I could not bring myself to watch any of the debate. I flipped over to see Trump for a minute or two, but I was not all that interested in him either. These debate shows are a good example of what’s wrong with American politics. They are talent shows for the managerial class where we get to see inside the conference room of the bipartisan fusion party headquarters.

One of the stranger things about the modern mass media age is how much of it is make believe. I can think of exactly one debate that truly mattered and that was Nixon – Kennedy in 1960. How much it mattered is debatable. Otherwise, debates are like football games. People tune in to root for their team. Few minds are changed. At this stage, no minds are changed as they have been doing these shows for six months.

That said, I enjoy reading the commentariat the day after. They put on their serious face and lecture the rubes about what really happened in the debate. Because their true motivation is to burnish their class status, they personalize their analysis in the hopes of elevating their status in the club. It’s silly parlor politics among men who have made a career of telling the women what they would do if they had the chance.

This one caught my attention.

Finally, this debate was a fascinating glimpse into what might have been absent the disrupting force of Donald Trump. Bush was far more at ease without one of the candidates hurling middle school insults at him, and the debate itself was substantive — showcasing the GOP’s most effective communicators. This is why people said the GOP had a “deep bench” in 2016. Absent Trump, the three-man contest likely would have been between Bush, Rubio, and Cruz. But might-have-beens are irrelevant, and in this evening’s audition for the best alternative to Donald Trump, Marco Rubio won the night.

That’s their complaint in a nutshell. The big meanie, the bully, has wrecked their fun. It’s not fair. Without Trump, panda men of the managerial class could have had tea and calmly discussed the really important stuff, like how to best rearrange the commas in the regulatory code. Instead, that vulgar dirt monster and his populism ruined it!

Mark Steyn the other day made the very good point that these pusillanimous popinjays make excellent money scribbling for popular websites and chattering on TV. Being right or even being popular does not factor into their thinking because it has no impact on their lifestyle. The guys and gals who spent a year selling Mitt Romney still had jobs after Romney lost what was a very winnable election.

Once you decouple the paycheck from performance, the performance collapses. In the dreaded private sector, this is well known. Go into a UPS office and it is a model of efficiency. Go into a US Post Office and it is a sclerotic nightmare of bureaucratic asshattery. The reason is in the former, performance and pay are linked, while in the latter the pay remains the same no matter what you do.

It’s an interesting thing we are seeing with our media. The cable rackets and the donor system have conspired to populate the ranks of journalism with ball washers and yes men. In an attempt to turn the media into a megaphone for the ruling elite, they have emasculated it.  Worse yet, their insularity has made them vulnerable to even a mild breeze of discontent.

I’m reminded of this from H. G. Wells:

‘It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure— had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!”

It was not so long ago that you could not afford to make enemies in the elite media, if you wanted to have a public life. The old saying was, “never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” People like Mark Steyn, Ann Coulter, Steve Sailer and many others are getting on fine as enemies of the state media. Now, Donald Trump is doing well as an enemy of the state parties. Those who are deeply invested in the state have good reason to fear the wreckers.

One of the more enjoyable aspects of the current insurrection is watching the popinjays in the Conservative Establishment writhe in agony at being cast as establishment men. Their utter astonishment at the little people, the hoi polloi, giving them the business about their perfidy and cronyism has been a blast. In the Bush years I developed a healthy dislike for many of the more oleaginous charlatans in the commentariat. My heart feels like an alligator.

A theme around here is that the panic in conservative media is due to the sudden rush of dis-conformation washing over them. For the longest time, they have believed they are the vanguard of a popular revolt against the Progressive establishment. Suddenly, everyone has joined a different revolt, a revolt against them. These putative champions of the people are like the character in the supernatural mystery film that suddenly learns he is the villain.

Here’s an interesting piece on the same theme. I wonder if this guy is a reader.

Once upon a time, in the immediate postwar years, the elites who ran the country’s two major political parties were part of the country’s broader political establishment, which included the owners of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time magazine, the heads of the three national television networks, and the directors of a small number of leading political, cultural, and religious institutions.

This establishment was dominated by an ideology of liberal centrism that one of its key figures famously described as “the vital center.” It fostered, cultivated, and presided over a broad consensus in favor of the New Deal at home and the Cold War containment of communism abroad.

From the beginning, the modern conservative movement thought of itself as an insurrection against the liberal establishment and its representatives at the head of the Republican Party. One of the movement’s formative, galvanizing events was the 1955 founding of National Review by William F. Buckley, Jr. as a place where right-wing intellectuals could work on fashioning an anti-liberal governing ideology. Less than a decade later, the magazine championed the populist candidacy of Barry Goldwater in the hopes that he would depose the reigning liberal consensus and pursue a policy of rolling back both the New Deal and the Soviet Union.

The effort failed. But by the mid-1970s, the movement had been joined by a new group of intellectuals. In addition to uncommonly sharp polemical skills and a training in policy analysis, the formerly liberal neoconservatives brought to the movement an awareness that to succeed it would need foment a counter-establishment, both to help overthrow the liberal establishment and to serve as an alternative to it once an electoral victory had been achieved.

I’d add that the so-called neoconservatives never abandoned their technocratic impulses. They just rejected the dovishness of the New Left, preferring a more muscular response to the Soviets.

This counter-establishment tasted power for the first time with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan 35 years ago, and since then it has grown massively in strength and influence. Today the counter-establishment simply is the conservative and Republican establishment.

And yet, because its ideological outlook was formed when it was out of power, this establishment seems incapable of thinking about itself as an establishment. And so we get the editor of National Review, a regular fixture on TV, saying (presumably with a straight face) that his magazine, which has been closely read among leading members of the Republican Party for decades, isn’t a part of the Republican establishment.

I’ll note that an integral part of Progressive mythology is the struggle. Despite being in charge for close to a century, Progressives still think of themselves as an insurgent minority at war with their oppressive overlords. Elizabeth Warren is worth millions, yet she spends her time in the Senate ranting about the one percent. Her neighbors in the one percent cheer her on. It’s false consciousness.

Another theme around here is that the two sides of the American political elite are two sides of the old Yankee elite. Yankeedom came to dominate America after the Civil War and has occupied the commanding heights ever since. The old Yankee sense of being a soldier of God in a fallen world morphed into a worldview where they are always the heroic underdog of their story. Both sides of the ruling class see themselves as noble warriors fighting the good fight against the ruling class.

In the 1970’s, the National Basketball League was close to dead. Most of the arenas were empty and the games were rarely on TV, due to a lack of interest. It turns out that white people were not all that interested in watching drug-addled black guys with giant afros dunking a basketball. Even playoff games were often not televised due to a lack of audience.

Then a couple of guys came along who captured the public’s attention, first in college and then the pros. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird made for a perfect pairing as they were opposite in so many noticeable ways, yet nearly equal in talents. When they ended up on the two great franchises of the sport, it saved the NBA and ushered in a decade of growth for the league.

David Stern, the commissioner of the league, managed to learn the one lesson that was 100% wrong, in every way imaginable. That is, his takeaway from the Bird – Magic era was that he, David Stern, was a genius and responsible for saving the NBA. He then spent the rest of his career destroying the league and the sport.

This is relevant only in that is shows how easily people can believe things about themselves and their cause, even when the data points in the opposite direction. David Stern was a terrible commissioner, but he thought otherwise and his tribesmen in ownership mostly agreed. That was mostly due to the externalities that disguised the cost of incompetence, by kicking them down the road or passing them onto others.

Something similar happened with the conservative intellectuals over the same period. In the 60’s and 70’s, conservatism was an intellectual critique of the welfare socialism of the post-war West. But it was a tin-man movement because it lacked a leader with the personality to rally the people to the cause. That changed when Thatcher and Reagan emerged. It ended when they passed from the scene.

The intellectual movement, however, staggered on as a movement without a heart, but convinced that it had all the answers to the great questions. Waves of conservative intellectuals have come along like sharks’ teeth to lecture us on the finer points and nuances of conservatism. To be an authentic conservative in politics now means an avalanche of policy papers on how to fine tune the leviathan.

Like David Stern and his coevals running the NBA all those years, these conservative intellectuals, and I am being generous here, convinced themselves that Reagan and Thatcher rose to the top because they stood on the mountain of policy papers generated by the conservative industrial complex. They are blissfully unaware of the repeated failures by them and their political surrogates since Reagan left office.

The fact is, conservatism, as we have been taught it over the last half century, is an answer to a question that is no longer being asked. Forty years ago, the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation demanded an intellectual counter to welfare socialism. America had to be economically, militarily, and culturally up to the challenge of international communism. Conservatism was the backstop to prevent Progressive from caving into the commies.

That’s no longer the world in which we inhabit. The Russians are driving Bentley’s and buying sports franchises. They love capitalism. While the threat of nuclear annihilation will always be with us, there’s simply no credible threat facing the West, beyond the self-inflicted. Further, there’s no need for an intellectual defense of the western culture as the Left has won all the battles, taking command of all the high ground in the culture.

Intellectual conservatism is no longer the razor wire defending the trenches of the middle -class. At best, it is a tangled mess left over from the battle. Increasingly it is seen as the top part of the fences the managerial class has erected around us. America is no longer a self-governing republic under assault. It is a custodial state, a nation-scale version of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

To some extent, this is why the Old Left is collapsing in on itself, resulting in the black hole that is Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. The great intellectual battles of the 19th and 20th century are over. The fractured ruling elites of individual countries are being replaced by the global ruling class. When elections lose their meaning, what’s the point of having parties anyway?

The conservative movement is dead because it no longer has a reason to exist. Whether or not something replaces it is debatable, but if that does happen, it will not be a defensive crouch. it will be an ideology appealing to insurgents and revolutionaries. It will be the credo of those who take joy in throwing sand in the gears of the big machine.

One of the interesting aspects of the Trump Effect is how the members of Red Team, who used to lecture us about solidarity in the face of the Obama onslaught, are now stabbing their teammates in the back. Trump people are “trumpkins” and in a cult of personality. They declare that Trump is not a conservative as if that makes him a pagan who likes human sacrifice.

Read the comments of any Trump story and you inevitably see a group of mouth breathers railing about Trump not being a conservative. The word “conservative” has meant whatever the party bosses want for so long, most people can’t remember what it used to mean. It has become an abracadabra word that means “good” or “bad” depending upon the person using it.

This post I saw linked on Maggie’s Farm this morning is a good example.

For a long time I have hypothesized (and worried) that the average Republican / Conservative’s support for free markets was merely tribal — the team’s official position was pro-free market, so individuals supported the team’s position without actually, really understanding it.  I have developed this hypothesis after a lot of private discussions with Conservatives who have betrayed many of the same economic mis-conceptions and bits of ignorance that drive much bad interventionist government policy.

Now there is this, from the leading Republican candidate for President:

Speaking at Liberty University today, Trump escalated his rhetoric on Apple’s overseas manufacturing, and claimed somehow the US would reclaim those jobs in the future. “We have such amazing people in this country: smart, sharp, energetic, they’re amazing,” Trump said. “I was saying make America great again, and I actually think we can say now, and I really believe this, we’re gonna get things coming… we’re gonna get Apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country, instead of in other countries.”

So the Republican who is currently leading in the polls (among Republican voters, mind you) supports government intervention in a successful company’s manufacturing and sourcing decisions.  Which just reinforces my view that we are dealing with the Coke and Pepsi party.  Heads we get statism, tails we get statism.

I’m unfamiliar with the blogger and I’m sure he is a peach of a fellow, but like many people, he seems to confuse libertarian with conservative. He’s also confused about what conservatism says about capitalism and markets. That’s a common failing among the politically active. It turns his comments about tribalism into a bit of self-parody, but maybe it is intentional in order to generate comments.

The confusion over free markets versus capitalism should be blamed on libertarians, who find it comforting to confuse the two. Free markets are an academic concept. They have never existed on earth. There are always external forces at work on the market participants. It turns out that humans have this thing called culture and culture shapes the market place by placing rules on the participants, either formally or informally.

Capitalism simply means private ownership of the means of production for the purpose of producing private profit.  Put another way, it is the appropriation of capital (property, money, labor, etc.) by some to the exclusion of others. Just as there are no completely free market economies, no modern state is purely capitalist. There is always some degree of public ownership.

The point here is that you can have capitalism with all sorts of government interventions and you can have a market economy with loads of state regulation. What defines the Right is not whether there is a debate over these issues. The Right is defined by who decides and how. It is libertarians who argue that issues like trade and regulation are beyond the pale and can never be debated.

More important, the Right debates public policy within the context of culture. There is a general acceptance of the human condition. The ways of the people in Poland will differ from the those in Canada. One may produce greater material wealth, but the other may produce greater tranquility. There’s no universally right answer, just what the people in those cultures prefer. Conservatives accept that people want to live they way they want to live.

To some degree it is understandable that people like that blogger would think it is all about economics. Again, this is the libertarian poison that has oozed into the bloodstream of the Right. Since the Republicans are afraid to discuss culture, they have retreated into synthetic debates over free markets and free trade. You never have to worry about the Left calling you names if you are on the side of Apple, even if Apple is using slaves to make their products.

That I suspect is why so many are so vexed by Donald Trump. His campaign is forcing a debate about what it means to be a conservative. This is bad for the technocrats and the libertarians. Both camps operate from the assumption that culture is meaningless and can be plowed under in the quest for power, material goods or economic efficiency. It’s also a handy way of steering clear of the social justice warriors.

There’s an old gag in in finance that goes, “when the tide goes out we get to see who is naked.” That is generally understood to mean that in a down cycle you get to see who is well capitalized and who was operating on credit. We’re seeing something similar in the political sphere. We’re suddenly finding out who is and who is not on the Right. The libertarians are swimming back to their island and the technocrats are waddling back over to the Left.