Category Archives: Politics

Ben the Magic Negro

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Spike Lee popularized the term “Magic Negro”, 15 years ago as a way to describe the noble black guy character so popular in movies. Richard Brookhiser probably deserves credit for describing the concept in this piece from 2001. It may go back much further, but I have not found anything further back than last decade. Jim from Huckleberry Finn may be the first appearance of this character in American fiction.

I’ve taken to calling black people “sacred people” because of the widespread embrace of this literary concept of the magic negro. It’s a lot like how middle aged women will get into Native American spirituality or Chinese medicine. It’s a weird form of worship based on ethnicity, that is wholly untethered from the reality of ethnicity.

Anyway, this came to mind when I saw this post on National Review the other day. The author and many of the commenters are falling all over themselves to praise Ben Carson and his immigration plans.

With respect to “cutting off the goodies,” there are a number of “goodies” that are all but impossible to cut off. As I’ve noted, many illegal immigrant households receive welfare benefits through American-born children. There is no realistic way to withhold those entitlements. With respect to the illegal immigrant population residing in the U.S., Carson’s plan does seem far more practicable than Trump’s (which, it is worth noting, was not in the immigration plan released by his campaign). But it’s not clear whether Carson’s alternative will be amenable to conservative voters.

If you read Ben Carson’s book, he makes clear he is in favor of wholesale immigration. He also makes clear that he has not thought much about the issue so he just repeats the things he heard on TV because they sound nice. His repeated call for a guest worker program, suggest he does not know there are two dozen guest worker programs in place right now.

Carson’s immigration statements are mostly gibberish. In fact, his positions on everything make little sense. He claims blacks are arrested for driving while black and largely agrees with the claims about police mistreatment of blacks. This is the sort of stuff you see on TV, not the sort of stuff you see when looking up the facts. In other words, Be Carson is not very well informed.

No one dares say this, of course, because that would be bad, very bad. In fact, not gushing over the man is very bad too. The only appropriate response to Ben Carson is to compete with everyone else complimenting him on his wonderfulness. Conventional conservatives are going through what Progressives went through eight years ago. They think they have found their Black Jesus.

In fairness to Carson, I don’t think he is playing it that way, but he is riding the wave for now. He does strike me as a decent man with good intentions. I have no idea if he is really as nice as he appears on TV, but I have found nothing to suggest otherwise. By now someone would have come forward if Carson had a dark side or a bunch of skeletons in his closet.

None of which changes the fact that he is where he is because he is a black guy being nice to conservatives. If he were an Irish guy with the same resume and presentation, he would be this guy or this guy. No one would have any reason to know him and friends would assume he has lost his marbles. But, he is a sacred person and that means he gets to be on the big stage running for president.

Unintentionally, Carson is proving a point the revolting have been making for a while now. That is, Conservative Inc.is just the dull-witted little brother of the Progressives, tagging along behind them, imitating whatever they do. The Left got their magic negro in 2008 and the Right gets their magic negro in 2016. The fact that neither man has any business being in the White House is off-limits because only bad thinkers say such things.

The shame of it is that Carson is a great story, regardless of his race. He should be running for Senate right now in Maryland. Having a smart guy who knows about the medical system in America, serving in the Senate would be good for the country. Baltimore City, where he lives, is in need of a mayor and in need of a sober sensible man to address that city’s troubles. Carson could probably do a lot of good in either of those roles.

Instead, he has been carried up on multicultural thermals purely for the pleasure of the chattering classes looking for grace on the cheap. Inevitably, they will tire of him and he will be replaced by some other novelty. Multiculturalism is the B-side of racism, in that it addresses the same emotional itch. The object in both cases is stripped of their humanity and they become nothing but a means to an end.

We’re Revolting

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The other day, C-list conservative chat-bot Quin Hillyer made a comment in National Review Online stating that the publication has been on the forefront of immigration restriction. He made it in the comments of his article in which he tries to ball-gargle Bobby Jindal. Hillyer is one of those guys who hangs around the local Fox studio on weekends, on the off chance Fox needs a talking head for one of their segments, so there’s no reason to pay attention to him.

What got my attention though was the assertion that NR has been anything but stone silent on the issue of immigration. They used to run Steyn and Derbyshire, who have written eloquently on the details of the topic. Mark Krikorian is given space in their on-line blog to post immigration numbers. Otherwise, the official position of the magazine has been to give it a good leaving alone.

John Derbyshire has often talked about editorial meetings at NR when he was employed there. He was the only person to ever raise the topic and when he did, everyone would slide their chairs away from him, like he had just farted. To be seen sitting next to a bad thinker can only be remedied by looking horribly uncomfortable whilst doing it. That way, the other good thinkers know you are a good thinker just stuck in the same room with a bad thinker.

It’s why I call it the “I” word. Immigration has been sacralized on the Right as a magic talisman that wards off the charge of racism. After all, how can you call these good thinkers racist when they are forever championing the people of the world to come to America? Open borders has become the anti-venom that lets them tangle with the Progressive snake handlers on the chat shows and on-line.

You see that in this Jonah Goldberg column from last week.

If I sound dismayed, it’s only because I am. Conservatives have spent more than 60 years arguing that ideas and character matter. That is the conservative movement I joined and dedicated my professional life to. And now, in a moment of passion, many of my comrades-in-arms are throwing it all away in a fit of pique. Because “Trump fights!”

That’s a very revealing comment. You note there’s no mention of winning. The point of political movements is to win political fights and move the polices and presumably the country, closer to what the movement imagines is best. What Jonah reveals, unintentionally I suspect, is that his game and the that of his coevals does not include winning, at least not winning political fights.

Instead it is an intellectual and spiritual exercise. As the Left runs up and down the field, the Right is supposed to stand aside, congratulating themselves on being men of ideas and character, unlike the the uncouth lefties winning all the battles. In other words, the end game of conservatism, according to Goldberg, is to be a good sport and losing with dignity. Conservatism is a form of assisted suicide where the adherent accepts defeat as a condition of joining the movement.

Of course, what radiates from these columns is the class issue. Jonah Goldberg, despite being a big hulking guy, spent his youth in NYC in fear of the street toughs. Those crude sounding bullies of his youth have suddenly risen up in the form of Donald Trump, threatening to take his lunch money away all over again. The refined men of taste who thought they outran the reality of the street are horrified at the prospect of a proletarian bully moving in on their movement.

All of this reminds me of the scene from Brave Heart where Longshanks confronts his feminine son and his “assistant” after Wallace sacked York.

The Professional Right has a revolt on their hands because they have failed. Their response to the revolt has been a hissy fit that confirms, in the minds of the revolting, that they are right to replace these men of no action. It’s not that the replacement is better or more likely to win. The first step in every revolution is to first exact revenge on those responsible for the current conditions.

That’s why we are revolting.

The Trump Effect

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When Donald Trump started making noises about running for president, I remember thinking, well, nothing. I have never been a Trump fan. I’ve had no reason to not like him, but I’m not a consumer of popular culture. Therefore, I never had need to come down one way or the other on Trump.

My sense was that he was like every other successful pitchman I’ve known. A harmless phony that is good at making people feel good about giving them money. In the case of Trump, he is a pitchman for himself and his brand, which helps sell real estate.  Nothing wrong with it, but nothing for me to care much about one way or the other.

When Trump started talking about immigration, I cringed a little. Trump has never struck me as a deep thinker so having him lead the charge on an issue of this magnitude struck me as a bad idea. I know a lot about it so I have a certain bias toward people who share my level of knowledge on the subject.

The reaction from elites, however, changed my mind. The pearl-clutching and fainting on all sides of the ruling elite has been stunning and enlightening. I’m not alone in this. My sense is much of Trump’s support is the result of this, a result of the Trump Effect.

The most obvious example of this, one I have written about a few times, is Kevin Williamson at National Review On-Line. He has been driven to madness over Trump, writing a dozen columns calling Trump everything from an ape to a Nazi. National Review finally put an end to it, apparently, as he is back to writing about unicorns and flying carpets.

I used to enjoy his articles, but his bizarre Trump columns, and to a lesser extent the strange Sanders columns, had me wondering about his sanity. Williamson was not alone; he was just the guy leading the parade. All of the allegedly conservative cognoscenti were making unhinged ad hominem attacks on Trump in what looked like a coordinated assault.

People notice things and a lot of people noticed that the Professional Right was treating Trump like a black guy at a Newport yacht club. Trump was Rodney Dangerfield and the members of the Professional Right were taking turns being Judge Smails. It was country club snobbery, not thoughtful and respectful criticism.

The other thing people noticed was that the hooting and bellowing sounded just like what they heard last decade from the Left with regards to George Bush. Kevin Williamson called Trump a “witless ape” and that sounded a lot like when the fever swamp types called Bush a chimp.

Seeing the blonde harpy from Fox prattle on about the “war on women” did more for Trump’s candidacy than anything else, I suspect, because of the images it conjured of bygone battles with the Left. She sounded like a cast member from MSNBC, ranting about Dick Cheney and the Haliburton Hurricane Machine destroying New Orleans.

The galling aspect of the Cult’s dismissal of Bush was the condescension. It was the beautiful people versus the normals. It was not George Bush they were dismissing, but his voters and their issues.The Left regularly made sport of the rubes and hicks they blamed for George Bush.

We’re seeing the same thing here with the Professional Right and Trump. The sneering dismissals don’t even bother to discuss immigration, the plight of the middle-class or the war on traditional culture. Our betters will not stoop to that level. It’s just sneering condescension.

There’s an aspect of the Trump Effect that makes it different from the reactionary support of George Bush by many middle Americans last decade. It is who is doing the hooting and to whom they are hooting it.

Normal middle Americans who watch Fox News, for example, are horrified to learn that the genteel types on their television think they are stupid prols that better know their place – or else. Jonah Goldberg thinks the listeners of Rush Limbaugh are not worth his time as they are insignificant bugs.

The biggest criticism — in terms of quantity, not quality — is that I am a RINO squish faker fraud no-goodnik lib sucking at the teat of the establishment blah blah and blah. These usually take the form of angry tweets and e-mails. So I’ll fold my response to this silliness into my responses to the longer-form stuff. One of the most popular rejoinders comes from the Conservative Treehouse, a site I’ve liked in the past. But if it weren’t for the fact that Rush Limbaugh enthusiastically plugged it on air, I’m not sure it would merit much of a response.

A 2,000-word “Open Letter to Jonah Goldberg,” written by someone named “Sundance,” it devotes barely a sentence to responding to anything I actually wrote. Nor does the author really defend Donald Trump — or his supporters — from my criticisms. Instead it is a long and somewhat splenetic indictment of the “establishment.” Sundance writes: “The challenging aspect to your expressed opinion, and perhaps why there is a chasm between us, is you appear to stand in defense of a Washington DC conservatism that no longer exists.” He then proceeds to conflate the GOP’s record with “Washington conservatism” as if they are synonymous.

This strikes me as projection and deflection and nothing more. The whole thing is a non sequitur masquerading as a rejoinder. He lays down a tediously long list of questions

The sneering is impossible to miss. Jonah’s view of himself is as a man of the sophisticated class. His critic is a man of the servant class. The snotty reply is not intended to correct or even educate the critic. It is a dismissal.

Goldberg’s audience in that piece is not the critic or the critic’s readers. The audience is his coevals in the chattering classes, who have locked arms in defense of their class against the Trumpian onslaught.

That’s the Trump Effect.

What offends the tender sensibilities of Jonah Goldberg is not the issues Trump has championed. To Jonah, those are not to be taken seriously. What offends Jonah is that Trump is a low-class prol rallying the field hands in a revolt against the master and his house boys. If you look carefully at Fox, you can see George Will and Charles Krauthammer clutching at their pearls, muttering “how dare he!” whenever Trump is the topic.

I don’t think the people supporting Trump think of him as their champion. My guess is most would rather vote for someone less caustic and improvisational.But, it’s not really about Trump and I think they know it. Trump is a means to an end, they hope.

Middle Americans are looking through the windows of the farmhouse and seeing Progressives and Conservatives sitting together eating and drinking together as one. They cannot tell the Conservatives from the Liberals because their faces seem to be the same and they are saying the same things.

There was the same hearty cheering as before, and the mugs were emptied to the dregs. But as the animals outside gazed at the scene, it seemed to them that some strange thing was happening. What was it that had altered in the faces of the pigs? Clover’s old dim eyes flitted from one face to another. Some of them had five chins, some had four, some had three. But what was it that seemed to be melting and changing? Then, the applause having come to an end, the company took up their cards and continued the game that had been interrupted, and the animals crept silently away.

The Yankee Crackup

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Back in the 80’s, Reagan was hailed as a brilliant politician for winning over working and middle-class ethnics, the so-called Reagan Democrats. The Archie Bunkers who voted Democrat out of instinct suddenly switched parties and voted Republican. Only old timers talk about the Catholic vote or white ethnics anymore, but within living memory, they existed and mattered.

That was a big development primarily because it signaled a radical change in the party coalitions. The old Democrat coalition of working class northern whites, southern whites, blacks and the old Yankee ruling elite was no more. The South was going Republican and the white working class appeared to be following suit. It’s why so many swing state Democrat pols changed sides. They followed their voters to the new party.

Something happened in the 1990’s that arrested what should have been a long running ruling majority coalition. The old Yankee elites started jumping to the GOP side, joining the Rockefeller Republicans to take control of the party. The party of Reagan became the party of Bush.They made all the noises the Reagan coalition expected, but they were Bush men through and through. Just look at the House leadership and you don’t see a bunch of Evangelical Southerners.

Where we have been for the last two decades is a country with a ruling class largely based in the traditionally dominant region of the nation, the Northeast. The areas settled by old Yankees, along with the Midland areas dominate both parties and they take turns cobbling together ruling majorities from the other bits of the country. The Yankee-Midland coalition came out in force for Obama, while the Midland-Southern coalition came out strong in the midterms. The reverse occurred in the Bush years.

What seems to be happening is the Yankee-Midland coalition is blowing apart. I thought about this while in Massachusetts recently. In a Waltham restaurant, the TV’s started showing Trump’s visit to Norwood Mass. The whole place turned its attention to the show. I heard more than a few people cheering Trump. Friends I was with were all very interested in the Trump phenomenon.

That does not make much sense as we are given to believe that it is those xenophobic racists in the Deep South propelling his campaign. Just the other day, National Review ran a piece about how Trump is George Wallace. To Southerners, George Wallace no longer resonates. Most people in the South don’t remember the guy, probably confusing him with the black comic.

To political types from the Northeast, George Wallace is right up their with Bull Connor and the Confederate Flag. He’s a symbol of bad whites throughout time and place. In other words, this comparison is not for the benefit or detriment of bad whites. It is a one group of good whites signalling to other good whites that they are playing with fire. The hysterical response by Conservative Inc to Trump is not because he is a fringe xenophobe. It’s because he speaks for a wing of the coalition that appears to be going heretic.

Before Trump came along, there were rumblings from the other side of the Conservative ruling junta that things were not well. Reform Conservatives are warmed over Rockefeller Republicans from the pre-Reagan era. They have been agitating for a new direction where they shed the yahoos, with their boom-sticks, sky gods and limited government nonsense. They see Trump as a chance to wrench control of the movement and the GOP.

The thing that never gets discussed is this. Trump is a New Yorker. He has lived his life in a city that is majority non-white. Lumping him in with the racist crackers from the south is laughable. When he speaks, lots of regular people in the northeast hear one of their own. In contrast to the acrylic robots they see running both parties, Trump is a regular guy, just with a few billion dollars and a super model wife. He’s a guy a large number of people look up to as a good example.

To extend this out further, the inspiration for Trump on immigration is none other than Ann Coulter, a WASP princess from Connecticut. She was enthusiastic about Romney, simply because he was making the right noises on immigration. The great undiscussed truth of modern times is it is Yankee New England that is the most hostile to immigration. They are fine with the Hindu chemist or the Syrian engineer, but they have zero interest in the little brown guys you see loitering at the local Home Depot.

It’s hard to know how this plays out. The action has been on the GOP side, but the Democrats are having a nervous breakdown of their own. The old Yankee strongholds are experiencing another exodus, similar to what happened in the late 70’s and 80’s. Taxes are an easy culprit, but it could be culture. The middle class in these areas have simply grown disgusted with their ruling elites, the same ones they are revolting against today by supporting Sanders and Trump.

Maybe it something else, but it appears Yankeedom is heading for a crackup and taking the political class with them.

Extreme Radicals Of The Most Extreme Kind

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Heather Digby Parton is one of those low-watt moonbats we saw popping up on our screens regularly in the last decade, when the great tide of Progressive lunacy was reaching its high. Sites like Kos, Media Matters and Salon were home to these folks, organizing conferences and promoting their hooting and bellowing. Together, they formed the deranged choir that backed the post-modern sermons of Barak Obama.

According to Mx. Parton, she has traveled her whole life as an army brat. My bet is the phrase “citizen of the world” crosses her lips quite often. I’d also bet she still talks about how much she hated her parents. Modern Progressivism is mostly just mild individual psychosis scaled up to a mass movement.

Anyway, she has an hysterical rant in Salon telling her coreligionists they must rally to thwart the looming evil that is Ben Carson.

But what if neither Trump nor Carson are popular because of their personalities? What if the beltway consensus that Trump’s success isn’t based upon issues or ideology is wrong and voters are actually attracted to his crazy ideas on the merits? The fact that Carson is closing on him certainly lends credibility to that possibility, because despite his mild-mannered persona, Carson’s ideas are even more extreme than Trump’s.

The two top contenders for the Republican nomination have nothing in common in terms of style, but among a very big field they are the two with the most radical agendas, and, as Salon’s Simon Maloy pointed out recently, a common disdain for what they term “political correctness.” As uncomfortable as it may be to think about, maybe Republican voters aren’t just looking for someone to express their rage. Maybe they really are extremists.

Most conservatives have misunderstood this weird use of the word “extremist” by Progressives. The assumption is that these people are far out on the fringe such that normal looks radical to them. In reality they are not speaking to the bad whites. They are speaking to their alternatives in the Yankee Coalition. By attaching an idea to the bad whites, they hope to scare the more reticent members of the Yankee Coalition.

I think everyone is familiar with Trump’s agenda. For starters he’s going to round up and deport all the undocumented immigrants, build a wall on the border with a beautiful door and make Mexico pay for it, start trade wars with China and Japan, and when it comes to ISIS he has said:

“They have great money because they have oil. Every place where they have oil I would knock the hell out of them. I would knock out the source of their wealth, the primary sources of their wealth, which is oil. And in order to do that, you would have to put boots on the ground. I would knock the hell out of them but I’d put a ring around it and I’d take the oil for our country.”

Carson’s ideas are no less out in right field: He would use drones on the border to blow up caves where he believes immigrants are hiding. He believes that Planned Parenthood was created to commit genocide on African Americans. He has said that Obamacare is the worst thing to happen since slavery. And he believes that prohibitions against torture and war crimes are P.C. foolishness:

“Our military needs to know that they’re not going be prosecuted when they come back, because somebody has said, ‘You did something that was politically incorrect. There is no such thing as a politically correct war. We need to grow up, we need to mature. If you’re gonna have rules for war, you should just have a rule that says no war. Other than that, we have to win. Our life depends on it.”
So, the two most popular candidates in the Republican race for president are as different as can be when in comes to personality and style. One is a monumental blowhard billionaire and the other is a diffident brain surgeon.  But it’s not the way Trump and Carson speak or the style with which they present themselves that has the base so dazzled. These voters agree with the substance of what these two are saying. And they are both certifiable extremists. Maybe it’s time for the political establishment to reconsider their view that this phenomenon doesn’t amount to anything more than a political tantrum and take these people seriously.

Putting aside the characterization of the positions, what you see here is a not a message to the other loonies on the Left. This is the sort of thing your crazy liberal sister is going to be saying at Thanksgiving. “Have you heard what Carson said about abortion? Only Bible-thumping crazies believe that sort of stuff. Surely you don’t agree with those people.”

There’s a lot of denial going in in the ruling coalition. On the Left, they have been in the pumpkin patch for seven years now and they have little to show for it. They have to look at the Hillary – Sanders thing and be terrified. Worse yet, they assumed old friend Jeb Bush was going to cruise to victory and now that’s looking grim.

On the other side of the coalition, the GOP establishment similarly thought this was going to be a fun walk to victory. Even if their guy (Jeb Bush) was not going to fly, they had Kasich, Rubio and Walker in reserve. Now that none of these guys can draw flies and some of them are objects of hostility by voters, they don’t know what to do. Panic is setting on on both sides of the Yankee Coalition.

Post-Country Greece

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The Greek crisis of the summer made plain that the future is not intended to include the public having a say in the management of their affairs. The Greeks went to the polls, first to back an anti-austerity party and then to reject the austerity plan proposed to them by Europe. The result was a systematic collapsing of their economy by Europe until Tsipras capitulated.

Whether or not it makes sense for the Greeks to default or go along with the latest bailout is debatable. I’m firmly in the camp that says we invented bankruptcy for a reason, but it’s not really what’s important to me. What matters is who decides. When the people, through their traditional institutions, decide what’s best for them, we have sovereignty. When decisions are made by an outside force, regardless of makeup, you have subjugation.

Greece is now just a territory of Europe where the people insist on using a funny alphabet, but are otherwise subjects of the Euro ruling elite.

That’s fine and maybe it is for the best. Greeks have never got the hang of the country thing. They had a decent run of city-states a long time ago, but that was when Greeks had red hair and blue eyes. The more swarthy version of the Greeks seem to have trouble organizing much of anything.

The end of countries, however, is not without other consequences. One is that we now need new labels, as seen in this Telegraph story on the looming Greek elections.

Greek voters are set to punish the government of prime minister Alexis Tsipras after polls show his hard-Left Syriza party is on course for a shock defeat in a general election later this month.
Mr Tsipras, who called a snap vote on August 20, has seen his party’s comfortable 15 point lead evaporate in just six weeks, putting the centre-right New Democracy in pole position to lead Greece’s fifth government in just four years.The ascendant conservatives – who support the bail-out and will keep the country in the euro at all costs – edged ahead of Syriza for the first time since May 2014 in two polls this week.
A survey carried out by Metron analysis put ND in the lead with 24pc of the vote, compared to 23.4pc for the incumbent Leftists. A previous poll for Mega TV put them on course for 25.3pc of the vote ahead of Syriza’s 25pc.With opposition forces gathering steam, Mr Tsipras is facing a fierce popular backlash having capitulated to onerous bail-out conditions to keep the country in the euro for the next three years.

However, pre-election polls suggest no single party will win enough support to form a majority government after the September 20 ballot.

Analysts now expect the pro bail-out conservatives, who oversaw the last international rescue and dominated Greek politics before Syriza’s landmark election in January, to form a more stable coalition, dramatically reducing the risks of a future eurozone exit.

Smaller pro-euro forces such as Socialists PASOK and the centrist To Potami party are also more inclined to join a unity coalition headed by ND’s interim leader Evangelos Meimarakis, rather than the tainted Mr Tsipras.

The single biggest issue in Greek politics is membership in the Euro, followed by the invasion by Arabs, who are promising to destroy what’s left of Greece on their way to Germany. Yet, the socialist and the conservative are in lock step on both issues. The “hard left” is the outsider, because they signed off on the same bailout as the Right and Left support.

How does this make any sense?

It does not and maybe that’s the point. If elections are now rituals for the hoi polloi to blow off steam, what difference does it make that the commies are in league with anarcho-capitalists? Democracy is not just another sporting event in Greece. You buy a team jersey, got somewhere to drink outside and cheer for the guys wearing your jersey. When it’s over, you sing some songs, get drunk and fall asleep.

Mitt Romney in a Skirt

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The other day CNN changed their rules for the upcoming debate such that Carly Fiorina can be at the adult table this time. To no one’s surprise the media was giddy over the prospect. Rich Lowry was out in his cheerleader outfit, waving the Fiorina pom-poms. David French had a piece up telling us that Fiorina is the next Margaret Thatcher. My hunch is Conservative Inc. is convinced she can derail Trump and maybe fool his voters into supporting her.

It’s not a terrible idea as GOP voters are like everyone else these days. They are marinated in the proselytizing of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. White men are bad. Women and minorities are good. That means the dream candidate for many voters is a one-legged lesbian Elvis impersonator of color. All Florina has to do is wave around a little American flag and make the right noises about abortion and she’s in double digits.

Fiorina is in many ways emblematic of what’s gone wrong with the GOP. The party is now seen as a craven insider party willing to make whatever cynical deals it needs to make in order to please the donor base. The reason Trump and to a lesser degree Carson are polling so well is they don’t have the stink of McConnell and Boehner on them. The party’s media arm is therefore pumping air into Fiorina ‘s tires thinking that will satisfy the hoi polloi.

That may not be totally fair to Fiorina, but the fact is she is where she is strictly because she lacks a penis and gave a lot of money to Republicans in the past. If she had a penis, she is Brian Russell. Having a moderately successful corporate career is simply not enough to run for president and get more than a few votes. Her resume says Congress, not president.

Of course, that resume is not exactly sterling either. She finished her corporate career as CEO of HP and was the anti-Steve Jobs, because she took a strong brand and ran it into the ground. Under her watch, HP lost half its share price and shed thousands of jobs trying to stem the bleeding. Her tenure is considered one of the biggest fiascoes in Silicon Valley history. HP share holders held parties after she was fired and the stock jumped 10% that day.

She was also a disaster at her previous stop. Lucent does not get much attention when people talk about Fiorina’s resume, but it is probably the most telling part of her story. She swung big deals that looked great on paper, but ended up saddling the company with massive debts that eventually killed the firm. Like everything else in the go-go Clinton years, Lucent was a big bust-out that skimmed billions from suckers through inflated stock prices.

In other places, I’ve called Fiorina the original Ellen Pao and the more I think about it the more I like it. In the 80’s, as the Boomers took over businesses, this weird creature appeared on the scene – the female executive. Every company wanted the power girl on their brochure and in their executive suites. Most were probably qualified, but a lot rode the warm upward currents of affirmative action to positions for which they were unqualified.

Putting that aside, assuming I’m just a bad thinker, she has run for office in the past. In 2010 she took on the rapidly decaying Barbara Boxer, who is as popular as rectal cancer in California. That was a great year for Republicans and a moderate like Fiorina running against an old bag should have been a race. Instead Fiorina ran a comically bad campaign and lost by double digits.

The thing about that race is it looked just like the 1994 Senate race in Massachusetts where Mitt Romney took on Ted Kennedy. Fat boy was on the ropes as the locals were ready for a change. His drunken antics were even embarrassing to Mass voters and Romney was a modern, moderate Republican in the old Yankee tradition. Plus, 1994 was shaping up to be a monster year for the GOP.

I was in a restaurant in Saugus Mass the night of the big debate. It seemed like everyone got up and went into the bar to see Fat Boy finally get taken down. Teddy was sober and played the dead relative card. Mitt folded and he looked scared. Everyone left the bar and went back to their tables. It was over and everyone knew it. Romney saw his polls collapsed and he was crushed in the election.

That should have been the end of it for Mitt, but he was rich and determined. He retooled and won the governorship. Then he retooled again to run for president. All that retooling left a guy who was willing to say anything to win. Even by the standards of politics, Mitt Romney was a gold plated phony. You see the same pattern with Fiorina, except she is skipping the run for governor. But, she’s still Mitt Romney is a skirt.

Class Traitor

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One of the things I’ve often noted is that the above the waterline social commenters scan the fringe for ideas, without ever mentioning the fringe people they were farming for ideas. The most obvious example is how good thinkers on the Right borrow from Steve Sailer whenever they need to write something smart about education or crime. I don’t recall seeing anything that smacks of plagiarism, but I’ve seen lots of stuff that was “inspired by” Sailer.

Anyway, I saw this in my twitter feed and immediately thought of myself and Sailer. I’ve been making the class traitor argument for a while with regards to Trump and Ted Cruz. I don’t think that’s particularly clever of me as it seem obvious. This sense of betrayal was at play with Bush and his overt Christianity. I know Sailer has made the same argument with regards to Trump and it looks like he saw the same story as he has posted about it.

Ross Douthat plays an odd role in the conservative ecosystem. His job, as far as I can tell, is to let the other chattering skulls know what fringe ideas are OK to appropriate without risking the wrath of the Cult. I don’t think it is intentional, more like serendipity. He writes for the NYTimes and he is aware of the alternative writers so he has become a gatekeeper for mainstream conservatives. He also seems to get that and he takes it seriously, but maybe I’m reading too much into it.

This bit got my attention:

This does not mean the two parties are interchangeable, a Republicrat conspiracy against the public. A clash between powerful elites can still be a very real clash, as recent Supreme Court decisions attest.

Nor does it mean that elites always get their way, even where there is bipartisan agreement. If they did, the Simpson-Bowles entitlement plan and comprehensive immigration reform would have passed many years ago.

But it does mean certain ideologies and worldviews get marginalized in national political debate. The libertarian who wants to cut defense spending, the anti-abortion voter who favors a bigger welfare state, the immigration skeptic who wants to keep Social Security exactly as it is … all these voters and many others choose the lesser of two evils every November, because neither party’s leadership has any interest in representing their entire worldview.

Guys like Douthat venture to the fringes of the media reservation, but they never wander far from the perimeter. They can’t as that inevitably means they get proscribed and sent to Sailer’s basement. They fear that more than anything because there’s no rehabilitation for managerial class heretics. Once you turn on your own, they lead you to the edge of the compound and slam the gates behind you. You’re effectively dead.

In this case, it means repeating the company line about there being real differences between the parties. The reality is our parties are just two versions of the consensus of the ruling elite The rich give to both parties equally. More important, they fund the media wings of both parties. Ironically, Trump has talked about this when asked about his political contributions. He buys pols from both parties just to be prudent.

At the end, Douthat repeats something I’ve been writing about here for a while making me think he is a reader.

and he’s coming at all these issues, crucially, from a vantage point of privilege — which his critics keep highlighting as though it discredits him, when in reality it lends his populism a deeper credibility. He’s the Acela Corridor billionaire (albeit tackier than most) who promises to reveal what the elites are really up to, the crony capitalist who can tell you just how corrupt D.C. really is, the financier who’ll tell you that high finance can afford higher taxes. It’s precisely because he isn’t a blue collar outsider that he may seem like a credible change agent: Because he knows Wall Street, and because he doesn’t need its money to campaign, it seems like he could actually fight his fellow elites and win.

He won’t, of course, but it matters a great deal how he loses. In a healthy two-party system, the G.O.P. would treat Trump’s strange success as evidence that the party’s basic orientation may need to change substantially, so that it looks less like a tool of moneyed interests and more like a vehicle for middle American discontent.

In an unhealthy system, the kind I suspect we inhabit, the Republicans will find a way to crush Trump without adapting to his message. In which case the pressure the Donald has tapped will continue to build — and when it bursts, the G.O.P. as we know it may go with it.

Since the founding, America’s party system has been two parties representing broad cultural and economic coalitions. The two parties jostle over building the majority coalition, with spells of Yankeedom trying to impose its communitarian culture on the rest of he country. Otherwise, the parties are coalitions representing the broad political consensus, one left of center and one right of center, but both very close to the center.

What’s happened in the last 25 years is something new in that one party has become an ideological party and both parties now represent the interests of the global elite. This works well for the Democrats because they have always been about the top and bottom versus the middle. Now they are just an explicitly ideological version of that old leftist strategy, financed by the super rich, buying grace on the cheap.

The Republicans are trying to figure out how to exist in this new arrangement. Their success in 2010 and 2014 is entirely due to the middle class having no alternative. That’s why the big fight is happening on that side. The American middle class is sensibly rejecting the dreary technocrats offered up by the party, giving Trump the opportunity to be the leader of a revolt that I doubt he understands.

There’s a lot wrong with his piece, but the fact is he has green lighted a discussion of the contextual issues regarding the Trump phenomenon. So far “conservative” writers have been limited to calling Trump a Nazi over and over because they were afraid to mention the dreary awfulness of the GOP. My guess is we will see discussion of this reality in the media.

Arx-holes

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Way back during L’affaire Cecil, I was struck by something I saw from friends and foes and that is they set their opinion based on the opinion of others, rather than their own reading of things. John Derbyshire did a few segments on the issue in his broadcasts. The “reaction” from the right was anticipatory as Progressives were slow out of the gate. Once the SJW’s joined the party, there was an echo reaction on the Right. Derb’s revisiting the topic two weeks after his initial reaction is a good example.

My reaction to the reaction was this post where I sort of laid out my views on the lion murderer. I still got a few responses pointing out that I was on the side of the fat angry lesbians who stalk bad thinkers on-line. Some people simply can’t find themselves on the same side of an issue with the black hats, not matter what the facts may dictate.

I’ve been thinking about that for a while now. There’s something about it that bugs me. It’s the same vibe I get when reading the neo-reactionary guys. Just the term “neo-reactionary” bugs me. The term “reactionary” has been an epithet used by the Left since the 18th century. It implies an irrational response, not a logical one and certainly not a dispassionate one.

My opinion on the lion murderer was neither passionate nor irrational. It certainly was not reactionary as I held those same opinions before I ever heard of the lion murderer or his victim. If someone had asked me ten years ago about what I thought about big game hunting, I’d have said most of the same things. I would have said the same thing about a theoretical someone who boasted of killing animals in order to scandalize people. In other words, I came to those opinions without regard to who was on which side.

I have no interest in re-litigating the Cecil issue, as the cool kids would say. It’s just a handy reference point. I’m an anti-reactionary. By that I mean my opinions about the world are independent of alternative views. I think what I think about the Cult of Modern Liberalism based on what I know about it and what I know about human nature. If the Cult of Modern Liberalism did not exist, I’d still hold the same opinions about humanity.

The fundamental flaw of the modern Right, and certainly of the neo-reactionaries, is to give the Cult of Modern Liberalism what amounts to a heckler’s veto over their mental landscape. If the Left is deciding where the Overton Window is, for example, they control the debate. Any reaction must take place within that window and that’s a loser on every level.

You see this with the recent spree shootings. The deranged white kid shoots up a black church and the entire debate is about whether or not it is emblematic of white racism. A black lunatic shoots a couple of white coworkers, and the debate is about whether racism drove him to do it. Ideologies built on a reaction to the Left are forever locked into debating issues chosen by the left on the terms of the Left.

It’s why the Left has marched steadily through the culture for the last fifty years. They have been handed the agenda, knowing their opposition will only react to whatever they are doing. The most obvious example of that is the Muslim Wars in the Bush Years. The Left rallied its anti-war elements, locking the Conservatives into a pro-war position that was irrational and self-defeating.

The anti-reactionary alternative is on display with Trump in the GOP primary. For all his faults, Trump is his own man, and he has his own opinions about how to do things. In contrast, the 17 other candidates have built their entire political resumes in opposition to the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Their positions, career choices and priorities are all about what they think the Left will think of them. They are not men; they are shadows.

It’s not an alpha male versus beta male thing, although that’s a related topic. What plagues the modern Right is that they have no reason to exist other than as the Left’s nagging old lady. Some new fad sweeps the fever swamps of the Left and conservatives are right there to lecture everyone about the foolishness of it. That’s fine, but Osama bin Laden was right people. Given the choice between the strong horse and the weak horse, people pick the strong horse. Given the choice between the cad and his nagging old lady, people take the cad.

We live at an unusual crossroads culturally. The Left’s internal contradictions may very well be tearing it to pieces. Its solution to being at odds with human nature is a cultivated paranoia that encourages escalating internal warfare. This time black women take the mic away from Bernie Sanders. The next time they take away Bernie. A mass movement based on revenge has to end in disaster.

The logical alternative, however, is not an alternative. The Modern Right defines itself in opposition to the Left. As the Left collapses, it will take all its reactionary dance partners with it. What will fill the void will be the strongest anti-reactionary movement left standing. Whether that is the Gucci populism of Donald Trump or something else, I don’t know, but something will fill the void.

The Crushing Reality of Mathematics

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A fun book to read, if you have a thick skin, is called The Big Questions by a libertarian crackpot named Steve Landsburg. Somewhere in the book he makes the excellent point that mathematics is universal and immutable. At the dawn of time, two plus two equaled four for all values of two. It’s never changed and will never change, even if the universe collapses into an infinitely dense mass.

If you are looking for a nice shorthand definition of reality, mathematics is a good choice. Consequently, a good definition of “crisis” is when beliefs violently realign with mathematics. The Greek crisis is about the number of Euros they owe to creditors is bigger than the number of Euros they have in their accounts.

To paraphrase Philip K. Dick, math is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. Like reality, people can only take so much math, so we spend a lot of time pretending it is negotiable. The most obvious example is the American pension system. Every week we see stories like this one about how cities and towns are being crushed by pension debts.

There are three bits of math to consider here. One is the fact that you can only tax people so much before they revolt. They may revolt by tax avoidance, or they may hang their politicians, but there’s a point where they will not pay any more in taxes. That means every government has a cap on what it can collect from its subjects.

The second bit of math is that people expect certain minimum things from their rulers. Towns have to keep the streets clean, catch criminals, runs schools, etc. National governments have to defend the borders, run the courts, police the economy, attack the muzzies and so on. These things cost money and that amount is always more than the people think they should pay, but it is just below the maximum they will pay.

The final bit of math is the hardest and that has to do with debt. Pension systems are a type of debt. If I hire you and as a part of your compensation, I promise to pay you a monthly stipend after you turn 65, that’s a debt. That debt must be backed by collateral. In a pension system that collateral is the cash contributed by members and the employer, plus whatever interest that cash earns.

Pols have been jacking up the benefits for decades as a way to buy support from unions. This is just another way of saying they have been borrowing massive amounts to buy votes. To hide this reality, these pension systems claim their investments will return 7.5% or more, which they promise will cover their liabilities.

The trouble is the math says otherwise. If your pension system has $100 million in liabilities and those liabilities are growing by 7.5% per year, your returns have to be 7.5% to keep pace, as long as your assets are $100 million.  In many cases, these pensions have assets between 60-70 percent of liabilities. That means 10-12% returns are required and most of these funds are seeing returns of 2-3%.

The only way to make up for this gap, which is getting worse every year, is to divert money for operating expense like street cleaning, to pay pension debts. That and raise taxes, but in most of America we are at the maximum people will pay. The result is the people pay more and more for less and less government. At some point, mathematical reality crushes these municipalities and the states.

Most estimates put the math problem at about $4 trillion, but we have to assume that is the best case scenario. Greece is an excellent example of how math avoidance leads to compounding mistakes, thus making the math worse. Ten years ago, Greece could have unwound their debt with an orderly exit from the Euro. Now they just wait for the revolution.

There’s no reason to think the same thing will not happen in the state pension systems. Some states can cut benefits and others have quietly transferred the liabilities to cities and towns, which can use bankruptcy to cut their debts. California, on the other hand, is looking at a Greek-style economic meltdown in the next decade.

None of these things happen in a vacuum. California owes its former workers money it will not pay. Those employees owe money they cannot play. Of course, California bonds sit on the balance sheet of banks who pledge them as collateral. The math of the pension crisis says it is going to wipe out more than the savings of a few retired bus drivers. The math says we’re all doomed.