Category Archives: Politics

Oh Canada

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Way back in the olden thymes, everyone and I mean everyone believed that the weird fuzzy-wuzzy fascism of the Democratic Party was settled policy. Only lunatics and fans of Hitler thought otherwise. After all, the 1964 election had proved it! We did not yet have science! but the defeat of Goldwater was the next best thing. There could be only two types politics, hard-boiled liberalism and soft-boiled liberalism.

People could be forgiven for assuming that was true. Goldwater was recklessly described as a lunatic, who wanted to blow up the world. He was not, but the press and all the beautiful people hooted and roared when LBJ sent out psychologist claiming that Goldwater was deranged. As an aside, expect this to happen with Trump and Carson, except it will be economists.

That meant the choices before the voters would be between the metastasizing welfare state of the Republicans or the metastasizing welfare state of Democrats. In other words, you could have any color car you wanted as long as it was black. There was no turning back the clock and going back to the dark days when things were better. No sirree, it was all settled. All the smart people said so and if you said otherwise, you were not smart, maybe even crazy.

The weird thing about the Reagan years is they may as well have never happened. All the good that was done in those years has been rolled back and some of it so quickly it is hard remember that was ever done. What’s crazier, is immediately after Reagan, his party went right back to believing what they believed before he won two landslide elections. That is, they had to be Democrat-lite in order to win elections.

One of the reasons the GOP is in trouble today is their insistence on being a slightly less crazy version of the Democrats. That has its appeals as there are always voters out there afraid to rock the boat. That and it promises to keep the fanatics in the liberal press corp at bay. The trouble is the bulk of the people who would like an alternative to the Liberal Democrats can’t stomach the trimmers and compromisers the GOP is offering up.

Truman said it, I think, when the people get the choice between a Democrat and a Democrat, they pick the Democrat. That’s the dilemma facing the GOP these days and it appears to be what has unmanned the Conservatives in Canada yesterday. Given the choice between something and nothing, the people chose something even though that something is as dumb as a goldfish.

The last time I had any reason to care about a Trudeau, the new Prime Minister’s mother was running around showing her beaver to the public. Margaret Trudeau was good looking piece of tail back in the day, dumb as a plank, but that’s probably why the geezerly Pierre married her. Too bad her son and Canada’s next leader got her brains and his old man’s megalomania.

“We beat fear with hope,” Trudeau said. “We beat cynicism with hard work. We beat negative, divisive politics with a positive vision that brings Canadians together.”

How is it possible for a fully formed adult to say such idiotic things in public? Political speech in the mass media age is aimed at the functionally retarded, but even by that low standard this drivel is embarrassing. Worse, it’s unmanly and mean. You won. Be honorable in victory you sniveling punk. But then again, why should he? The voters just voted in an insipid punk. He’s just giving them what they want.

Nature abhors a vacuum so when the responsible people refuse to be responsible, the irresponsible get to run wild. In this case, the people claiming to represent the sane and sensible Canadian could not be bothered to take the fight to the howling crazies so the howling crazies won. Again, given the choice between something and nothing people always pick something.

This reminds me of something. A few years back I was at an event for a friend and present at the event was the wife of a Canadian official. We talked a bit about politics and she made the comment that in Canada, the conservatives were not extreme like they are in the US. I nearly bust out laughing, thinking of Mitt Romney as extreme, other than extremely dull. But, she made clear that it was very important to Canadian conservative to not be viewed as too far apart form the the rest.

The lesson that will be drawn by the Canadian Conservative party officials is that Harper was too hard edged and he was insufficiently deferential to the Left. The next time, they must beg harder. It’s the same lesson the American Right “learns” after every election, win or lose. No matter the result, they must grovel harder next time.

Today, the little mushroom people of Nova Scotia weep for their country.

Filling The Void

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I sent this to my liberal friends mostly because I was bored and I sometimes find pleasure in making them miserable. That does not make me a good person, but on the list of things I have to answer for, it is far down the list. I was also curious to see if they would repeat the same lines they always do when someone points out that their cult is not about to reach the promised land.

Sure enough, the old chestnuts came out right away. “The GOP is in worse shape” was the universal response. “The demographics are on our side so it is just a matter of time” was a close second. Both of those may be true, but it is a strange response when you think about it. A story about the problems with Democrats and the response is to change the subject. Cults are funny like that.

Anyway, Matthew Yglesias, no relation to Julio, is sort of a silly person, but he is worth paying attention to if you follow politics. His analysis is nothing much, but he is a useful indicator of what is being discussed in the fever swamps, away from the public. He and his site are messengers, of sorts, spreading whatever is this the official position at the moment. At least that’s what the Vox boys are hoping.

There’s little doubt that the Democratic Party is shriveling up to be simply the Progressive White People Party with blacks attached to it. The map in the story show just how marginalized the party has become over the last decade. It’s not that the GOP suddenly has a monopoly on commonsense, it’s just that the Democrats have become an ideological party that appeals to about 20% of white people.

What I found hilariously telling is this bit:

In what Democrats should take as a further bleak sign, four of the 11 states where they control both houses of the state legislature — Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Illinois — have a Republican governor. This leaves just seven states under unified Democratic Party control.

Republicans have unified control of 25 states. Along with the usual set of tax cuts for high-income individuals and business-friendly regulations, the result has been:

    • An unprecedented wave of restrictions on abortion rights
    • The spread of union-hostile “right to work” laws into the Great Lakes states
    • New curbs on voting rights, to further tilt the electorate in a richer, whiter, older direction
    • Large-scale layoffs of teachers and other public sector workers who are likely to support Democrats

You could be forgiven for wondering what in the hell he is talking about with regards to curbs on voting rights and large scale layoffs of teachers. The real howler is the “richer, whiter older” stuff. Pretty much the only white people voting for Democrats these days are old and well off. Normal people can’t afford to be progressive. That’s a rich man’s hobby.

This is the money graph:

Winning a presidential election would give Republicans the overwhelming preponderance of political power in the United States — a level of dominance not achieved since the Democrats during the Great Depression, but with a much more ideologically coherent coalition. Nothing lasts forever in American politics, but a hyper-empowered conservative movement would have a significant ability to entrench its position by passing a national right-to-work law and further altering campaign finance rules beyond the Citizens United status quo.

An essential element of the progressive faith is they believe they are in a war with a superior enemy and only through a total commitment to the One True Faith will they defeat Grendel and achieve grace. When no such enemy exist, they invent one. Their claim that the GOP is a “ideologically coherent coalition” sounds insane to normal people, but Progressives believe it, they have to believe it. Otherwise they are just a bunch of meddling weirdos harassing normal people for no reason.

Even so, we live in an interesting time. The GOP is a party of men with the imagination of mid-level bureaucrats at the department of motor vehicles. The Democrats are a bunch of geriatric hippies and radicals that sound like extras from a documentary on the 60’s. The hard part about watching Sanders and Clinton go at it is not laughing. It’s two old farts arguing over bingo at the retirement home, but instead of bingo, they think they will get the chance to rule over the rest of us.

The funny thing about this Vox piece is that Progressives are correct about the condition of their movement. It’s exhausted. They are running around trying to champion trannies and deviants because they have run out victims to exploit. Similarly, the alt-right is correct about the condition of the Conventional Right. It’s a racket for moving books and merchandise to well intentioned Americans thinking they are doing the right thing.

Something is going to fill the void. Donald Trump did not stroll in and become the front runner by accident. When given the choice between something and nothing, people will always pick something, even if it not all that much. At some point, something better than Trump is going to come along. What that is, I don’t know.

The House Divided

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I’ve been making the point for a long time that the Republican Party is not really a political party. It’s a dumping ground for people that don’t fit into the Democratic Party for some reason. The groups that find themselves in the GOP don’t have a lot in common with one another. Many would prefer to be in the Democratic party, but circumstances make it impossible.

Romney famously ran on the “three legs of the GOP base.” That was economic conservatives, social conservatives and foreign policy hawks. That’s not a terrible formulation for a political party, but it is not based in reality. The so-called social conservatives, for example, are much more populist and localist than the economic conservatives can tolerate.

Similarly, the foreign policy hawks are not in line with the economic conservatives on a lot of things. The main reason people favor a tough line with the muzzies is so the muzzies will stay over in their countries. Many foreign policy hawks, like me for example, are OK with letting Afghanistan return to the 5th century. They should remain backward. Close down their airports, electric plants and water systems. Problem solved. That’s heresy with the economic conservatives.

Political parties in America have always been coalitions of divergent interests with one or two unifying items. From FDR to Jimmy Carter, the Democrats were Yankee elites running a coalition of ethnic groups, unions, southern populists and intellectuals. That’s given way to a party of Yankee elites running a coalition of fringe weirdos, blacks, immigrants, academic elites and their students. The Democrats are mostly the party of people who went to college and would have preferred to stay there.

The Republicans are not a coalition of anything now. If you are a Southern conservative, you have little in common with the conservative of the northeast. People in Massachusetts, for example, who call themselves conservative and vote Republican, are not religious and they are indifferent on the homos and abortion. Their leaders are often pro-abortion and gay marriage. Contrast that with the Democrats where everyone is violently in favor of abortion.

My formulation of the Republican elected officials is that one third wish they were Democrats, one third just like the easy life of elected office and the rest are genuine conservatives in the traditional meaning of the term. John Boehner, for example, would have been a fine Speaker in 1984, when the Democrats ran the House and tangled with Reagan over policy. Boehner would have been fine at building majorities to compromise on the small issues.

There’s something else. The Democrat Party is now a purely ideological party. This is a first in America. Europe has ideological parties, but American has never had them, at least ones that gain votes. The Democrats are now a party of the New Religion. You can’t win office as a Democrat being pro-life or if you are against homo marriage. You have to embrace anti-racism, multiculturalism and egalitarianism in order to have a place. I’ll note that all Democratic House members are open borders fanatics.

How a coalition party, especially a haphazard one, responds when faced with a an ideological party is debatable. The experience of Europe in the first third of the 20th century is not encouraging. It does appear that the House Republicans are so divided they cannot pick a speaker. No one dares say it, but the issues dividing the party are the old national questions, particularly immigration. The people running the party want open borders. The insurgents want national sovereignty. There is no room to compromise.

My guess is the people in charge will stay in charge. They will employ an age old strategy of backing a novus homo that they think will fail and embarrass the upstarts. Just in case, you can be sure they will work hard to make sure he does fail. They are playing the long game from the comfort of the inner party. Some of these people have been in DC so long, their GPS reads “thar be monsters” for the areas outside the Beltway.

The only whiff of good news in any of this is that I sense that the sovereignty issue is playing much better in the Northeast and Midwest than elsewhere in the country. The South is much more mildly opposed to immigration, simply due to the cultural arrangements and the long history with migrant farm workers. In the Northeast, the old Yankee paranoia and intolerance is showing up in the immigration debate.

If the GOP can evolve as a party to reflect the mild nationalism of lightly managed trade, constitutional liberty and regulated immigration, it can be a majority party that has appeal nationally. That will require something on the ball in the leadership positions, but all the incentives are pointing the wrong way now. A party riven with dissent ends up with the worst leaders of the various factions. The result are guys like Mike McCarthy who is as dumb as a goldfish.

We live in interesting times.

Mitt Romney in Drag

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In 2008, Mitt Romney ran as the guy to the right of John McCain, which was not too hard given McCain’s record. The trouble for Romney was that he was not much of a conservative, by anyone’s reckoning so the party splintered. Evangelicals could not stomach a Mormon so they lined up behind their coreligionist, Mike Huckabee. McCain had the party bosses behind him, who thought having a black president was too important to wage a serious challenge in the general.

In 2012, Romney re-purposed himself into Robo-Conservative. His programming was combed through for any defects and bugs so that no matter which buttons you pushed, out popped the standard “conservative” response. It was a bit creepy watching a guy from West World run for president, but they say we will be ruled over by robots soon enough so it was good practice. The thing with Romney is that he said the right things, but no one believed him.

That’s the problem with “evolution” in politics. If you start out as a gun enthusiast who tried to bargain with the gun-grabbers, but evolved into a 2A absolutist, people understand your journey and they believe you.  If you start out as a gun-grabber and then suddenly change positions, you better have a damned good story. Otherwise, you’re worse than wrong, you’re a liar.

The Romney career is a great example. For twenty years he kept evolving to meet the situation in which he found himself as a candidate. It was not that he evolved as a candidate that got him in trouble. It was that voters understood he would never stop evolving and that once in office he could turn out to be anything or nothing. To paraphrase Malcolm X, Romney believed in nothing so he would fall for anything.

Fiorina has the same problem, but it is not quite as evident to the voters. I pointed out the other day that she is a stalking horse for the party bosses. They are tarting her up to walk the same streets as Trump, hoping she can lure enough of his vote away to sink his candidacy. Some guy at Bloomberg, who maybe reads this blog or can see the obvious, has a similar take on the Fiorina show.

Carly Fiorina is looking like the insider’s outsider candidate.

On the surface, it’s clear why the national political mood has swept her, Donald Trump, and Ben Carson to the top of Republican presidential polls. A former California technology executive, she has never held elected office, a profile that a plurality of Americans say they prefer to a candidate with gubernatorial or U.S. Senate experience.

Yet, as she recently demonstrated when otherwise-feuding Republican lawmakers showed up to see her on Capitol Hill, she also has Washington credentials that have won her fans inside the Beltway, even as she seeks the nomination with a strategy that makes the GOP establishment a frequent punching bag.

I always thought that the problem with Romney, in the end, was that he was an insult to the voters. The people who championed Romney just assumed that the voters were too stupid to think about it too closely so they would line up behind him as their betters instructed. Most did, but many were disgusted by it all and stayed home. Whether or not it was enough to swing the result is debatable, but it was enough to be debatable.

Now the same folks that were ready to sell us Jeb Bush are now, in response to the revolt on the Right, selling Carly! Fiorina as the antidote to what ails the American Right. She is making many of the same noises that the angry rubes in hooterville find attractive in Trump, but she’s not one of those dirt people the modern GOP finds so disgusting. The trouble is, she is just Mitt Romney in drag.

Abortion is one of those issues that is a litmus test issue. If you think it is a barbaric act, you are never in favor of anything that makes it more attractive or available. There’s no wiggle room there. You can allow for its legality and acknowledge the moral ambiguity in certain circumstances, but you do so through gritted teeth. If you were waving the Planned UnParenthood banner around, your conversion to the pro-life cause better have happened on the road to Damascus. Otherwise, you’re just adding “liar” to your list of defects.

Coincidentally, abortion was the issue that really hamstrung Romney as he could never come up with a plausible answer for why he kept changing his opinion. By plausible, I mean one that did not indicate he was a soulless sociopath who would say anything to get elected. Fiorina is a more gifted liar than Romney, having climbed the greasy pole of corporate politics, which requires great skill at apple polishing. But her polling suggests she is not catching on with voters outside the Acela Corridor.

Placing the Carly! phenomenon in the timeline with Romney, the picture that emerges is of a party that has no idea why it is a party anymore. All they know is they are not Democrats. The Democrats are not much better as they are just a collection of fads designed to piss off the squares in normalville. One party is a revolt against commonsense, the other is a response to that revolt, with neither having anything to offer beyond hysterics.

To the Gas Chambers!

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Most men grow out of libertarianism, if they were ever so foolish, by their mid-20’s. It is at that age when you have enough experience in the world to see the foolishness of it. It takes longer for the young Progressive male to wake up because of the cultural reinforcements all around us. We live in lands controlled by the Cult of Modern Liberalism. To be something other than a Progressive tests the mind on a daily basis.

I’m fond of pointing out that liberalism and libertarianism are two sides of the same coin. People find that assertion bizarre, but both are utopian and both start with a hatred of humanity. That is the heart of materialism, after all. Materialism places efficency at the top of the moral hierarchy and people somewhere further down. The main difference between the faiths is the the liberal hates all men equally, while the libertarian simply detests the unfit.

This is on full display in this column by Kevin Williamson. The style is familiar where the curdled hatred of humanity is couched in an ad hoc critique of the bogeymen that haunt the dreams of reactionaries and libertarians alike. There’s also the standard layer of free market frosting about the glories of free trade and the free movement of people. It’s the part we’re supposed to notice, rather than the sadistic misanthropy at the core of the article.

Phillips, Inc., in the end decided it had no need for Phillips, Texas, and the town was scrubbed right off the map. The local homeowners owned their houses but not the land they sat on, which belonged to the company. (These sorts of arrangements were, and are, more common than you’d think, as in the case of the many Californians in the Coachella Valley who own their houses but lease their land from the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians.) Many of the residents of Phillips were uneager to be evicted from their homes, and they sued the company with the help of the famously theatrical Texas trial lawyer Racehorse Haynes, who informed the good people of Phillips: “They might whup us fair and square, but they better bring lunch.” Lunch was served, and Phillips is just gone.
It was the right thing to do. Some towns are better off dead.

That’s always been the truth at the heart of libertarianism, as well as the various implementations of Rousseau’s monstrous ideas. Libertarians have always imagined themselves as trapped with a bunch of fat lazy takers. Lacking the courage to confront the slackers themselves, they seek a system that will do the dirty work for them. Liberals have this same view. They see themselves as the saints of a fallen world and their system will take care of all those sinners.

Way back in the olden thymes, Whittaker Chambers unriddled this connection in his review of Ayn Rand.

Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In a age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

The liberal and the libertarian look at the messy arrangements of mankind and wish to clean the slate and start anew, because to work through the current arrangements is dirty and time consuming. One does not seek to alter the current arrangements out of a love or respect for the current arrangements. All utopians first aim to destroy and that is done best with a passion, which can only arise from contempt.

That’s what bleeds from Kevin Williamson’s writing. He looks at the “losers” in America with contempt. Some towns are better off dead. My guess is he thought that was a cheeky line, as he tends to the adolescent, but maybe he did think much about it. As Chambers noticed, libertarians are not full of introspection.

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left, first surprisingly resemble, then in action tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purposed, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

That last line sounds remarkably like Lenin’s adage, “who, whom?”

Rambling about the Maths of Debt

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The other day, Kevin Williamson posted this about balancing the Federal Budget. It is the typical snarling, snide polemic he is known for recently. Maybe he accidentally drank out of his ink bottle or took a blow to the head, but his work has been of this type for a while. This recent piece is mostly another deranged rant about Donald Trump. The bulk of his column is crap, but this got my attention.

At the moment, our national fiscal situation is considerably less bad than it was during the Obama-Pelosi-Reid era of one-party Democratic rule; the 2010 and 2011 federal deficits were 8.7 and 8.5 percent of GDP, respectively, but the 2014 deficit was only 2.8 percent of GDP. Federal spending went from 24.4 percent of GDP in 2009 to 20.3 percent in 2014, thanks in no small part to budget sequestration, the one national policy in which Washington’s Democrats and Washington’s Republicans are united in loathing. The 2017 deficit is projected to be 2.3 percent of GDP.

That puts us within striking distance of having a balanced budget (albeit one that is balanced at a spending point that is too high for my own taste) or at least the reduction of budget deficits to trivial levels. All that is needed to get there is a little sober reform on the taxing front and a little sober reform on the spending front, with the hardest piece being reform of our entitlement programs, which in the long run will be the major drivers of deficits. I like the idea of radical tax reform, scrapping the tax code, abolishing the IRS, and starting over, and then privatizing Social Security and abolishing Medicare and Medicaid to boot. But you don’t actually have to do that to balance the budget.

That struck me as implausible so I did some mathing. The first thing we need to know is how much debt the Feds are piling on each year. In fact, that’s probably the only thing worth knowing as that is the tax on the future we may or may not be able to sustain. Greece stopped being a country, after all, because it could not service its debt, not because it spent too much or taxed too little. When you can no longer service your debt, you’re done as a country.

According to the Treasury, the amount of total debt held by the public has gone up 23.9% since the heroic budget deal Williamson is fond of touting. That’s better than the previous four years when debt rose by 37%, but there was also the big giant recession where tax receipts dropped. On the other hand, it is still well above the average over the last 35 years, so no one should be celebrating this modest reduction.

The larger point he is making is that with some small tweaks, the federal budget can be balanced. Well, over the last 35 years the annual increase in Federal debt has been 8.3%. In 1980 the debt was $907,701,000,000 and it is now $17,824,071,380,733, as of the end of the 2014 fiscal year. That’s a staggering amount of debt that happened during the two biggest economic booms in the nation’s history. Put another way, in the best of times we have run up debt at record levels.

For another way to look at it, here is the inflation adjusted debt since the 60’s:

fredgraph

There’s no way a sober person can look at the number and come away thinking we are a few tweaks away from solving the debt problem. If that were true, the graph above would not exist. Instead the line would bounce along in that 30% range as it had for so long. Something changed in the 1980’s and as a result debt as been on a steady run upward ever since, regardless of the party in charge and the amount of tweaking.

That raises another interesting question. If debt as a percentage of GDP is spiraling upward and neither party seems to have a way to stop it, what is driving the debt spiral? The most obvious place to look is the spending side as taxes have not changed a whole bunch in my lifetime. They lower rates, but remove deductions. Then they raise rates, but add back in a bunch of deductions. As Reason Magazine noted a few years ago, tax collection remains fairly constant over time.

Here’s one of my favorite charts. It is the per capita inflation adjusted spending. Using 1980 as the starting point, the size of the Federal government has doubled, even adjusting for inflation.

When you look at per capita, inflation adjusted GDP growth, you see something curious. The average growth rate has been 1.86% since 1980, which is interesting for a number of reasons, but what’s relevant here is that it explains the chart above. The cost, per capita, of government may have doubled in 35 years, but so has per capita, inflation adjusted GDP. The cost of the Federal government has simply kept pace with rise of incomes. The relative cost of government has not changed much.

So, what is driving the debt spiral?

The answer is the the debt spiral is self-perpetuating in a zero interest rate world. Imagine you have a personal income of $100,000 per year after taxes and expenses of $105,000 per year. You borrow $5,000 to cover the deficit. Every year your earnings go up 5%, but your expenses go up 5% as well. In 20 years, that annual deficit is $12,500, which sounds pretty good. Your annual deficit percentage has not changed, but your total debt is now $165,000!

Of course, it gets much worse because debt has interest. Even the government pays something in interest today. Using the above example and the historic norm of 7%, the total debt would balloon to over $200,000 in that 20 years and the debt payments would eat up a big chunk of the budget. Long before you got the 100% debt range, your little country would have been forced to cut back and pay down debt.

What’s happened in the free money era since the 1980’s is the cost of borrowing, in the view of politicians, has disappeared. In the age of market based borrowing rates, the bond markets forced the government to choose between competing options. Do you spend more on defense or more on roads? Do you make pension promises for ten years out or does the impact on borrowing make that untenable, because it cuts into current spending on other constituents?

That has not been the case for a generation. Instead of choosing between competing interests, pols just borrow to pacify both interests. The Republicans borrow to cut taxes for their patrons and the Democrats borrow to give goodies to their patrons. Elections, therefore, have no consequences as the parties never threaten each others interest. The voters are simply deciding who gets to spend time at the debt trough.

Of course, there’s a limit to how much debt a government can run up even in a zero interest world. If central banks begin to let rates rise, then the day of reckoning comes much sooner, which is why they can never let rates rise, at least not on purpose. That returns me to the original topic. The only “tweak” that can fix the debt problem is actually a radical change and that comes but one way.

Straw Wars

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The Democrats have always been the gold standard in the art of politics. They are a means-to-an-end operation where the only thing that matters is the end result. The Republicans are a clown car by comparison, because they get hung up on process and let the goals slip away from them. That and many of their leaders are stupid. But, they can play hardball when pressed by internal dissent. A good example is what we are seeing with Carly Fiorina.

Starting a couple of weeks before the last debate, the inner circle of the party started pressing their media friends to promote her candidacy as a more sober alternative to Donald Trump. They got CNN to change the rules to put her on the big stage so she could try to draw blood from Trump. Strangely, the establishmentarians think Trump offends women as much as he offends the Panda-Men of the party. Ever since, all of the usual suspects have been telling us Fiorina is surging in popularity.

This is the classic use of a straw candidate to dilute the support of an adversary. Since Pericles, political factions have sought to split the vote of a larger faction by offering up alternative candidates to drain away some of the vote. Recently Democrats, for example, have used straw candidates in Massachusetts and Virginia to win elections they would otherwise have lost. They surreptitiously supported libertarian candidates who had no chance of winning, but would draw away a few points from the Republican.

The best straw candidates are those who don’t know they are a straw. My favorite example of this is the 2010 governor’s race in Massachusetts. The incumbent Democrat, Deval Patrick, was in trouble so the party encouraged a guy named Tim Cahill to run as an independent. He was a conservative Democrat, but as an independent, he was biting into the vote of the liberal Republican, Charlie Baker. At first it looked like Cahill would be a strong candidate, but he faded and it was clear he was only going to split the anti-Patrick vote.

Cahill never figured out he was just a straw so he hung in the race, even after the local media began to refer to him as the straw. Whether or not Cahill was this stupid is debatable, but he kept running, throwing the election to Deval Patrick. Not long after Cahill was indicted on corruption charges by the very same Democrats who used him in the election. I always thought that was a great touch.

Fiorina has been a hang-around for about a decade now. She worked on McCain’s campaign as an adviser. She ran for Senate with party help in 2010. I’ve called her Mitt Romney in a skirt because she is one of those no-trust candidates that says all the right things, but no one really believes them. It’s as if they are actors from central casting, trained to repeat the lines, but only playing a role. If someone decides they need new lines, they will gladly say the new things.

That’s what makes her a great straw. Like Romney, she thinks politics works like a corporation. Suck up to the bosses, keep moving up the org chart and eventually you get the top job. Instead of seeing the motives of her new best friends, she thinks she is being welcomed into the club. She will suck up even harder trying to please the party bosses, who are only encouraging her so she can tear a whole in the Donald Trump dirigible.

Fiorina is never going to be the nominee. The company men just want to hide behind her skirt while she dilutes the Trump vote for a while. They correctly see that the voters are rejecting the establishment men, rallying to Trump as a protest more than anything. If that vote can be split between three candidates, that leaves open the chance to let a company man consolidate the vote currently split between guys like Jindal, Rubio, Bush, et al. If you do the math of the polls, half the vote is willing to back a company man over the rebel options.

The other role she serves as the straw is to play the “I’m mad, but I’m not crazy” card on the Trump voters. What I mean here is she will take up the same issues as Trump like immigration, but a full step further toward the party’s position. Once Trump is gone, she becomes the fringe position. Once Fiorina is gone, then it is short walk for those voters back into their cages.

I offer no predictions on whether this will succeed. This is a weird time for the GOP. I called it the Yankee Crackup because the ruling coalition is at war with itself in ways we have not seen in a very long time. Boehner just got the hook by the party bosses for failing to deal with the House rebels. Now McConnell is under pressure for being himself. The recent polling suggests this latest Fiorina ploy is falling flat so maybe a revolt is really happening.

Irreconcilable Differences

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When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Viewing the after action reports on cable news and on-line, I can’t get past the fact that the chattering class remains thoroughly perplexed by what they are seeing. The script says they are supposed to coo over Farina and her poll numbers will soar. Then they will put on the serious face and tell us why one of the dwarfs is the only sober choice. The dwarf will win the nomination and they will all live happily ever after.

Instead, it’s as if someone has removed the CPU from the robot. Rather than working as expected, it is running amok, smashing up everything and threatening to kill the soft graceful people who inhabit the world of the chattering classes. The only thing missing from these reports on Trump is to have the chattering skulls huddling together as they read from the prompter.

Part of what we’re seeing is the chasm between the managerial class and the rest of us. The folks on TV or writing for the mainstream sites imagine they have a good bead on things. After all, they read each others blogs, books and columns. They talk to all the smart people that traipse through the studios. They even send foreign correspondents out to places like Cleveland and Denver to report on what’s happening out there, beyond the perimeter.

Another part is that they are programmed to think that politics is simply a fight between the two sides of the ruling class. Their bosses engage in ritualized combat over who gets to be in charge for a while. Instead of fielding champions to battle it out in the pit, they give each other tongue lashings on TV. The peanut gallery still gets to give the kill sign, but it really does not matter who wins as they largely agree on everything anyway.

That’s what is so confusing to them. Most of these people are simply unaware of the vast body of opinion outside the their bubble. They have this huge blind spot that the rest of us call reality. The chattering classes don’t get the Trump Effect because it’s not supposed to exist. In fact, it can’t exist. Contemplating it is on par with noodling over the existence of magical elves riding unicorns.

What we’re seeing on TV and the Interwebs is just the glitter path. There’s a huge chasm between the ruling class of American society and those over whom they rule. It’s not simply a disagreement over the direction of society. In many respects, the duty of the ruling class is to guide their subjects to the right policies. In a sane society, the people in charge are smarter and more knowledgeable so they better be more right than the masses.

No, the dispute today is over the nature of society and it is an irreconcilable dispute. The ruling class of today imagines a world that does not include a thriving, rambunctious middle class that participates in the decision making. They imagine a world that looks a lot like feudalism, where  the people are kept, like pets or farm animals. It’s a world that cannot accommodate the English speaking world’s idea of a citizen.

The choice before us is a simple one. Either the ruling class gets a new people or the people get a new ruling class. The ruling class, to their credit, have figured this out a long time ago. Mark Zuckerburglar is not spending millions to thwart reform efforts because he is a greed-head. It is an article of faith among the billionaire class that their survival depends on ending the concept of citizenship and that’s best achieved with open borders and mass migration.

The people may be finally catching on and that’s why patriotic parties are rising up in Europe while America is having Trump-a-paloosa. The people supporting these efforts are committed to working within their traditional processes. That means winning elections, passing new laws and reforming the ruling class. The people supporting Trump are not ready to cross the Rubicon and have a boiled rope party – yet.

Social reform works when the people in charge are driving the reform. There are no examples of successful reform movements that were not supported by some elements of the ruling elite. That’s important to keep in mind when analyzing what’s happening in the West. Similarly, most bottom-up reform movements have been crushed by the people in charge. The exceptions are those that ended in revolution.

The other night, one of the dwarfs quoted Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. “One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”  This was in reference to the civil disobedience over homosexual marriage.

The irony, of course, was lost on all of them. In that letter, King was making a point to the white ruling class of the South. That point was this. They could either negotiate with King and dismantle the legal discrimination or they could deal with the mobs in the streets. King was betting that they lacked the stomach to open fire on the mob, which meant they had only one way out.

Donald Trump is not Martin Luther King and there are no mobs in the street yet, but the situation facing the ruling elite is the same. The ruling class has been slowly diluting the value of citizenship by extending the benefits to millions of non-citizens. The hope was that sentimentality or fear would keep people from noticing. That’s no longer the case. People have noticed. From here, the ball can only roll down hill one way.

The Fall Reset

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Watching the debates, I wondered how many of the Trump people really cared much about any of it. My sense is the Trump vote is just the immigration patriots plus the red pill conservatives.The former only support Trump because of immigration. The latter support Trump because its fun to watch Judge Smails have a stroke over it. I’m obviously in the latter group.

Reading the news today, it’s pretty clear that the press has no idea how to talk about Trump. They prefer to talk about Farina and Carson, as they fit neatly into their respective boxes.There’s also a sense that Farina could cut into Trump’s support, but that’s a fundamental misreading of things. Some of the media is still hoping to revive one of the dwarfs, but that’s not a fun task at the moment.

Anyway, this debate is the start of the fall campaigning season. The next debate is the end of October, then another in the middle of November and another in the middle of December. They have a debate tentatively scheduled for January, but that’s the final stretch to the first batch of primaries. The next four weeks will make the field for the 2016 election season. So, where are we?

The Dead

George Pataki will not take the hint. They gave Gilmore the wrong date and time for the last debate so he would not clutter up the stage. If Pataki does not take the hint, he will wake up with Gilmore’s head in his bead. My bet is they find some way to exclude him from the next round or he just throws in the towel. Maybe he and Gilmore can open a B&B together.

Caitlyn Graham‘s disturbing performance is not going to go unnoticed by his friends in the party. Graham is a reliable vote for the establishment so they don’t want him going bonkers and maybe needing to seek professional help. He’s also 60 and can hold that seat for another 20 years so they will have the talk with him and he will drop out before the next debate.

Rick Santorum was thinking he could live off the land through the fall and then make a run at Iowa. His appeal is to the cultural conservatives who vote against abortion and the homos. The trouble is those voters are more vexed over the Latinos than the homos and Huckabee is splitting what’s left. The Huckster has the connections to the churches so look for Santorum to get the hook or drop out next month.

Watching Christie on the main stage, I saw a guy who knew it was over and this was probably his last day in the spotlight. He was loose and goofy, just enjoying himself. A lot of Yankee Conservatives like him, but there are too many guys striving for this vote. There’s no money to keep him going so my guess is he quits and opens a muffin shop on the Jersey Shore.

The B-List Establishment Men

Jindal has been playing an interesting game. He has spent nothing so he can hang around as long as likes. His talk radio work has been to defend the party, promote his brand of reform and trash Donald Trump. Everyone knows he is running for a cabinet spot so it’s not about polling with him. He wants to get one shot at the big stage and hope to catch people’s attention. With his coevals in the group faltering, it’s not a bad strategy if he can hang around for another month.

The collapse of Walker is a good example of how mass media has warped modern society. Walker is a dork with a bald spot so voters are turned off by him. He also has a nasally voice which reminds people of the IRS guy at their audit. He raised a lot of money and he showed a little spunk of late, but he has another month to figure out how to not be Ned Flanders or he’s a goner.

Kasich is another guy on thin ice. The party men all thought he was going to be a great alternative to Bush and encouraged him to join the, telling him he would be the VP for Bush at the worst. If Bush faltered, Kasich would the next man up and get the nomination. That whole plan is unraveling now as Bush sinks and takes the rest of the establishment men with him. Kasich has no money and he needs to start producing or he will be out of cash by Thanksgiving.

The A-List Establishment Men

Bush has such a huge war chest, he can hang around until 2020 regardless of his polling. His problem is he is the second choice of a lot of voters who are currently backing other establishment guys. Once the lesser lights drop away in the next couple of months, his numbers will rise. That’s the plan at this point. Play the rope-a-dope and get to January as the sole Establish Man left in the race. If the other choices are yahoos like Trump, so the theory goes, the voters will come home to Bush country.

I put Rubio in this category simply because I can’t think of another place to put him. He’s got enough money to stick around through the first wave of primaries. He is an establishment guy that the party really wants to succeed. His trouble is he The Beaver to Jeb’s Wally. Since Bush is not going anywhere, I just can’t see how Rubio breaks out and becomes the company man. But, he has nothing to lose so he will stick around hoping for a miracle.

Weirdos

I’ve wanted to like Rand Paul, but let’s face it, he is a weird little dude. As I said during the debate, Rand is that guy in the neighborhood everyone suspects when a kid goes missing. It’s not what he says or his position on things. It’s that his priority list seems to be completely out of kilter. He’s deeply passionate about weed laws, but seems indifferent to immigration or taxes. He’s why most men outgrow libertarianism a few years after college. He will stick around until New Hampshire and then quit to focus on his Senate run.

Huckabee is another strange man. I just can’t look at him without thinking about him “marrying” his wife a second time so he could game the gift ban, treating the bribes as wedding gifts. Like other grifters from the Ozarks, he is tenacious and resourceful. Gypsies would be awed by him so he will stick around hoping to win the Evangelical vote in Iowa and get himself into the race as the morality candidate.

It pains me to put Ted Cruz in the weirdo category, but where else does he fit? He’s hated by the party and he only appeals to fringe weirdos like you people. His game is to be there when Trump collapses to pick up his vote as the rebel leader. He has the money and smarts to keep that plan working through the end of the year. As long as he sticks close to Bush in the polls, he can plausibly raise money and get into the debates.

Outsiders

Ben Carson looked like he was stoned during the debate and it was so bad that even the rump-swabs in the conservative press had to admit it. Unlike Trump, Carson is a novelty without a purpose. He has no signature issue and no real reason to be running. When you think about it, Caron’s argument is he is simply the most moral man on stage and therefore he should win. I suspect his vote starts to decamp to Farina now that she is the new shiny penny on the scene.

Farina is a gold plated phony, but she is now seen as the dragon slayer by the party. Farina worked for John McCain for a short while so she has party connections. No one seriously thinks she can be the nominee, but she could steal enough of Carson’s vote to be treated as the hot new alternative to Trump for a while. Her job therefore is to be the dutiful straw, appealing to Trump voters, but pulling her punches against the establishment men.

Trump is the most interesting political story in my lifetime. He’s the anti-candidate. None of the normal rules apply as he is now the symbol of protest. What should scare the party is that 30% number. That’s a lot of people who are ready to blow the party up to spite the establishment. The thing to watch is the polls over the next two weeks. If Trump keeps climbing, it’s time for Rinse Penis to turn on the bat signal as the party is in deep trouble.

The Bull Mouse Party

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I’ve never been a fan of the “esoteric writing” concept. In theory, it sounds great, until you think it through. Free thinkers, constrained by the orthodoxy of their day, communicating to one another in a secret language. That way when the authorities show up to inspect their books, they find nothing that could get them time on the rack. Prisons around the world combat this problem so it is hardly black magic.

The reason I tend to be skeptical of the “philosophy between the lines” stuff is it opens the door for all sorts of mischief. If I’m a 15th century monk writing heretical thoughts using secret language, it can only work if the readers can decode my secret language. If some monk in another land a century later can decode my text, then my contemporaries could as well.

I realize there was a lot of it, but it was mostly just smart people speaking over the heads of the less savvy. That’s a different thing than what the esoteric writing guys claim, which is where the mischief comes into the mix. It’s one stop short of deconstructionism, from there you enter a world where words have no meaning.

The point of bringing this up is a related topic is the idea of the deep state. The idea that a secret club composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, the military, the academy, business, etc., who control the public institutions in various ways. It makes for great movie villains, but it contradicts observable reality.

That said, like minded people with common interests will work together. In government, relationships are what make the gears turn. A citizen can easily be stymied by the machine, even though he has pressed all the right buttons at exactly the right time. He calls his local congressman and magically, the machine springs to life and everything works like magic.

What happened is the congressman’s office has people who know people in all the nooks and crannies of the bureaucracy. You don’t work for a congressman unless you have contacts. Your job is either to raise money or make some part of the machine work when asked. If you are really good at either of those, you can go very far in government, further than elected office.

A guy who knows lots of people who know lost of people is Bill Kristol. He has worked the Acela Corridor his whole life. In addition to running the Weekly Standard, he has had stints in government and he knows lots of people who know lots of people. Bill Kristol is the quintessential establishment man. In Steve Sailer’s universe, Kristol has a shaved head and strokes a cat while plotting the course of the country.

The Weekly Standard has a new sugar daddy these days so they have been a little less neo-con and a little more con, but Bill Kristol remains the Pope of Neo-Conservatism. Given that the Bush Party is pretty much everything Bill Kristol’s father imagined, it’s worth paying attention to what Kristol has to say about things. He was the first Beltway man to mention Sarah Palin as a running mate, for example.

That’s what makes this interesting to me.

If frontrunner Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, one of the biggest names in the Republican Establishment, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, says he “doubts” he would support the Democrat in a general election but would “support getting someone good on the ballot as a third party candidate.”

“I doubt I’d support Donald. I doubt I’d support the Democrat,” Kristol told CNNMoney via email. “I think I’d support getting someone good on the ballot as a third party candidate.”

The old GOP Establishment hotness was demanding Trump pledge in writing to support the Republican nominee, even if it isn’t Trump. He has since done so.

It now looks as though the new GOP Establishment hotness is threatening to support a third party candidate if Trump wins — the same third party maneuver the Establishment loudly and repeatedly assured would mean a Hillary Clinton victory if Trump chose that route.

…but if the plotting and planning among the GOP Establishment is to run an Establishment candidate as a third party in the event of a Trump nomination victory, by their own shrill admissions over the summer, the Establishment is consciously prepared to flip over the entire boardgame and hand the White House to Democrats in 2016.

Unless of course they were all lying with their loud claims that a third party run would result in a sure-fire Republican loss. I don’t think so. All the polling shows that any breach between Trump and the Republican Party means — and by a safe margin — four years of President Hillary Clinton.

Either way, a very large part of the Republican base has already lost complete faith in the GOP Establishment. Kristol’s warning or trial balloon or whatever it is  will only further alienate the Party from its own base.

While Trump looks to expand the Republican Party, Kristol’s comments will appear to many like a childish threat to annihilate the Party if the GOP Elite don’t get their way.

Would a guy like Kristol work to create a third party if Trump is the nominee? Probably not. Getting on the ballot in every state would be impossible. That means co-opting existing third party tickets and that’s not easy either. It would require an enormous amount of cash and the emotional commitment from establishment men to burn down their fishing lodge in order to keep it out of the hands of the riff-raff.

What it probably means is the establishment would sit out the election. Trump (or Carson) would find party organizers at the state level unwilling to do much to help them get out the vote. Ironically, it would look a lot like what happened to the Muslim Brotherhood when they took over Egypt. Suddenly, the gears of the state stop spinning and no one who knew how to make them spin was available to get them spinning. That’s what would happen to Team Trump.

This would signal a show down where the Old Party tells the neophytes they can either get back in the traces or the Old Party is going off to become the Bull Mouse Party. Or, go to the Democrat Party and form what would be the Coastal Party. Put another way, there’s no room for compromise. If the revolting carry the day, the revolted will go nuclear.