet job, so she’ll do what’s she is told, but who knows with Carson.

From the party perspective, the best case tomorrow night is Trump finishes in the high 20’s and their boy finishes in the 20’s. Trump at 27% and Rubio at 20% can be spun as a great victory for Rubio. If Cruz were to drop to fourth or fifth, that would help to. The narrative out of New Hampshire would be that Trump and the crazies are losing steam, while the good thinkers are consolidating around their man. My bet is that story is written and ready to go.

What will happen is the party will call in their big donors to let Bush, Kasich and the rest know that it is time, for the good of the party, to rally around Rubio. This could also work if Kasich finishes second. He’s a loyal soldier of the party and he hails from a valuable state. He’s a bit erratic, but a strong second is hard to ignore, given what has gone on in the primary thus far. Kasich could plausibly reintroduce himself as the stable, experienced hand in the race.

The more likely scenario is Trump finishes in the high 20’s and the pack is in the mid-teens. A four-way tie between Cruz, Kasich, Rubio and Bush is a disaster. Everyone then has a reason to stay in the race and they have a reason to attack one another. It would be even uglier if Trump cracks 30% and the pack is in the low teens. The story out of New Hampshire will be all about Trump and his numbers will jump everywhere. People like a winner.

The world is coming to an end scenario is a Trump – Cruz finish, with the former in the 30’s and the latter in the 20’s. The boys at National Review will be slitting their wrists if that happens. In that scenario, there’s no reason for the party men to stick around as they will have been rejected with prejudice. The race will be about who gets to lead the revolt the rest of the way. If you are a Cruz supporter, this is your ideal outcome on Tuesday.

The other race is actually more interesting for the simple reason Hillary Clinton may start to hear calls to drop out in favor of someone like Joe Biden. The spin will be that Bernie Sanders is the local favorite, but Vermont is not New Hampshire. He’s viewed mostly as a joke everywhere outside of Burlington. If he wins big it is because Democrats would rather lose than see Hillary Clinton in the White House. Go Bernie!

The only way to avoid this, I think, is for Clinton to have a shockingly close finish with Sanders. I mean something like 52-48 where she can then claim a surge of support. Right now, the polling has her under 40% so getting into the mid-40’s is the only way to avoid the inevitable questions about her plausibility as a candidate. With so much attention on the GOP side, this is not farfetched, but I would not bet on it. Again. Go Bernie!

The Day After

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I watched very little of the Republican debate last night. These are not designed to inform the voters or challenge the contestants. They are TV shows. Those old enough to remember the Gong Show have to notice the similarities. The only difference is the old Gong Show had more self-respect. Chuck Barris had no illusions about what he was doing.

I caught some bits and pieces on-line, mostly through twitter. The clips I saw of Chris Christie pulling Rubio’s underwear over his head made me laugh. I’ve said for years now that Rubio is Miss South Carolina with a penis. The guy is as dumb as plank, but he can memorize his lines. As long as he is not asked to go off script, he sounds convincing. Last night he sounded like every other dumb actor.

Trump supporters on-line were jubilant. I suspect they feared a rally by the open-borders people behind Rubio in New Hampshire. The Conservative media was all prepared to make second place the new first place, just as they did after Iowa, by making third the new first. I flipped on Fox and it looked like they were covering a funeral so I’m guessing they think it is curtains for Rubio.

What’s somewhat interesting about all this is both parties are facing a problem they thought they would never face. That is, the voters picking a nominee off the unapproved list. If Sanders wins big in New Hampshire, it’s hard to imagine Clinton recovering. What’s coming through loud and clear is the voters would rather lose than win with Hillary.

The Republicans are facing a similar problem. If Trump wins New Hampshire, it’s hard to imagine any of the dwarfs surviving the night. Bush, Kasich, Rubio and Christie will have lost badly in the first two tests. Cruz and Trump will be the remaining options. Unless one of the dwarfs has a magical election night and finishes second, there’s no argument for keeping them in the race.

My guess is the old hands in both parties are quietly discussing what they do to prevent these unacceptable options from winning the nomination. The Democrats have changed their system to give the party elders enough of the delegates so they could block Sanders if they choose to do it. That would mean having another option like Biden, Gore or maybe Warren. A Biden – Warren ticket could placate the Sanders people.

On the GOP side, it’s not as easy, but they can still throw a wrench in the works. One way would be to rally around the first dwarf on Tuesday night. Let say Kasich finishes second. The other dwarfs drop out and endorse him as king of the dwarfs and they make an explicit statement that they are doing it to stop Trump.

That crystallizes the rest of the race as the sensible wing versus the crazies. The media will pile on and it could probably be enough to prevent Trump from getting the required delegates. The dwarf league would ignore Cruz, seeing him as a drain on Trump. The trouble with this is it would be so transparent it could very well work in Trump’s favor.

The doomsday scenario for both parties is the Michael Bloomberg option. Bill Kristol has already said he will bolt the GOP if Trump is the nominee. It’s not hard to imagine the Conservative Industrial Complex following him and supporting Bloomberg as the “least bad option.” They could decorate their banners with quotes from Buckley about strategic voting.

At the same time, Progressives would suddenly have an option they could support if they don’t like Sanders. Instead of a blood bath at their convention, they could let Sanders have the nomination, but make clear that real liberal democrats will be backing Bloomberg as the reconciliation candidate. “He’s the only guy who can unite both parties!”

All of this sounds farfetched, but the prospect of a Trump – Sanders election sounded laughably absurd a year ago. We live in an age where the ridiculous quickly becomes the norm. Twenty years ago, comics told jokes about men marrying men. Today, they threaten you with prison for even remembering those jokes. Mark Steyn was purged from National Review for repeating an old quip about homosexuals popular in the 50’s.

We are in a great transition, so everything is on the table. Just look over at England. One party evaporated. The other is run by a lunatic, leaving them with the Tories and that weird Scottish Nationalist Party. Predicting that five years ago would have gotten you committed. Heck, the smart money five years ago said Labour would return to power.

Some on the Alt-Right think the parties are reorganizing along globalist-nationalist lines. Others see one party being the white party and the other the NAM party, making America something like Rhodesia, I guess. Then there are those who suspect Brazil is the future, where a light skin oligarchy rules over a massive dark skinned ghetto. Maybe some combination of all of those things is the answer.

The simpler answer could be that globalism simply has no constituency in a mass media democracy. Global capitalism outlandishly benefits a very small portion of society. People being what they are, this massive inequality opens the doors for candidates antithetical to global capitalism. That was the lesson 100 years ago and it maybe the lesson today. Of course, 100 years it took a blood bath to drive home that point.

The Null Party

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One of my gags I like to use in the comments sections of “conservative” opinion sites is to point out that the Republican Party is the land of unwanted toys. About a third of elected Republicans are traditional, middle American conservatives. Another third is just time serving barnacles who are in the best job they can ever hope to get. The other third would rather be Democrats, but circumstances put them in the GOP.

Sensible Americans often make the mistake of taking what the Progressives say about the GOP at face value. Who has not been harangued by some madman hooting and bellowing about the extreme right wing extremist Republicans? Turn on MSNBC and that unbalanced lesbian is always carrying on like Ted Cruz is at the door, threatening to fill her uterus with Bibles and sew her legs shut.

Reading the campaign websites yesterday for my screed about Rubio and Clinton, I was reminded of this reality about the parties. If you are a normal, traditional American of any race or religion, the Democrats hate you. Yeah, they hate white men with a purple passion, but they had middle-class black guys and Korean shopkeepers too. Their appeal is exclusively to poor minorities, plutocrats, government employees and the upper reaches of the managerial class.

If you are a mailman, the Democrats are the good bet, even if you are a pale penis person. If you are running a UPS Store franchise, the Democrats are your enemy, even if you are a one-legged black lesbian Elvis impersonator. That’s the thing. Their appeal is really just a relentless assault on an ever widening array of enemies. It’s a party of old rich white people promising to smash up the while middle class and give the bits to those who vote Democrat.

The point here is that for the majority of Americans, there’s nothing on offer from the Democrats. For a sizable minority, maybe even a majority now, the Democrats are a threat to them personally, professionally and culturally. Strip away the old white people who grew up voting for FDR Democrats and the party probably represents just 25% of the population. Given that 20% of whites are Progressives, 30% is probably the ceiling for the Democrats.

What this means is that for those with anything on the ball, voting Democrat is suicide so they have to find an alternative. The Republicans have nothing much to offer, but at least they are not threatening to pull the roof down on society. GOP majorities in state legislatures, governorships and the Congress are entirely due to there being no third option. When the option is slitting your own throat or voting for the Republicans, most people have no trouble pulling the lever for the GOP.

The problem with being the Null Party is twofold. When the other party has anything to offer, they end up looking magisterial. Bill Clinton was a vulgar clown, but he had an issue and he had a purpose. That was enough to beat an old patrician with no reason to keep his job. The same was true of Obama. Compared to McCain and Romney, Obama looked like Churchill. Something, even something stupid, is more than nothing and in a democracy, that’s what wins.

The other problem the Null Party faces is that when they are in the majority, as they are today, they have nothing but idle time. Since they never had a reason to win the majority, they can’t come up with anything to do with it. Instead of a strategy to roll back the excesses of Obama, for example, they spent years squabbling over trivialities and then finally conceded everything in order to gain some peace during the presidential election.

Given that they have become the default option whenever the Democrats go bonkers, which is often, the Null Party keeps drawing the wrong lessons from each election cycle. There are furtive attempts to confront Obama were blamed for their loss in the 2012 election. Curling back into a ball is credited with their stunning victory in 2014. That’s why they gave away the store in the last budget. Like a cargo cult, they just assumed more concessions meant another victory. Instead, they have a revolt.

At the end of the last Great Progressive Awakening in the late sixties and early seventies, there was an intellectual counterculture forming that culminated with Reagan winning the White House. The spiritual energy may have been drained out of the Democrats as the New Left burned out, but there were still plenty of sensible people in the party to give it some reason to exist. This carried us into the Bush years when everything fell to pieces again.

Today, there’s is nothing to fill the void now that the latest Progressive wave is receding. The Null Party may fill the seats in Congress, but they have nothing to offer the voters other than platitudes, references to Reagan and technocratic programs that amount to busy work for the bureaucrats. Nature and politics abhor a vacuum, which why the leading candidates in both parties are from well outside the mainstream. Something, even something stupid, is more than nothing and in a democracy, that’s what wins.

Marco Versus Hillary

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On Steve Sailer’s site, I commented upon one of the election threads that the most likely result will be Marco Rubio versus Hillary Clinton. Just for kicks, I went on to point out that this was Clinton – Lazio 2.0 and a suspicious mind might wonder if this was not the scripted result. For those who don’t remember Clinton’s senate run, she used pretty boy Rick Lazio like a Q-Tip and then tossed him away.

I was mostly joking, but it is not an outcome that is beyond the pale. If Rubio wins New Hampshire, he is most likely the nominee. Despite her debacle in Iowa, Clinton is probably going to win her party’s nomination. Democrats have gone around the bend, but there’s no way the brothers and sisters are voting for the old Jewish guy. Think about that. Blacks are now the party ballast for the Democrats.

Anyway, after a long primary for both sides, let’s say we end up with Hillary Clinton versus Marco Rubio. I’m going to assume that most people reading this would not be enthusiastic with either option, but democracy is all about the lesser of two evils, picking between electrocution and poisoning. My guess is most readers face every election thinking both choices are unpleasant. So, how to pick?

My first litmus test issue for any candidate these days is immigration. I’m a squish on the topic, but I think open borders is grounds for commitment to an institution. Here’s what Hillary Clinton says, “We need comprehensive immigration reform with a path to full and equal citizenship. If Congress won’t act, I’ll defend President Obama’s executive actions—and I’ll go even further to keep families together. I’ll end family detention, close private immigrant detention centers, and help more eligible people become naturalized.”

Marco Rubio tried to pass exactly that in the Senate, but he now says, “Our reaction needs to be what we should be doing anyway, which is passing immigration reform, beginning with getting illegal immigration under control.” I guess if you really want to make a case for a difference between Marco and Hillary, you can say he is slightly less enthusiastic about granting citizenship to the world, but we’re splitting hairs now.

My second litmus test issue is gun control. Hillary says, “I’ll take on the gun lobby and fight for commonsense reforms to keep guns away from terrorists, domestic abusers, and other violent criminals—including comprehensive background checks and closing loopholes that allow guns to fall into the wrong hands.” While I have no doubt she is a gun grabber, this word salad here says she will do nothing about it.

Marco Rubio has no history of gun grabbing and he said, “It’s not the guns, it’s the people who are committing these crimes.” His voting record here is solid and he has never said anything to suggest he is faking it. Rubio is also from Florida and you go nowhere in Florida politics if you’re soft on guns. This is one of those times where you have to look beyond the position statements and Rubio is the safe choice on guns

I used to put abortion as a litmus test issue, even though there’s not much to be done about it. My view is that while abortion should be legal, but very limited, calling it a natural right tells me you are too stupid to be trusted. I used to hold the same view of homosexual marriage. The fact is, Progressives have won all these battles and it will take a revolution to alter that reality. Most of the GOP is fine with abortion and homosexual marriage so a candidate’s opinion here is irrelevant.

That’s it for the big philosophical questions. Next on my list would be the smaller issues like taxes, spending and regulation. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds on these things. Look at the candidates websites and they have thousands of words on issues that fall into one of those three buckets. Clinton has a whole section on legal reform, whatever that means. Rubio has a section on common core, a topic that should not even exist.

I’m just going to keep it at the 30,000 foot view. What do the candidates have to say about reducing the size of government? Stop laughing. God help me, but I read everything on Hillary’s site and I have no idea what she wants to do as president. Her whole site is just emotive nonsense about various demographics groups. The only reasonable score here is to assume she would be business as usual, which means steady growth of the state, with some extras for Democrat barnacles.

On Rubio’s site, he has a laundry list of issues organized so the blind and stupid can easily navigate the topics. To his credit he has a section on debt, which is pretty funny given his personal finances. As you can see, there’s nothing there but some platitudes about saving stuff by reducing waste and reducing waste by saving stuff. As with Hillary, there’s no reason to think he has any interest in cutting government spending.

On taxes, it appears both candidates want to move commas around the tax code, which is always great fun. It accomplishes very little, but it makes for great flag waving. Both candidates think social engineering through the tax code is a great idea. Otherwise. there’s not much to distinguish them and they don’t seem to be making taxes a big part of their pitch. That really says a lot when you think about it. It used to be that taxes were the main difference between the parties.

That leaves regulation. Like taxes, you just don’t hear anyone talk about clearing out the regulatory thicket anymore. The Federal Registry is close to 100,000 pages now. There are more than one million regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations. No human can know all of them. Hillary Clinton is promising more regulations for all sorts of nonsense like requiring people to be happy on alternate Thursdays, but her posted positions are, as a I wrote above, emotive nonsense.

Rubio, to his credit, has a section on regulation. Hilariously, he proposes new regulations on the making of new regulations. I miss the days when Republicans talked about cutting departments. It was a lie, of course, but at least they were not talking about altering the space-time continuum. I went looking around for a better understanding of his idea and it is basically a budget that limits the total number of regulations each year, based on some exotic formulas.

The funny thing here is Hillary, the old commie, is showing her age. In her prime, a good statist promised a laundry list of free stuff from the public treasury. Today’s statists replace laws passed by elected parliaments with administrative degrees ginned up by autocratic agencies. Rubio’s regulatory reform is a complicated technocratic response to the metastasizing technocratic state. It’s unleashing a cobra in your house to kill the mice.

The long and short of it, when you start comparing the two probable contestants for president, is they are not all that different from one another. Unless you have some weird reason to care about how they move some commas around the tax and regulatory code, the only difference worth mentioning is the gun issue. Otherwise, your life will not be any different under the tyranny of Hillary than the tyranny of Marco.

Just in case someone is tempted to mention the courts, just keep in mind that the most egregious decisions of late are from Republicans appointees. The lesson of the last year is that the courts have locked shields with their fellow in the managerial class against any attempts by the dirt people to reign in their excesses. Like abortion, only a revolution will do anything to fix the courts.

We’re doomed.

The Revolt

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Back in the 1992 election, I was sitting in what we used to call a working class bar. This was a downscale neighborhood in Boston and people still worked so working class was the correct label. Nowadays, “working class” almost always means not working. As soon as you hear the phrase, “working families” you know that no one is working and there’s no father around to make it a family.

Anyway, this bar was white Irish working class. I was just killing some time, so I stopped in for a beer. The place was busy, but not so loud that you could not hear the TV. Pat Buchanan came on and the Irish girl next to me started to hiss. I was a little surprised, but then she volunteered that Buchanan was a racist and hated immigrants. She was as white as a ghost and her people came over in the 19th century.

As these things go, others joined her in talking about Buchanan and some other pols. I no longer recall most of the details, but the main take away for me was that these working class whites were trying really hard to not be working class in their attitudes. They may work in service jobs and construction, but they were not going to be blue collar. Class for them was not about economics. It was an aesthetic. It turns out Engels was sort of right.

Sam Francis said back in ’92 that Buchanan, while being right, was too nice for electoral politics. He was right about the last part as the managerial class painted Buchanan as a quasi-Nazi bigot and anti-Semite. About the former, the conventional wisdom was that Buchanan was a yesterday man, advocating policies that went out of style in the 1950’s. The future was technology, mass media and working class Irish gals worried about racism.

What happened, of course, was that the credit boom following the Louvre Accords allowed the people in charge to keep the party going, without the people taking notice of the great hollowing out of the middle. Cheap credit meant buying better stuff made in foreign lands so everyone could feel like they were doing well. Cheap credit also sent the stock market soaring, so everyone felt like they were rich.

I was at lunch today with someone who is a solid suburban Republican. We were laughing about politics and he said something odd. He said, “You know, old Bernie is a nut, but his description of what’s wrong with this country is not that far off. He’s the only guy talking about this stuff. I’m not kidding. If his solutions were not so crazy, I’d probably vote for the guy.”

I was a little surprised, but I had to agreed. In fact, I have agreed for a while. Somewhere along the way we deified rich people and they get to run wild. Look at all the bankers who walked away from their wreckage with millions in bonuses. The robber barons of Silicon Valley are trying to bring back slavery and supposedly sensible people defend it. Liberal Democrats defend open borders. Then there is the political class that seems to live a life without consequences.

That’s the thing about this election that does not get discussed. Bernie Sanders lacks all of Trump’s media savvy, yet he is about to drop a house on Hillary Clinton. These are Democrats so some portion of the vote really thinks communism is the answer, but the great bulk of those planning to vote for Sanders are doing so out of spite. It is a big middle finger to the political class.

Trump, with all his faults, is a better candidate than Sanders, simply because he does not have a head full of nutty ideas. Even so, he is no one’s idea of a great candidate. He’s rude and he is often crude. His speeches don’t make a lot of sense most of the time. My bet is most people planning to vote for him get that, but they want to send a message. They also trust he will not do anything crazy if he ends up in the White House. That and he is right on the big issues like immigration.

I think what we’re seeing is the long overdue reckoning for the mistakes of the 60’s and 70’s. The disastrous welfare programs, the massive expansion of the federal state, the rise of Cultural Marxism as the official religion of the ruling elite. The squalor of the 70’s should have forced a roll back of all these things. What should have happened in the 80’s and 90’s was a return to normalcy. Instead, the credit boom put all that on hold.

Worse still, it fueled the growth of the managerial class that is decidedly hostile to normal people. Turn on the TV and you see an endless stream of degeneracy that mocks the foundations of western civilization and the traditions that have preserved and nurtured it. Traditional America is treated as a hate crime. The people in entertainment live like royalty, while accusing middle American of an endless list of crimes.

Pat Caddell, the veteran pollster and social observer, is calling this a revolution. He may not be way off base. It is a revolt, but a revolt against thirty years of a ruling class papering over the mistakes of the past. Egalitarianism, anti-racism and multiculturalism are fine in the faculty lounge, but they are a cultural dead end as a ruling class religion. The people in charge have run out of ways to hide this truth and now the long overdue hell is going to be paid.

Gaming Iowa

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The final Des Moines Register poll has been released and there’s both joy and consternation across the land. The anti-Trump folks are going one of two ways on it. Some have resigned themselves to the inevitable and are exploring various forms of suicide. Others are denying physical reality and following in the steps of Dorothy Martin and her UFO cult. Back in 2012 we saw the same thing in the week prior to the general election.

The Trump supporters are a bit sanguine about it. They are happy to see their man pulling into the lead, but they fear it is a false dawn. After all, all of the experts have said that this is an impossibility. So conditioned to accept expert opinion, they cannot believe that the unicorn they are seeing is real. I can’t blame them for it. I’ve seen a lot of weird stuff in my life and this is pretty weird. I still can’t get over Jerry Falwell endorsing Trump.

When gaming these things out, it is important to remember that Iowa is the not always a good barometer. Of the last seven contested GOP campaigns, Iowa picked correctly three of seven times. The Democrats are not much better. Iowa has picked correctly five of the last nine contested Democrat races. I’m just looking at the Wiki page going back to the 70’s, which is a good enough sample to see that it is a coin flip as to whether Iowa matters.

If the polls and prognostications are correct and Trump wins Iowa, he goes into New Hampshire with a massive (edit: I have a poor sense of direction) tailwind and a good shot at running the table. He’s already a big favorite in New Hampshire and he leads in the later events. Iowa was thought to be his weakest state for him, so a win and he probably sees his numbers jump everywhere.

The question is how the rest of the field will respond. There’s clearly a good portion of the GOP electorate who has been trained to hate Trump by their keepers in the Conservative Industrial Complex. Will we see the rest of the field lock shields, pick a champion and launch an anti-Trump counterattack? That’s a good possibility, but history says these efforts fizzle due to the fact the factions hate one another as much as they hate the bogeyman they share.

So, we have one possible outcome. Trump wins and we quickly see some sort of stop Trump effort coalescing around a single candidate. The betting now has Trump as a 49% chance of winning so let’s give this scenario the same chance. Next week we have a Trump victory and the beginnings of a CIC organized stop Trump campaign around one of the losers.

The next most likely outcome in Iowa, according to the numbers, is a Cruz win in Iowa. Barring something close to an asteroid strike, it would also mean Trump comes in second and Rubio third. Cruz has the best “ground game” in the state and we’re told that means a lot, but the data suggests maybe not all that much after all. Thirty years ago the number of volunteers and endorsements was a proxy for voter sympathies, but that’s not true today. Otherwise, Trump would not exist.

A Cruz win means he goes into New Hampshire with some momentum, but he is not very popular there and the rebel vote is solidly behind Trump. How much of a dent it puts in Trump’s support is unknown, but his vote is not going to the party men so in this scenario, not much changes for Trump.  On the other hand, it makes mounting an anti-Trump campaign impossible. The party hates Cruz too. That makes this scenario the nightmare scenario for the CIC.

We have a 49% chance of a Trump win and a 40% chance of a Cruz win, both are bad news for the CIC. Reading the propaganda organs, their hope is Rubio wins, thus launching both a javelin at the heart of the rebels and launching a new crusade for the men in modestly priced suits who make up the Conservative Industrial Complex.

Having a bisexual Cuban amnesty fanatic knock off the evil ones would be for them what Obama was for the other side of the managerial elite. Wednesday in Washington would be an unofficial holiday as the locals partied into the wee hours.

Once sober, they would pull the plug on the rest of the field, train their guns on Trump and we would get a replay of 1992 where a wall of sound would hit the public, declaring Trump out of bounds. Trump’s support would collapse down to the core 25% and he would look for a way to exit the scene.

Finally, there’s the man from nowhere scenario. Rick Santorum won last time, even though no one gave him much thought. The reason he won, the reason the CIC refused to acknowledge at the time, was that Romney was terrible. Santorum was the “none of the above” option. The only guy who could plausibly play that role this time in Ben Carson and he is not looking too good. I’d give this a one percent chance of happening.

There we have it. There’s a 49% chance Trump wins and sets off a real old fashioned civil war in the party. There’s a 40% chance Cruz wins and delays the civil war or even prevents it. A lot will depend on how New Hampshire goes in this scenario. Then there is a 10% chance the CIC destroys the rebel alliance and reasserts its control of the process. Finally, we have a 1% chance of something crazy happening that tells us nothing.

The Media Fix

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Back before Al Gore, peace be upon him, gave us the internet, I maintained quite a few magazine subscriptions. National Review, The New Republic and The Atlantic were on my list from the time I was a teenager. I would cycle in others like Harper’s, The New York Review of Books and even Granta and Ploughshares. I spent many a night drinking at the pub where the later was founded.

Now, I have exactly zero subscriptions. I take what I can get on-line and there’s so much on-line I see no reason to pay for it. The fact that I can, with a few clicks, catch up on the news in Borneo or check in on the doings of Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow and his fight against hooliganism is truly a miracle. Educated men of a century ago would be gobsmacked by the amount of detailed information I can include a single blog post.

There’s a downside to this wonderfulness. In the olden thymes, my subscription meant something to the people running those magazines. They needed it to pay their writers, so it was important to the writers as well. Today, these publications have no reason to care about me or my opinion of them. They just need to generate enough traffic to show their donors, who don’t care about me either.

In other words, as the financial relationship has changed, the intellectual relationship has changed. These publications are now on-line and they don’t have a direct financial link to their readers. Instead, they depend on wealthy donors and support from the massive nonprofit establishment. The result is an operation like National Review went from appealing to readers to lecturing them.

A similar thing has happened with TV news. In the olden thymes, the three networks were certainly preachy and biased, but they also had to get viewers and that meant keeping it between the ditches. The batshit insanity of a MSNBC would never be permitted. Those fruitcakes were relegated to local access and shortwave because no one could afford to indulge them.

That all changed with cable. MSNBC gets $0.70 per cable household per month, whether anyone watches or not and is overwhelmingly not. That means they collect $70 million per month even though no one watches. Fox, CNN, ESPN et al have similar or better deals. When you get a billion dollars for just showing up, you can indulge in just about any sort of reckless behavior you want, even letting mentally unstable lesbians host a primetime show.

The cable rackets have had another impact. They rely on writers and bloggers out of the Commentary Industrial Complex. Fox hires boys and girls from National Review and The Weekly Standard to be guest on shows. MSNBC hauls in people from progressive publications. PBS uses the NY Times and Washington Post as their farm system.

Put it all together and we now have a mass media that is not only unresponsive to its viewership and readership, but also openly hostile. The old periodicals that used to peddle ideas and culture to the public now lecture the public on behalf of the managerial class. The low-brow mass media of television can now indulge all of the excesses of progressive fanatics, making sport of anything and everything normal people find useful.

The worst part of this is that unplugging and dropping out has no impact. Until tens of millions of households unplug from cable TV, these media operations are immune to public discontent. Cord cutting will have some impact, but most people will never take that step. The massive nonprofit industry will keep on financing the news and opinion operations. Rich guys like Carlos Slim and Jeff Bezos will backstop big news sites.

The North Koreans are fond of installing loudspeakers in villages to blast propaganda to the masses. In America, they install them in your living room and your pocket. The communications revolution was supposed to threaten the media monopoly of the prior age. Instead, it has created a special force, shock troops, who man the megaphones on behalf of the managerial class.

I suspect that much of what’s going on in the Republican primary is due to a realization that the people on talk radio, Fox News and your favorite news site are not playing it straight. Not so long ago they were explaining why you had to hold your nose and support Romney, because winning was too important for principles. Today, they are saying principles are too important to vote Trump, even though he is looking like a winner.

One of the things I’ve noticed in my life is people seek to break free of the transactional life. Retail is looked down upon, I think, because people naturally hate the clarity of it. When you sell direct, you have to do so in a way that people like. Every lost sale is an indictment of you and your product. It’s why the toughest, smartest guys in most business are the sales guys. They have no illusions about themselves.

The media has sought to break free from the retail relationship. Selling ads based on circulation and viewership is a daily confirmation of your worth, or lack thereof. The result of this drive, on the one hand, has been the thoroughly corrupt cable TV market where content providers get a free shot at your wallet.

On the other hand, a massive, taxpayer subsidized nonprofit system has been created to fund writers, newspapers, journals and even academics. Look around a think tank and these people are calling each other “fellow” and “resident scholar” as honorifics. It’s no wonder C-level joke writers like Jonah Goldberg have developed massive egos. Everyone calls him “fellow” down at the institute!

Back in the 1990’s when newspaper circulations were collapsing, I read a story about a paper in Dayton Ohio. They hired a consultant to tell them why they were losing customers. The consultant pointed out that their food section was running stories on haute cuisine while their readers ate hamburger helper. In other words, the product sucked so people stopped buying it.

That’s much tougher in the current moment. The product certainly sucks, but people are not dropping TV in big numbers yet. Similarly, the tax-exempt rackets face no threat from Congress. There are plenty of billionaires willing to finance papers like the NYTimes and Washington Post. Maybe the only response is for voters to support the candidates the media hates the most.

Trump – Cruz 2016: They are as much fun as chemotherapy, but they are what you need to fight the tumor that is the media.