Category Archives: Politics

Vouchered Reality

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I think when the robot historians write the story of late empire America, one of the great villains will be Jack Kemp. It was Kemp who “figured out” that conservatives had to find some way to counter the Progressive monopoly on altruism in the public consciousness. Otherwise, elections would continue to turn on who most cares about the weakest, rather than who has the best ideas.

That sounded fine in terms of politics, but philosophically it conceded a critical point. That is, the state is responsible for the care and feeding of the citizenry. If someone is poor, it is the duty of politicians to figure out why and fashion a remedy for it. Kemp’s happy warrior dance is what eventually led to the Bush variant of “Compassionate Conservatism.” When Bush said, “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, Government has got to move”, he was channeling Jack Kemp.

The “conservatism” of Jack Kemp was decoupled from the traditional conservatism of America. Instead of being a cultural and philosophical counter to Public Protestantism, it was a different implementation of American Progressivism. The New Right accepted the fundamentals of the Left, particularly innate egalitarianism, they just had different ways to achieve the desired results.

The New Right offered tax incentives as an alternative to the bureaucratic and sclerotic welfare systems of the Left. Instead of building and maintaining public housing stocks, the New Right would create the ownership society. Of course, when it comes to education, the New Right offered vouchers and school choice as an alternative to throwing money at the union dominated public schools.

The trouble with all of this is it accepts a set of assumptions that are at odds with reality. Fundamentally, the Old Right differed from the Left on the issue of egalitarianism. The Right argued that people are born with a range of skills, talents and dispositions. There is a natural hierarchy within the human family and social arrangements must comport with the reality.

In contrast, the New Right signed onto the idea Reagan so cleverly explained in his famous A Time For Choosing speech fifty years ago. They “can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without automatically coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.” While the Left sees the invisible hand of avarice, the New Right sees a bug in the code of social policy.

This denial of biological reality is most evident with school choice. The assumption underlying these proposals is that every parent wants their kid to grow up to be a college educated high achiever in a self-actualizing profession. In reality, the degree of parental concern for offspring follows the normal distribution that tracks closely with economic condition.

Anyone who has spent time with the poor understands something that the social planners never grasp. Poor people make poor decisions. That’s why they are poor. They have above average time preferences, which is mostly due to a lower IQ and poor impulse control.

The drug dealer did not end up on parole because he thought things through and weighed the risks against the gains. Selling weed just seemed like a good way to get money at the time. He wanted money so he could buy stuff like a car and maybe a flat screen. Tomorrow is another country that he never intends to visit. It’s all about the here and now.

It’s why school choice programs don’t have a lot of supporting data behind them. This study linked on Marginal Revolution is the latest example debunking the claims of school choice. It turns out that there’s not a whole bunch of talented kids locked into poor schools after all. It’s bad students that make bad schools, not the other way around. Vouchers, at best, let middle-class whites move their kids further away from the poor kids.

Politicians of the New Right are so enamored with these programs, despite their dubious value, because of what Jack Kemp saw forty years ago. On the one hand, they promise the same results that naturally flow from freedom of association, which appeals to their base voters. On the other hand, everyone gets to pretend to care about the poor, thus stealing a cudgel from the Left.

The result over the last three decades has been a metastasizing welfare state that is served by an army of technocrats from both sides. Per capita federal spending, adjusted for inflation, has doubled since the 1980’s because one party pushes compassionate liberalism while the other side pushes compassionate conservatism. Traditional America has been crushed between the jaws of this vice.

The Crisis of Liberal Democracy

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It is generally assumed that revolutions are for poor, bedraggled countries where operating a flush toilet is a great challenge. The hilariously misnamed “Arab Spring” is a good recent example. One Arab craphole after another fell into chaos as the price of food shot up and the local potentates were unable to keep a lid on things. Big important countries don’t have revolutions anymore. They have democracy!

That’s not a foolish assumption. The last real revolt in Europe was the Bolshevik Revolution and a lot of people would argue that Russia is not a part of Europe. The Spanish Civil War is not counted as a revolution, but that’s debatable. Either way, it’s been a long time since westerners have felt the need to “spit on their hands, hoist the black flag and start slitting throats.”

The argument is that modern liberal democratic societies have built in checks against tyranny and systems for making structural reforms when necessary. If the main political parties are unresponsive, then new parties rise up to displace them and implement the needed reforms. Elections give the people the tools to reign in their rulers so there’s no need for revolution.

Just because this process has never happened does not mean it can’t happen. The argument here is that the main parties respond to changing attitudes and reform on their own so there’s no need for new parties. The Tories in Britain, for example, moved right when UKIP got going. In America, the Democrats lurched to the left when the Green Party sprouted up in the 90’s. The Republican Party is about to move right in response to the Trump-a-paloosa.

That’s the theory. The Greeks would point out that they kept voting for something different, but nothing changed. In fact, the more they voted, the more draconian the punishments from Europe. They would have been better off having a good old fashioned military coup. At least that would have made for good television. Instead, Greece is now Germany’s Puerto Rico.

The lesson the German politicians learned, or at least appear to have learned, is that democracy is nothing but a bluff. The Greeks could have started shooting, but instead they knuckled under to German demands, even when it was a matter of pride. They would rather stop being Greek by eliminating that which makes them Greek, than take on the burden of leaving Europe and reclaiming their sovereignty.

Angela Merkel appears to be taking the same stand with the German people. Here we have genuine social unrest due to the flood of migrants she invited into the country and her response is to go after Germans who speak out about it. The mayor of Cologne, sounding like Bill Clinton, told her female citizens to just lie back and try to enjoy the rape-a-thon going on in the city square.

Just in case you are inclined to think that’s a mischaracterization, Merkel has just made a big public show of not accepting limits on allowing more Muslim immigrants into the country. The only conclusion to draw from this is she thinks there’s no amount of degradation and humiliation that will cause the German public to rise up and put an end to this madness. Given the Greek experience, she’s probably right.

It’s tempting to think there’s some difference between Germans and Greeks in the view of the people in charge, but that is a mistake. As far as Merkel is concerned, the people of Cologne are no different from the people of Athens. They are not even people. They are economic units to be shifted around and eliminated in order to maintain the ruling class. If the economic units in Athens can be bullied, why think the units of Cologne will not be bullied too?

What we are witnessing in the West is the great test of liberal democracy. On the one side, all over the West we see recalcitrant mainstream parties digging in their heels on polices that benefit the global elite at the expense of the local populations. On the other side you have local populations trying to force change on their government through the liberal democratic processes. The theory says the politicians, as a matter of survival, will yield.

So far, that has not been the way to bet. Instead, the main parties find new ways to subvert the will of the voters. In Greece the Germans laid siege to the country until they broke the will of the people. Closer to home, the German government is unleashing a wave of Muslim terrorism on their people, presumably as a form of intimidation. In France, the main parties have teamed up to block the third party from winning.

You don’t have to be a seer to see what’s coming. If through the accepted democratic process, the will of the people is thwarted, then the people will lose respect for those processes. If the people in charge already look upon these processes with contempt, there’s no one left to support the status quo and the whole things falls to pieces. Perhaps the post-democratic world imagined by the global elite is what emerges, but 100 years ago all the smart people had similar thoughts.

The American Alawites

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Minority populations in any society tend to nurse a grudge against the majority. It’s perfectly reasonable, as a sane society of any design will abide by and cater to the desires of the majority population. Therefore, the minority group will find themselves on the fringes or under constant pressure to assimilate. This natural friction also results in a bidirectional animosity between the majority and the majority.

It’s why a sane society avoids letting the minority population gain control of the levers of power. While there is some chance it works out just fine, there is a greater chance that the minority will try to exact revenge on the majority. Alternatively, it will appear they are favoring their group over the majority. To paraphrase Lee Kuan Yew, in a multi-ethnic state, people are loyal to their tribe first, so it is assumed.

In modern America, this gets squirrely because the ruling cult we call Progressives, have turned minorities, particularly blacks, into objects of worship. It’s why we have been saddled with the jug-eared clodhopper, Barak Obama, for the last seven years. Progressives truly believed he was the fulfillment of prophecy and would cleanse the soul of the nation.

As a result, the tendency is to focus on Obama’s racial animosity toward whites, because like most black people in America, Obama nurses a grudge against white people. That was fairly clear when he was running for president. His comment about rural white guys being bitter clingers was largely viewed as one of the good white/bad white signals. Bad whites go to church, own guns and are racists because they are losers.

It is why it is tempting to think Obama’s bizarre executive actions on firearms is just a way to spite the honkies. His policies will do nothing to abate violent crime. Black guys will keep shooting black guys for sneakers, respect and other dumbass reasons. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim. The only people who will notice these changes are law abiding crackers, who like hunting and shooting paper targets.

But that’s the thing. Obama is about as black as Ned Flanders. His tribe is the cult into which he was born and raised, the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Like the Alawites fighting the Sunni majority in Syria, he looks at the majority with contempt, believing they choose to live outside of grace. This is not a black thing. It is a Progressive thing. He thinks he is on the winning side of history, so that means his opponents are losers.

Alawites are Twelvers, an eschatological brand of Islam. They believe in twelve divinely ordained leaders, known as the Twelve Imams, and they believe that the last Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, lives in occultation and will reappear as the promised Mahdi. That will mark the end of ordinary reality and begin a reunion with the Divine. The faithful organize their lives around bringing about this final event.

Progressives are a similar cult. All their talk about being on the right side of history is just another way of saying they are the elect, the people who will enter the promised land in the end times. The proof of that is they organize their lives around bringing about those end times. Once they build their city on the hill, they can move in, lock the doors and leave the losers in flyover country to their own hell.

In the meantime, like their Calvinist ancestors, Progressives invest a lot of their energy in public acts of piety. Obama just got a most everything he ever dreamed of from his rent boy Paul Ryan so he should be happy with his legislative success. Instead, he is going out of his way to let everyone know he is on the side of the angels with regards to guns. To the fanatic, there’s always room for one more mass, one more hymn, one more sacrifice.

The trouble is, like we see in Syria, Obama’s ruling sect is wildly out of touch with the majority. Since he took office, 100 million guns have been sold to Americans. This is in a country that probably had three times that number in circulation when he was elected. As we see with the Alawites in Syria, mathematics does not yield to wishful thinking. Eventually, the majority decides to impose its will on the minority.

The vast majority of Americans are waking up to the reality of their position and beginning the process of sloughing off the current ruling class. America is a peaceful and prosperous country so there’s no need for a violent revolution. But if the fanatics do not yield, well, the people are heavily armed so the revolution, if it comes, will be brief. Just in case, you may want to stock up.

Fear and Resentment

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I continue to read National Review On-Line, despite having dropped the subscription to the paper version years ago. The reason is it is a canary in the coal mine sort of publication now. Their selection of topics and positions indicates the current thinking within the Republican Party. They have fluff and red meat type stuff too, but it is mostly about how to sell the GOP to the public.

The Weekly Standard, in contrast, is about influencing policy and is more of a trade journal for staffers in DC. They will take a long piece on policy or strategy and package it with a bunch of fluff that managerial class staffers will find interesting. My guess is their circulation is 90% within the DC metropolitan area. It now fills the role the New Republic filled before it was destroyed by the gay Nazi from Facebook.

Anyway, this ridiculously long-winded piece on immigration from one of the fake nerds at National Review is something that got my attention. I mostly skimmed it for two reasons. One is that a 3,500 word piece is too long by default. Second, it’s obvious the author has no grasp of the subject.

For years, elite conservatives have ignored grassroots opposition to mass immigration, and Trump’s rise is their reward. That GOP primary voters are in revolt over immigration, and that so many of them are spurning elected Republicans they no longer trust, should come as no surprise.

Does this mean that all conservatives need to do is call for closing the borders, and then all will be well? Not by a long shot. If Republicans who favor mass immigration have been blind to its downsides, many of those who are opposed to it have themselves been blinded by nostalgia — they have failed to recognize that the more culturally homogeneous America of the 1980s, when many older conservatives came of age, is gone.

The result is that anti-immigration conservatives have alienated potential allies. Many centrist and liberal African Americans share conservatives’ skepticism about immigration, yet they are reluctant to join forces with a movement they see as racially exclusive. Many Hispanics and Asians, whether foreign- or native-born, see the virtue in reducing less-skilled immigration while easing the way for skilled workers. Political scientists Jens Hainmueller and Daniel Hopkins have gathered considerable evidence that support for such a policy is widespread among Americans of all backgrounds. Yet immigration advocates have deliberately framed the immigration debate as all-or-nothing, and conservatives have let them get away with it.

I’ll just note that no where in the 3,500 word article do we find numbers in favor of mass immigration of any sort. The alluded to “evidence” in this quote is never mentioned again. Like the “evidence” in support of Big Foot and extraterrestrials, the evidence in support of mass immigration is always discussed, but never presented.

Again, it is an unnecessarily long article. The argument is that the GOP needs to adopt a policy of unlimited immigration that discriminates against low-skilled immigrants. That way, the knuckle-dragging rubes in flyover country will stop bitching about the foreigners and get back on the GOP bus. Again, there’s zero data in support of the claim that immigration is good for Americans. It’s just assumed.

None of this is new, but it indicates two things. One is the GOP is still baffled by the revolt of the peasants. They are convinced the trouble is the poor white dirt people in their trailers and shanties, being displaced by the brown people of the future. If the GOP can buy them off then the American middle class will gladly sign onto what the author concedes is cultural suicide.

The other thing we see here is there’s no real interest in peeping over the walls and seeing the faces of the revolting. They prefer to imagine the Trump vote is a bunch of old white guys on Rascal Scooters, waving around the Confederate Flag. There’s a sneering contempt for the rabble outside the walls. Therefore, it is only proper to assume the worst of them.

The contempt is most obvious when they deploy their favorite phrase, “fear and resentment” to those opposed to mass immigration. The implication is that only paranoid losers oppose mass immigration. They can’t keep up so they manufacture bogeymen they can point to as an enemy. Hilariously, the author finishes by calling his war on Americans “the compassionate case for integration and assimilation.”

This being the start of 2016, I have naturally been reading up on the year 1916. Even though it was clear that Russian society, for example, was buckling under the strain of war, the tsarists were incapable of seeing things through the eyes of the Russian people. To them, the peasants and workers may as well have been foreigners, for all the connection they felt toward them.

You see the same insularity in today’s managerial elite. Reihan Salam is better than most in that he concedes that the GOP should pay some attention to its voters on the issue of immigration. The trouble is the vast majority of the managerial elite look at the American people in the same way the tsarists looked at the starving peasants of St. Petersburg, as a burden and a nuisance.

The Odour of Honeysuckle

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One of the more entertaining aspects of the Trump Effect is watching members of the so-called conservative media throw around the word “conservative” like is some sort of magic spell. They utter the word within various incantations intended to make Trump disappear. Others use it to ward off the hordes of Trump supporters they fear are about to break their beloved party.

The word “conservative’ has lost all meaning, which is what you see in this post on NRO the other day. Jim Geraghty is no Genius T. Coates, so you have to look past the logical fallacies at the beginning, but you’ll note that what Geraghty thinks of as “conservative” is just a shopping list of Republican proposals with a healthy dollop of social engineering.

The panic among the chattering classes is obvious and the Geraghty piece has the feel of someone bargaining for his life. The only thing missing is the “I’ll give you anything you want” line that Hollywood imagines everyone says when facing death. A year ago, they were sure that one of the guys from central casting would be the nominee and now they see it all falling to pieces. The dirt people have breached the walls.

Whenever I read these columns, I keep thinking of the bit from Braveheart at the first battle. This was before Mel shows up to give his big speech. The troops are about to split after seeing the English forming up and one of the nobles pleads with them, “Men, do not flee. Wait until we’ve negotiated.”  That’s GOP Inc. these days. They want one last chance to negotiate.

The problem for Conservative Inc. is they conceded a critical principle a long time ago that puts them forever at odds with traditional American conservatism. That is, they surrendered on the fundamental right of association, which is the bedrock of American conservatism. Once the state can dictate to you with whom you can associate or disassociate, you are no longer a citizen. Every conceivable right depends on the ability to band together or walk away, as necessary.

The remedy was to grasp about for ways to gain the ends that naturally flow from freedom of association, without upsetting the Left over the issue of race. The trouble is that it was always a matter of time before the Left could close the loop and make everything about race. They even made the weather a racial issue so anything of consequence was going to be easy pickings for the Cult.

Long ago, the official Right came to an accommodation with the other side of the Yankee ruling class. A movement that fundamentally stands outside the traditions and instincts of Public Protestantism is forever trapped in that framework. Public intellectuals of the Right spend their lives trying to make their movement, their philosophy, comport with the ethics and aesthetics of the Progressives.

Once the Right gave into the Left on association, equating it with racism and therefore off-limits, the Right stopped being an opposition movement and became a partner. One side wants to use the power of the state to compel certain behavior, while the other sides either counsels caution or argues for different goals. Whether or not the state herds the people around is no longer an issue up for debate.

That’s what has the official Right in a panic over Trump and the growing resistance to immigration. If the people can debate who is and who is not allowed in for settlement, then freedom of association is back on the table. That means the average American can decide with whom he lives and, by extension, with whom he refuses to associate. More important, it calls into question the modern Right’s place in the ruling consensus.

In the novel The Sound and the Fury, Quentin Compson is the son of a once prominent Southern family who is at school at Harvard. Quentin wishes to reject his father’s antiquated philosophy, but the world he lives in seems constantly to affirm that view of the world. Eventually, unable to reconcile his place in the cultural timeline with the world in which he lives, he throws himself off a bridge and drowns in the Charles River.

The official Right finds itself in a similar dilemma. They desperately want to find some way to reject the past without succumbing to the present. The Bill Buckley experiment has been a generational attempt to accommodate traditional American conservatism with the dominant Public Protestantism that we now call Progressivism.

For a long time, they were sure they unriddled it, but now here they are facing what they see as the Snopes clan. They look at Trump and his supporters as vermin who threaten the great project. Instead of strolling the ivy covered walls of elite institutions, the official Right is about to drown in the odor of honeysuckle. Like Quentin Compson, they see no way to resolve the past with the present.

The End of Things

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After the American Civil War, the big issues, with regards to politics in the country, were decided. The vanquished portions of the nation would have a say in the running of the country, but only within the constraints of the settled upon political system. America would be a country with a strong central government that would dominate the federal system conceived by the Founders. The debate would be about how much it controls and how quickly.

The idea, for example, that the restraints on the national government listed in the Bill of Rights should now apply to state and local government would have seemed odd to the Founders. States, for example, had official religions. As late as the 1830s Massachusetts provided tax money to local Congregational churches. The 14th Amendment applied the Bill of Rights to states, thus altering the fundamental relationship between the states and the Federal government.

From the Civil War forward, politics in America was largely a domestic dispute between the factions within the victorious coalition. You see this in the choice of presidents. The First “southerner” to win on his own after the Civil War was Wilson in 1912 and he remains the greatest of outliers in American politics. Both Johnsons and Truman got there by virtue of death. The next true southerner to win was Carter and again we see very strange conditions.

You can probably argue that the post-Civil War arrangements would have collapsed in the 20th century except for the great wars of Europe and then the Cold War. The crisis in global capitalism leading up to The Great War and then the war itself, placed enormous power in the hands of the federal government. The rise of America as global hegemon after the Second War made Washington DC the capital of the world throughout the Cold War.

Then something happened, something no one seems to discuss much these days. That is, the collapse of the Soviet Union and along with it the end of ideological socialism. Up until the 1990, the world was defined as capitalism on one side and Marxism on the other. Suddenly, one end of the scale collapsed, at least in terms of economics and morality. In the blink of an eye, being a Marxist went from avant-garde to ridiculous.

The 1992 election was cast at the time as the point where the Baby Boomers took over and that was true to a point. It was also the point where the Democrats threw in the towel on socialism. They embraced global capitalism with the enthusiasm of a convert. It’s not an accident that the great banking “reforms” happened in the Clinton years, embraced by both parties.

The trouble for both parties is they lost their reason to exist when ideological Marxism collapsed. It is always argued that this has been worse for the GOP than for the Democrats, but the opposite is true. In the Clinton years the Democrats went from being the majority party to the minority party. From 1994 onward, the party was in a steady retreat politically and ideologically.

The 2000 presidential election felt like a pivotal one because you had a vestigial Southern Democrat versus a Yankee heretic. The main source of hatred toward Bush from the Cult was his apparent rejection of the culture of Yankeedom for the culture of Hooterville. The venomous hatred of Bush was what you see from the betrayed. The Left was the shrewish ex-wife and Bush was the philandering husband.

That anger was put to good use. By 2006 the New Left had a sales pitch, even if they had nothing to pitch. Voters will pick energy over lethargy and the Democrats in the mid-2000’s had plenty of energy. Then they found Black Jesus and could run as moral crusaders, even though they could not articulate the point of the crusade. They had to search around the fringes for victims to champion and wrongs to be righted.

Homosexual marriage, tranny rights, ghetto rage, micro-aggressions and faux rape culture are all the result of grasping around at the edges of life looking for something, anything, which can be made into a banner. Each grasp deeper into the darkness returns something even more preposterous. Liberalism, and by extension the Democratic Party, has become a roadside freak of self-beclownment.

So-called serious progressivism today is mostly just nostalgia. Lefty plutocrats like Rahm Emmanuel, a man who made millions in a no-show job on Wall Street, vacations in Cuba while Chicago descends into a race war. George Soros, the great benefactor of modern progressivism, is a billionaire global capitalist.

The Left and by extension the Democrats, now embrace the same economics as the so-called Right. Both sides lust after riches in the financial markets. Both sides embrace global corporatism. The Left champions the liquidation of labor rights through advocacy of open borders. Think about that. There’s a reason it is hard to see the difference between the parties. There isn’t one.

Much is made of the circus going on in the GOP primary but look at the Democratic side. The party that used to brag about its youth and creativity is offering a worn out old grifter and a ridiculous commie that looks like he strolled out of a 1940’s movie on communism. The two of them are out campaigning in mobility scooters. The one young guy in the race can’t draw flies.

The great reordering that is under way is due to the collapse of the raison d’être of the American ruling class. What animated politics in America for the last several generations has been the interplay between Progressives and the defenders of the status quo, played out in the shadow of the Cold War.

The Left collapsed as an intellectual movement when the Cold War ended, but the Right collapsed as a pragmatic alternative. You can’t have one without the other. In a single generation, the Left has adopted the economics of the Right and the Right has adopted the politics of the Left. Neither side has a reason to exist outside of naked greed.

The New Containment

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The policy of containment, with respect to the Soviet Union and the Cold War, evolved at the end of World War II and into the post-war period because the other options were not practical. Sending the US army to push the Russians out of eastern Europe would have been an impossible sell to the American public, assuming it was even possible. Dropping a nuke on Moscow would have been a public relations disaster.

On the other hand, simply letting the Russians dominate Europe was out of the question politically, even though many within the American ruling elite were communists. There had to be a way to keep most of Europe free that did not result in a war with Russia. Containment was the near perfect solution. It kept the Russians in check, created thousands of jobs for the Yankee elite and fed the military-industrial complex.

That’s not intended to imply that the people who crafted and developed the Western response to the Soviets thought all this through in advance. It just evolved into the best solution. At the onset it scratched the itch, the need to respond to Soviet aggression, but over time it proved to be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of various constituencies within the ruling class.

The funny thing about the Cold War is it preserved the American ruling consensus long after the facts on the ground justified it. The public was not going to support overturning the apple cart as long as the threat of nuclear annihilation was very real. That naturally made anyone advocating great change a threat and they were easily painted as a hothead or commie.

The result was a self-policing where the Left kept their commies in the lower ranks and the Right kept their hot heads out of sight. Within living memory, a ridiculous fop like Barak Obama would have been kept in the community organizing department where he could not cause trouble. Of course, fear of nuclear annihilation kept the public from questioning the arrangements, even if meant keeping the black man down.

Since the end of the Cold War a quarter century ago, the ruling elites have lost their footing, staggering around like drunks. In Europe, the main parties are imploding into a single party relying on skullduggery to overcome a lack of purpose. The recent French elections demonstrate their willingness to lock shields to preserve the status quo, even when they can’t come up with reason for maintaining it.

In America, the Democrats are a party for men in dresses and women in muumuus. The Republicans are the land of misfit toys, politicians just not weird enough for the other team. The ructions in the GOP primary reveal the party establishment to be hollow men with no reason to exist beyond habit. The Democrats look like God’s waiting room, an old pinko in a pantsuit versus an old an old pinko in pants.

For the past few decades, there’s been no real cost to excess, but that’s changing as the demographic explosion on the fringes of civilization threaten the West with an invasion of barbarians from over the horizon. Islam presents both a cultural and demographic challenge. Africa presents a demographic and biological challenge. So far, the ruling elites have failed to come to terms with this looming threat.

It strikes me that the rise of “far far far extreme right wing” parties in Europe and the rise of the “extreme right wing racist Donald Trump” in America may turn out to be a catalyst for how the ruling class responds to the next great challenge to civilization. While abandoning anti-racism, multiculturalism and egalitarianism is unthinkable, all three can be shoehorned into a new policy of containment.

Keeping the Mahommedan bottled up in his own lands, a new policy of containment, has obvious practical benefits to the West. Capping off Africa by making the Mediterranean a real barrier to entry (and maybe bribing the countries of the Maghreb), helps solve the African explosion as well. The Arabs would simply refocus their attention on making the Sahara a natural barrier again.

At the same time, containment means not mucking about in the affairs of the Mahommedan. In the Cold War, the West left the Eastern Bloc to the care of the Soviets. They had their sphere of influence and we had ours. The new containment would follow the same model. Let the Mahommedan manage his lands as he sees fit, but keep him bottled up in those lands, behind a technological, cultural and military curtain.

The benefit to the ruling class is it gives them a natural reason to exist. They are holding back the tides and sensible citizens will not want to risk that by supporting fringe candidates. It also brings back the natural self-policing that comes from permanent war. The Left will suppress their one-word fanatics, while the Right will keep their invade the world nutters under wraps.

Of course, the military and the diplomatic core will have plenty of reasons to get money and jobs for their people. Muffy Pemberton can pop out of Harvard and take a job in the diplomatic corps, while Dwayne Haskins can make a career out of standing guard at the borders. The Yankee ruling class gets the band back together, just focused on a different enemy. They can even, wink-wink, argue about which side has the best approach.

The sales pitch can center around the fact that it is more effective to send aid to these people than it is to resettle them in the West. There’s also the benefit of keeping their best and brightest in their home countries so they can help develop their societies. There’s the obvious safety angle, keeping the Mahommedan from exploding in your local coffee shop. It’s an easy sell with obvious benefits.

Containment. It’s not just for commies anymore.

President Trump

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If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I’m ambivalent about Trump as a candidate. I’m enjoying the Trump Effect, but I’m not a Trump fan. I don’t hate the guy or have any strong feelings about him one way or the other. I’m just not a fan of his personal style and I have a tough time imagining him as president. Therefore, I have not thought much about him being president.

Watching the press go nuts over Donald’s schlong, er…Trump’s use of the idiomatic expression “schlonged” with regards to Hillary Clinton, I’m pretty close to convinced that Trump is not only going to win the nomination. He is going to be the next president. You can’t be this clever by accident. Sure, some gaffes turn out to work in your favor, but this guy is playing the press like a fiddle. This schlong business smacks of showing off.

Think about it. He uses an odd term that has been used by liberal media outlets like NPR and the NYTimes. That term has a sexual connotation to most people. He uses it on Hillary Clinton. His enemies immediately assume he means something vulgar, but narrative collapse kicks in and we end the cycle by talking about how Clinton’s husband is a rapist. That’s super villain clever and Trump does it regularly.

It’s pretty clear by now that Trump has a solid base of support. The remarkable thing about Trump’s polling in 2015 is the consistency. Poll after poll, pollster after pollster comes up with the same steady climb higher and higher. He started the year around 10% and is going to finish the year at 40%. No other candidate has had this steady rise in the polls, not even Hillary Clinton.

What has not been so clear, largely because Republican media has been flooding the zone with wishful thinking, is that the Trump vote has been splintered, split among several candidates. The GOP spin has played this the other way, claiming the establishment vote was split among a bunch of candidates, thus giving the illusion of a Trump lead in the polls. Once the minor figures drop out, the theory goes, the voters will coalesce around a party man and that would be it.

Yet, the math says otherwise. The latest CNN poll has Trump and 39% and Cruz at 18%. There’s no reason to think that the Cruz vote would go to an establishment figure. People supporting him hate the GOP just as much as the Trump supporters. That’s 57% of the vote. Carson, another outsider candidate is at 10% and it does seem that his vote is shifting to Trump and Cruz.

When 67% of the vote is going for candidates that exist as a rejection of the status quo, it is ridiculous to think that the remaining candidates will collapse into a unitary candidate and win the primary. Given that they are all equally weak, none of them are ready to quit and support the other so by the time a champion midget is crowned, it will probably be too late anyway.

My hunch is we are about to see the race transition into a new phase where the party establishment tries to salvage what they can from the wreckage. I’m not really sure how they can pull it off, but that seems to be the plan Cruz has been banking on for months. His act has been to avoid taking on Trump, letting the others take the beating while he lies low, waiting for his moment. My guess is he thinks his moment will be Iowa.

That sounds a like a great plan, but it assumes Cruz has not already hit the same ceiling we have seen over the past year with other candidates. They bubble up to about 18% and then start to decline again. It also assumes he can survive contact with Trump, something no one has done so far. In fact, the sign that your campaign is over has been when Donald Trump says your name.

I’m not making any predictions, but the way to bet right now is for Trump to be the nominee. He is schlonging Hillary Clinton right now, which will go a long way toward winning him converts in the GOP. Unless Cruz can handle the Trump schlong, he’s probably going to break on the wheel of Trump too.

Hari Seldon Has Spoken

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Back in the summer, I predicted that The Weekly Standard crowd would head back over to the Democrats if Trump won the nomination. Privately Bill Kristol has been sounding out party big shots about how best to stop Trump. He has hinted at his own plan to bolt the party if Trump won the nomination.  Now the Hari Seldon of neo-conservatism has made it official.

On Monday, Weekly Standard editor-in-chief Bill Kristol tweeted out what the rest of the Republican establishment is thinking: better Hillary than Donald. Here’s the tweet:

Crowd-sourcing: Name of the new party we’ll have to start if Trump wins the GOP nomination? Suggestions welcome at ed****@************rd.com

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 20, 2015

Kristol isn’t alone. As I wrote at Daily Wire today, Politico’s Jeff Greenfield says, “If the operatives I talked with are right, Trump running as a Republican could well face a third-party run – from the Republicans themselves.” That follows last Thursday’s Politico column from former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, who compared Trump to Hitler and called him “evil,” and last Wednesday’s Politico column reporting that Jeb Bush’s aides “began looking into the possibility of making a clear break with Trump – potentially with the candidate stating that, if Trump were the nominee, Bush would not support him.”

Last week, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said that former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour “and a lot of the Republican leaders would much rather Hillary Clinton be President of the United States than have Donald Trump represent them as a Republican.” And in November, The Hill reported that “GOP establishment donors have confided to The Hill that for the first time in recent memory, they find themselves contemplating not supporting a Republican nominee for president.”

I’m old enough to remember when it was scandalous for Trump not to pledge his allegiance to the eventual Republican nominee. Now, day after day, reports from party leaders leak, stating that should Trump gain control over the party apparatus, they will simply smash the machinery.

Four months ago the same characters now planning to bolt the party made Thanks Dad and The Tart hold a loyalty oath on TV, allegedly to show that Trump was an unreliable splitter and deviationist. For months National Review On-Line has been running daily columns claiming that Trump was not a real Republican because he could bolt the party at anytime. I’m looking forward to Rich Lowry lecturing Bill Kristol about his lack of loyalty.

Despite all the cheerleading for Team GOP and conservatism, these guys were never on our side. Neo-conservatism was always a Progressive heresy, not a conservative one. That’s where the paleocons got it wrong. They saw guys like Bill Kristol as newly minted converts trying to get control of the movement. The reality is the neo-cons were trying to kill the conservative movement and they largely succeeded.

The trouble is, reality has always been on the side of conservatism. A sober (somber?) acceptance of the human condition is the the core of conservatism. The crackpot theories of the invade the word/invite the word crowd we call neocons were always going to break on the wheel of reality. The public will only tolerate so many Farouks shooting up their offices and they will only volunteer so many sons to foreign wars. We’ve reached the limit of both.

I was at a luncheon today with some old school lefties and what struck me was their weariness with their cult. They are sick of the weirdos and grievance mongers. They want to get back to bread and butter issues like defending the working classes against the predatory class and fixing up the country for Americans. They still think government is great, but I could tell they are edging close to ditching the Democrats and the social justice warriors.

This growing schism gets no airing as the cult controls the media, but liberals gotta eat too. You can be the most doctrinaire lefty in town, but when your health insurance jumps 30%, you get pissed at the people who caused it. The on-going crisis of national sovereignty and neo-feudal economics is eroding the old order. Old lefties and old righties have more in common with each other than they have with their so-called leaders.

There’s a long road between now and the time when we lock shelds against the cloud people. When the Hari Seldon of neo-conservatism is threatening to destroy one of the parties, it means the great realignment is not going to happen without a fight. Given that he and the Encyclopedists are the guys in charge, betting against them is probably foolish. But, that’s the fun part of realignments. You never know how they will turn out.

Reading Moonbats

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It is easy to read and learn about the beliefs of others when those beliefs have nothing to do with your beliefs. Reading about the beliefs of the ancient Greeks, for example, is fun because we know it is all nonsense and it in no way threatens our own beliefs about the world, natural and supernatural.

On the other hand, tune into the Democrat debate show last night and a normal person will struggle to not fly into a rage and throw the remote at the television. It’s not just the lies and nonsense all of the candidates are fond of saying in public. It’s the fact that all of these people believe things that are antithetical to what you believe and even who you are.

As a result, it is very hard to watch, listen and learn. I bet most normal people find it easier to read the pronouncements of ISIS than listen to Hillary Clinton. ISIS makes more sense. You can relate a little bit to what they are thinking and feeling. They want their culture and people to prosper. It’s crazy and violent, but not irrational. That’s not the case with the Democrats or the Republicans.

Anyway, I was thinking about that when this popped up on twitter the other day. I started to read it, but felt coming over me that urge one associates with the smell of spoiled food. It’s the old reflex arch telling your body to get away from something foul. That’s not a habit I try to cultivate so I came back to it with a more clinical approach.

One of the habits I’ve developed is to look up the author of Progressive tirades. They have an odd habit of misrepresenting themselves. The smug sneering is always based in the mistaken belief they are super smart people. Look up their bio and you inevitably learn they were a poli-sci major at a state college. Alternatively, they hold a degree from a private school in a nonsense field like black studies or feminism.

In this case, Salon does some of the work for me:

“Sean Illing is a USAF veteran who very briefly taught political science at Loyola and LSU. He is currently a staff writer for Salon.”

I’m always suspicious of people who list their military service in their bio. This comes from my grandfather who said there are two types of people who wave around their service time. There are those who peaked during the war and those who are lying to you. My grandfather grew up with men who served under Grand Duke Nicholas so he was a little jaded. Still, it is something I have often observed in my own life.

The worst offenders, of course, are politicians. John McCain has been waving around his own bloody shirt for decades. Recently, female politicians have started listing “combat veteran” at the top of their bios, giving the impression they at one time hiked up their skirts, fixed bayonets and went over the top to face the Huns.

Sean Illing, according to his resume, is a fanatic who has struggled to hold a job and gets by writing these screeds for a tin foil hat website. That’s not disqualifying, but it makes it easier to read his posts knowing that he is struggling with reality. It’s why looking up the bio is a good tool for reading material produced by the Left.

What you’ll notice about these guys is they truly believe the Great Liberal Pumpkin is about to rise from the Moonbat Patch and bring about the eschaton. I’ve been reading about the death of “old white men” for forty years now, at least. Back in the Reagan years this was a favorite of Progressives smarting over the rise of middle America. It’s where we got the phrase, “Angry White Males.”

What’s humorous about this is the people predicting the demise of old white people just assume they have escaped the march of time. Sean Illing, faster than he can imagine, will be an old white guy, hiding in his apartment from the gangs of brown people on the streets polar bear hunting.

The other thing that you always see when reading the industrial strength crackpots is the comical hive mindedness. For Sean, the world is a simple place. Inside the walls are the good thinkers. Outside the walls are the bad thinkers, an undifferentiated other about which he knows nothing, other than the fact they are on the other side of the wall. Bees stink indiscriminately for a reason.

If you’re reading this, most likely you are a crime thinker with a head full of hate facts. Despite your evilness, you have noticed that the people outside the Hive walls don’t get along with one another. There is a wide diversity of opinion outside the Hive, while inside it resembles a Hitler Youth camp.

One of the central insights of Steve Sailer is that the current Progressive coalition is way to fringe to hold together for much longer. A coalition of working class ethnics, blacks and rural whites has a lot in common. A coalition of deviants, criminals and the deranged is not a recipe for success. Sean Illing is functional, but you can’t count on guys like that to keep it together over the long haul.