Category Archives: Politics

Life Imitating Steve Sailer

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I saw this on National Review Online this morning:

Jonah is sorely vexed over the deliberate exclusion of the non-PPP in the GOP field, but that misses a much better point about Progressives. If one were to portray the power brokers of America preparing for the election, it would be Elizabeth Warren holding a fundraiser on the Harvard campus, attended by the glitterati of the billionaire class.

Instead, the Left maintains the fantasy that the Pale Penis People, with their Anglo-Saxon culture and stubborn traditionalism operate out of exclusive country clubs, while the revolutionary vanguard bangs on the door in the name of the people. As Sailer is fond of pointing out, even the banal image of the WASP country club is at odds with history.

It is an interesting aspect of the New Religion. Fundamental to Jewish identity is being the outsider and the victim. Jews see themselves not just apart, but excluded from the main. Unsaid is the fear that at any moment the main will take note of the fringe and push it further away from the core or worse. The Southern Poverty Law Center has made a lot of people rich by frightening Jewish widows with stories of secret Nazis living next door.

This otherness has become enmeshed in modern Progressive thought and identity. Elizabeth Warren certainly started the Indian nonsense as a way to advance her career, but she did so by advancing her status as an outsider at the most elite training center of American power, Harvard University. Think of that. In order to reach the top, one must pretend to be on the bottom.

It is a strange delusion. The American Progressive imagines a world where David always beats Goliath, but the results are always the fault of Goliath, thus demanding a rematch so David can beat Goliath again. The WASP ruling cast has been dead for a century, but Progressives keep them alive so they can pick a fight with them. Since the enemy is imaginary, they will always have them as a rallying point.

It’s why I’ve taken to calling the new religion “faculty lounge Kabbalah.” It’s a mysticism based on the trinity of egalitarianism, anti-racism and multiculturalism. It’s not hierarchical or dogmatic. Instead it blends the Jewish sense of otherness and outsiderness with the revolutionary fervor of Rousseau-ism, into a religion of perpetual culture war. Progress is not a linear journey to a promised land. It is a process of perpetual turmoil leading to enlightenment.

Sanders-nistas

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Bernie Sanders is now running for president. First he tied an onion to his belt because that’s what they did back when his ideas sounded fresh and original. Soda pop cost a nickel and you could get a good haircut and a shave for two bits. Back then, the Party stood up for the working man against the syndicates, dadgummit!

Listening to clips from his  announcement, I could not help but think that Michael Savage is right and liberalism a mental disease. Bernie Sanders is an old man, 73 to be exact. That means he has seen every idea of the American Left tried multiple times, all of which failed exactly as predicted. Yet, he’s still demanding we spend more money on roads and bridges, the poor and the environment.

His big idea is to spend a trillion dollars on road building. That’s a about what we spend in seven years on roads. Bernie claims that will create 13 million jobs. Assuming those jobs pay roughly $40K per year, that means his big new roads program will keep those 13 million people working for two years. Of course, most of the money would be stolen by local pols, just like the stimulus money was stolen, so those numbers are all mythical.

It’s something an old man should know, particular an old man who has lived off the state for most of his life. That’s the thing with his cult. These guys are always arguing from the position that their ideas have never been tried and their cult has never had political power. The big lefty stimulus bill was just a few years ago, yet no liberal ever mentions it. Instead, they talk about the need for a stimulus spending program.

It’s easy to dismiss a fossil like Sanders. After all, his schtick was tired in the 1970’s when Phil Donahue was a big deal on TV. Forty years on he’s like seeing a guy in a denim leisure suit with a perm. The thing to remember, though, is that the middle-aged harpies on the cable news channels will one day be old commie fossils like Sanders. No amount of failure will ever change their minds. There’s no cure for this form of madness.

The news coverage is worth noting. Sanders has no chance of winning and 90% of America thinks he is a nut, but he gets the favorite uncle treatment. I guess that would be Uncle Ho. If a similarly fringe candidate announced for the GOP nomination, the media would be giving him the business and claiming it is proof the GOP is lurching into madness.

Anyway, Sanders will get some votes. The wool socks and sandals crowd now has an option on the menu. These are the people who think Ralph Nader would have been a great president. Given the state of the Democrat party, that’s probably worth 10% of the vote. That’s coming out of the voter pool to be divided between O’Malley and Clinton. My guess is those are votes that would have gone to O’Malley so Team Clinton has to be happy.

The real benefit to Clinton will be the debates. O’Malley is young and smooth, which would be big trouble for a run down old bat like Clinton. Having Bernie on stage will make Clinton look young and sane by comparison. It will be hard for O’Malley to draw easy comparisons between himself and Clinton. The worst thing for a challenger is a crowded stage, especially when one of the crowd is a crazy old man from another century.

Aside from the entertainment factor, those of us outside the Left will get a chance to see inside this fall. Cankles is the candidate of the aging boomer crazies. These are the folks who cut their teeth in the late sixties and early seventies. Butch O’Malley will be going for the younger moonbats. I’m on the mailing list and it is already clear he plans to be the white Obama.

The difference is O’Malley is probably more authentically black than Obama, given their backgrounds, but O’Malley will have to run as a pale penis person. Cankles is older now and her voters are older and crankier. Eight years of watching the young whipper-snappers run things has been tough.

Sanders is sure to throw some hay-makers at both camps, hopefully working as a catalyst for full-on moonbat-on-moonbat violence. Imagine the Democrat convention of 1968 except with walkers and middle-aged fat guys in cheap khaki shorts screaming about Fox News. The riot will need to be wrapped up by four so the Cankles supporters can make it to the early bird.

I welcome the man from the past into the Democratic race.

Greek Drama

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I often wonder what it was like to live in third century Italy, say a city like Milan. For the first half of the century or so, emperors were a dime a dozen. A general would win a battle, his men would proclaim him emperor and he would go kill the the current emperor. This went on for roughly half a century from the death of Severus Alexander. There were 22 emperors between him and Diocletian.

There were also endless wars, invasions and re-invasions during this period. Most people find this period of Roman history dull, but the fact that the Western Empire did not collapse in the third century is one of the great lessons of history. Human societies have great momentum that can carry even the most inept ruling elites along for generations before the energy of society is drained.

There’s also the fact that without a plausible alternative, people tend to bugger along as they have always done, despite their terrible rulers. This is true of the ruling elites as well. Rome stuck with the old ways long after those ways no longer made any sense. The cost of maintaining domination of Gaul and Germania far exceeded the benefits, but that’s all they knew so they exhausted themselves maintaining it.

That came to mind when reading this story about the latest act in the Greek drama. This thing is now in its sixth year and no one has the slightest clue as to how to resolve it. The Euros are stuck in a mode of thought that says the Greeks must be brought into alignment with the Frankish core of Europe, no matter the cost to the Greeks. The Euros will consider no other option, because they can imagine no other option.

The Greeks, to their credit, understand that this can never happen. But, they are locked into a mode of thought that says they must have their debts forgiven so they can start over, while maintaining their traditional social welfare state.  In other words, they will be Greek and there’s no other alternative they can imagine, much less consider.

This stand-off will eventually reach some sort of conclusion. The betting seems to be that the catalyst will be a default and then either the Greek people yield and submit to their European rulers or the Germans yield and let the Greeks walk away from some or all of their debts. Strangely, no one ever discusses a middle option between the two. The only alternative mentioned is catastrophe, however you wish to define it.

That’s the stuff in the news. On the street, Greeks go about their lives, arranging their affairs around the machinations of their rulers, real and de facto. That means moving money into foreign accounts, hiding it under beds and scheming around the tax system. In other words, Greeks go on being Greeks, regardless of what the people in charge have to say about it.

That, I suppose, was the way thing were in the third century, to circle back to where I started. The average guy in a town on in the fields was largely immune to what was going on in imperial politics. Young men joined the legions because that was what you did. It afforded a chance at a better life than as a peasant in the fields. Then as now, people choose from the options available to them and live their lives accordingly.

That’s not without consequences. Once people stop caring about the legitimacy of their rulers or even the identity of their rulers, there can be no law, just the strong ruling the weak. The Western Roman Empire collapsed when there was no one left to defend it. Once being a Roman went from being an asset to being a liability, the die was cast, so to speak.

Something similar seems to be happening in Greece. Being a citizen has no benefits. Being in the Euro, a citizen of Europe, still has value because the money has value, but how much longer that remains true is open to debate. Whether or not the Greeks have the will to riot, much less revolt is the big question.The evidence suggest they lack the will to govern themselves so revolt does seem unlikely.

That’s what brings me back to thinking what life was like in third century Italy. Did the average person suspect the end was near? Did they know their culture was in decline? Was there a pervading sense of foreboding that haunted the people? The evidence suggest not. Just as today, it appears the people just went about their business and the rulers did as they always did, trying to keep it all together.

The Inevitable End of Lunacy

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One of the least discussed big stories in American politics has been the transformation of one party into a purely ideological party. Anglo-Saxon politics has generally resisted ideological parties entirely. The few that have turned up have been short lived. The pattern has been coalition parties with an ideological wing.

We tend to focus on the ideological wing of parties and define them as such, but the people running the parties have always sought to broaden their appeal. The result has been that the major parties differ very little ideologically. That’s not to say there is no difference. It’s just that the difference are much smaller than the hooting and hollering would suggest.

The most obvious example of this is in Britain. Up until the last election, the Tories, supposedly an extreme right-wing party of the most right-wing kind were in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, allegedly a collection of Marxist hippies. If the things said about these parties were anything resembling the truth, there’s no way they could cooperate on anything.

In the US, the two-party system has always been between two coalition parties with just a blush of ideology. Democrats were the home of Progressives, but included blacks, Jews, urban ethnics and rural whites. Up into the 80’s there were plenty of pro-life Democrats, socially conservative hawks, along with the liberal urban voters. I’m fond of pointing out that Ted Cruz would have been a typical Democrat in the 1980’s.

The Republicans have always been the party of business, traditional Americans and monied interests. Even today there are very liberal Republicans who are pro-abortion and homosexual marriage. Despite the rhetoric, Mitch McConnell has done more in six months to advance Obama’s legislative items than Harry Reid has done in six years.

That changed in the 1990’s. One of those quirks of history, where attempts to stem a great sea change ended up advancing it, was the election of Bill Clinton. He was heralded by Progressives as their generations JFK, but he was also the leader of the DLC, a group trying the free the party from the ideologues.

Instead of re-centering the party, the Clinton years saw the Progressive wing take full control of the party and transform it into an ideological party. The election of 1994 wiped out the moderates from the South and Midwest. That left the field clear for howling fanatics like Pelosi, Reid, Schumer et al. Inevitably, anyone not fully committed to the one true faith was purged making the Democrats the first purely ideological party in American history.

I guess because the American media is universally Progressive this transformation has not been noticed. Instead it was cast as a triumph of the light over the darkness. It’s easy to forget that Obama said at his inauguration that physical reality would be altered now that he was on the throne. The natural world, according to him, would suddenly change in response to the triumph of the one true faith.

Ideological parties have a problem, which is why they tend not to have long lives. That problem is narrowness. Piety is defined relatively speaking. One is pious in relation to others. Imagine a herd of zebra all competing to be in the center. Those at the fringe are sloughed off after every reshuffling. Before long, you run out of zebra.

That’s what happens to ideological parties and what appears to be happening with the Democrats.

One of the most underappreciated stories in recent years is the deterioration of the Democratic bench under President Obama’s tenure in office. The party has become much more ideologically homogenous, losing most of its moderate wing as a result of the last two disastrous midterm elections. By one new catch-all measure, a party-strength index introduced by RealClearPolitics analysts Sean Trende and David Byler, Democrats are in their worst position since 1928. That dynamic has manifested itself in the Democratic presidential contest, where the bench is so barren that a flawed Hillary Clinton is barreling to an uncontested nomination.

The trend, of course, dates back much further but 1994 was like so long ago and stuff. The ’94 election wiped out most of the Southern Democrats. The 2000 election solidified the Democrats as the party of coastal urban areas. The 2006 election was one last attempt by Rahm Emmanuel to bring authentic populists back into the party, but that collapsed in 2010 and 2014.

But less attention has been paid to how the shrinking number of Democratic officeholders in the House and in statewide offices is affecting the party’s Senate races. It’s awfully unusual to see how dependent Democrats are in relying on former losing candidates as their standard-bearers in 2016. Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, Pennsylvania’s Joe Sestak, Indiana’s Baron Hill, and Ohio’s Ted Strickland all ran underwhelming campaigns in losing office in 2010—and are looking to return to politics six years later. Party officials are courting former Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina to make a comeback bid, despite mediocre favorability ratings and the fact that she lost a race just months ago that most had expected her to win. All told, more than half of the Democrats’ Senate challengers in 2016 are comeback candidates.

The irony missed here is that Progressives like to pitch themselves as the young hip party fighting the old squares, but take a look at the presidential candidates. The favorite is an old white dinosaur from the 60’s and the dream candidate is an old white dinosaur from the 70’s.

The rest of the piece is worth reading. What is not discussed is that demographic collapse is what looms around the corner for Progressives if they don’t quickly arrest this trend. A lack of qualified candidates means a surplus of unqualified candidates. The result is an increasing number of people representing the one true faith who are viewed as crazy or stupid.

I’m fond of comparing Progressives with Islamists, but in this regard they are opposites. Islam is surging because they have a surplus of young people. The Cult of Modern Liberalism has a dearth of young people and as a result is hollowing out as the boomers begin to age off.

Nothing lasts forever so even if this version of the one true faith fades, something will replace it. Most likely the Democrats revert back to being a coalition party of some sort once the GOP detonates itself in the coming decade. The new religion will evolve once again into something less toxic. What seems to be clear is this Great Progressive Awakening is reaching its end and a return to normalcy is upon us.

Robot Medicine

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I had my annual physical this week. That means two hours of my life wasted staring at the wall wearing an apron. I should not complain as the process for me is efficient compared to what others must endure. I get to the facility 15 minutes before my appointment and I’m sitting in a room somewhere within 30 minutes. In that time, I have submitted my urine sample and filled out some forms.

A pleasant black girl with neck tattoos took my blood pressure and had me strip and put on one of those ridiculous hospital gowns. I’ve always wondered why someone has not come up with a better hospital gown, but there’s zero motivation on the part of the medical profession to demand it. The medical business is not a business in the normal sense, where the suppliers compete with one another for customers.

I don’t actually see a doctor. Instead it is a nurse practitioner. Allegedly there is a doctor in charge of her and the other nurses, but I’ve never met him. I’ve never seen him. I’m sure he exists, but if not I would not be surprised either. The woman I see is nice, but a typical clock puncher. She comes to work for a check, not because she enjoys her work. To her, I’m just another meat stick on the schedule.

After twenty minutes of waiting, she arrived and commenced with the examination. That means taking my blood pressure, looking at my eyes and ears and feeling around for something weird. Most of the time she is in the room is spent asking me questions as she typed the answers into the computer system. Most of the questions seemed like they were for marketing purposes rather than anything to do with my health.

The point of this boring recitation of my annual physical is that very little of it requires me to interact with a human. Taking blood pressure can be done by a machine. I have one at home. Blood work is done by a machine. The clinic I use does their own blood work, allegedly, but there are huge national chains that do blood work for humans and animals.

As far as interpreting the results, the nurse I see is not bringing much to the table. She thinks my cholesterol is getting a little high, but Dr. Google and everyone I know has much higher LDL levels. I suspect there is a commission check in it for them when they prescribe these popular medications for cholesterol. Regardless, interpreting blood work is better done by a robot anyway. The same is true of the urine sample.

It seems to me that one place where the robot future should be a reality is in basic medical care. Instead of paying an arm and a leg for disinterested humans to act as a go between, let the patients talk to the robots direct. A mall kiosk could be used for blood pressure, urine and blood work. While you’re there you answer questions on a touchscreen. A week later the robot e-mails you the results and any recommendations.

Of course, the robot would also have access to your DNA. As we march into the humanless future, DNA will become the touchstone of medical science. Connecting the dots between genes and a wide range of diseases is a data problem, in most cases. Cheap collection devices in public places means masses of data to sort of collate.

Robot care would inevitably be cheaper and that means more people would get regular checkups by their local neighborhood robot doctor. If this sort of service were $50 a shot, most people would do it twice a year. Extend the services to things like flu shots, and nuisance things like colds and allergies and most of your basic care could be done on the cheap by the machines.

Another benefit is the payola schemes run by the pharmaceutical companies would be tamped down as robots are not easily bribed. During my visit, two sets of sharpies arrived peddling their wares. They were dressed in the best Men’s Warehouse has to offer and had arms full of freebies for the nurses.

It’s the same payola game the music industry used to play in the old days. It’s not technically bribery, but give a doctor free stuff and he is probably going to move your product. The medical profession denies it, but big pharma is not giving away tens of millions in trips, gifts and schmoozing because they are stupid. They do it because it works.

Of course, none of this is going to happen because the medical rackets are neatly aligned with the ruling liberal democrats. America does not have a government run system like Britain; it’s more of a partnership between the industry and the state. That way, we get the worst of both worlds. On the one hand there’s the avaricious private suppliers and on the other the mindless idiocy of government.

I’m fond of pointing out that we have all around us one of the greatest health care system on earth. American veterinarian medicine is better than what most humans enjoy on earth. It’s also cheap and plentiful. That’s because it is largely government free and parasitic lawyer free. Maybe when the robots take over, they can just kill all the lawyers and bureaucrats. Then maybe medicine will because a normal business again.

Death to the Old Farts!

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We are heading into the end phase of the most recent Great Progressive Awakening. This awakening started in the early 1990’s and was in full bloom in the 2000’s. The peak would be 2008 and it has been losing air ever since. Barak Obama in the White House probably kept it going longer than it should, but history is full of accidents. As Obama heads for the final turn, the movement that buoyed him is reaching its denouement.

For those unfamiliar with my oeuvre, I have a lot of new readers of late, the term Great Progressive Awakening is a play on The Great Awakening. The New Religion of America we call Progressivism or Liberalism has inherited the spiritual rhythms of main line Protestantism. Periods of activity where the faith is ascendent are followed by periods where it is dormant and going through a reordering.

The transition from main line Protestantism began in the 19th century with the Civil War. Read contemporaneous works by abolitionists and it is impossible to miss the spiritual fervor of the people in the movement. By killing the Southerners and breaking up slavery, God’s chosen were doing his work on earth.

Another awakening began at the end of the 19th century, eventually giving us Wilson, genuine socialism, internationalism, eugenics and Prohibition. These waves of religiosity are just as prone to world events as any other movement. Hitler and the war pumped a lot of air into the New Deal and largely collapsed the old traditional American conservatism that should have been a break on socialism.

The result has been an increasingly Progressive country as the Cult transformed from an economic movement with cultural overtones to a purely cultural phenomenon with some residual economic policies from the old days. Elizabeth Warren ranting about TPP is just a way to light some candles to the ancestors of the One True Faith. Warren got rich working for a giant hedge fund that runs an elite training facility. She likes corporatism as much as everyone else.

Warren’s rise is properly viewed as a lagging indicator of the current Progressive wave. The backlash started in 2010 and has continued every since, which has been evident in the three elections since this wave peaked in 2008. The ascendance of a weak and not altogether coherent poser like Warren says the movement is struggling with dis-conformation. The anointing of Obama, it turns out, did not bring about the rapture.

There are other signs that this wave is flagging. The most obvious being the whistling past the graveyard stuff like this article from Politco, the moonbat site for Blue Team fanatics.

It turns out that one of the Grand Old Party’s biggest—and least discussed—challenges going into 2016 is lying in plain sight, written right into the party’s own nickname. The Republican Party voter is old—and getting older, and as the adage goes, there are two certainties in life: Death and taxes. Right now, both are enemies of the GOP and they might want to worry more about the former than the latter.

There’s been much written about how millennials are becoming a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, but there’s been much less attention paid to one of the biggest get-out-the-vote challenges for the Republican Party heading into the next presidential election: Hundreds of thousands of their traditional core supporters won’t be able to turn out to vote at all.

The party’s core is dying off by the day.

Death cults like American Liberalism are fond of these sorts of fantasies. Faced with disconfirming reality, they have two choices. One is to accept that there is no heaven on earth and there’s no way to arrange things to attain it. That means abandoning the one true faith. The other option is to blame enemies of the revolution, spies and saboteurs. Shockingly, every Rousseau-ist cult goes for door number two.

To the great consternation of Progressives everywhere, murdering the enemies of the revolution is not an option in America. Instead they have to sate this urge with revenge fantasies involving the natural death of those they believe are holding them back. Five years ago, they claimed the people voting against Obama’s party were old farts ready for the grave. Now, those same old farts are in the way, but time is on the side of the anointed!

Reality, that thing that confounds mass movements everywhere, is something different. Young people are always the ones most likely to fall for nonsense like communism, Fabian socialism, Nazism, and now The New Religion. As we get older, we get wiser and are less inclined to be swept up in goofy fads like anti-racism or feminism. While the GOP is not of much use as a political party, it does provide a home of those who have outgrown the childish ideas of Cultural Marxism, socialism and the like.

Those old farts in the GOP may be headed for the grave, but there are more old farts where they came from.

Free Trade Fantasies

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Yesterday the guy who wrote this piece tried picking a fight with me on twitter over my observation that some trade deals are good and some are bad.  Libertarians hear the phrase “free trade” and they fall into a trance-like state. I think if you labeled dog poop “free trade” they would gobble it up like candy. That would be after they name-dropped David Ricardo and Adam Smith.

I’ve never had a twitter fight and I would certainly be willing to give it a shot. The trouble is started by using uptalk which makes me think of punching people in the face. There’s nothing that screams smug pussy more than slapping a question mark onto a statement. I’ve made it a rule to ignore people who do it. Reading his twitter feed, I get the sense he wears his ignorance like a shield and there is no point in debating such people.

But, I don’t know him or his work so I could be all wrong. Still, life is too short to waste time on finding out. My sense is his site is mostly libertarian spank material and I have no interest in it. I know all the arguments and much of what libertarians say is reasonable, but a lot of it is nonsense too. Humans are not moist robots and our relationships are not transactional. Economic man has never existed and that’s why libertarianism has never been tried.

Anyway, after all the red Team-Blue Team stuff, he laments that many Republicans and Tea Partiers think trade has hurt the country. To libertarians, this is like learning that half the country believes in witchcraft. As I wrote earlier, the phrase “free trade” has a narcotic effect on these people.

Shockingly, the former Half Sigma has a post up that gets at the problem with libertarianism in general and free trade in particular. I don’t think his idea for socialized banking is a great idea, but the point about pure markets existing only in the imagination is important. Political systems work as long as they comport with reality. Libertarianism works only in a world with perfect economic men ruled by saints.

Similarly, free trade is a boon to both countries as long as both countries have the cultural ethics of Canada. That way, people in both parties can expect their claims to be upheld in both countries. When one party to a contract is not holding up his end, the state must step in and enforce the contract. When that party’s home government is just as corrupt or incompetent, you get something other than free trade.

Not all countries have Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. Canada is not going to invest much into competing with America because both countries are culturally similar so cooperation is natural and mutually beneficial. China, on the other hand, is vastly different from the US. They see American and Americans as competitors, even adversaries.

That’s not to say there should be no trade with China. Like progressives, libertarians tend to see things in black and white. You’re either in favor of unfettered trade with everyone or you’re a close minded protectionist. Only libertarians and lunatics think this way. Most people fall into the middle area that thinks prudent trade deals with friendly countries are good, while reckless trade deals with rogue nations are bad.

All of this is germane to the TPP deal Obama is pushing. This deal is mostly a give-away to globalopolies, rather than a trade deal. The reason it is a secret deal is to keep people from seeing what’s in it, obviously. You don’t do that if you think the details are going to win you praise from the public. But, a lot of it has been leaked through various channels and it is what one would expect from a deal drawn up by global corporations.

It’s a reminder that being for free trade is like being for leprechauns riding unicorns. All of these deals should be looked at skeptically. The debate is not between free trade and no trade. The debate is over over how much power we want to cede to global corporations and foreign governments. Sometimes it makes sense to do deals with less than sterling countries. Sometimes the interests of multinationals coincides with those of Americans.

It can only be decided on a case by case basis.

 

Observations and Lessons From The UK Election

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When it comes to British politics, my go to guy is John Derbyshire. It’s not that he has a granular knowledge of every bit of maneuvering that is the staple of political coverage. It’s than he is properly skeptical and he gets the larger trends that have defined Britain for the last century or so. His roundup up of the UK election results is a nice summary of what happened and, to a lesser degree, what it portends.

When it come to European politics, including the UK, I enjoy Andrew Stuttaford. I don’t really think he fully grasps the nature of the global corporatists in the managerial class running Europe, but he is suitably outraged by what’s going on and does a great job underscoring the issues for those too afraid to read my blog. Here’s his latest and in the comments an exchange between Andrew and me.

That’s the warmup material.

My own view is the election, to the surprise of the people in charge and their attendants in the media, was about the national question. Specifically, will the English continue to have a nation of their own. Part of that is immigration and that’s what UKIP brought to the debate. Another part is England’s relationship with the Continent, the promise of the Tories to hold a referendum. Finally, the very idea of what it means to be British, English and Scottish, raised by SNP.

No one in charge, of course, wanted to talk openly about any of these issues, but the people in the streets did want to talk about them. Politicians go where the votes are and inevitably the parties all found a way to stake out their position. The most obvious is SNP, which may be the most cynical party in human history, but they ran on Scotland being for Scots, while Labour and Lib-Dems ran on formless internationalism, a sort of faculty lounge techno-fascism.

I say the SNP is cynical because if you read their position papers, they appear to be deliberately deceptive. The first graphs are all haggis and sheep buggering like a proud Scot. Then it devolves into academic jargon cheering on internationalism and multiculturalism. I suspect they know people only read the first two paragraphs.

Maybe it just sort of happened that way as the flag waving started to carry the party beyond their wildest imaginings. That’s not uncommon. We see this with candidates. When the crowd roars, it’s hard not to notice. Perhaps SNP sort of stumbled into becoming a weird fascist party that preaches international corporatism and good old fashioned patriotism. How they intend to square those is a mystery. Regardless, they made national identity a central issue of the campaign.

On the other side, UKIP made immigration a central issue. It was originally assumed that the Tories would suffer as a consequence, but it seem they may have benefited. The people looked at their options and ruled out the internationalists, Lib-Dem and Labour, in favor of the nationalist. The Tories may be weak tea, but they can be fortified. UKIP simply has too many weirdos for the average Brit. UKIP, inadvertently, dragged the Tory party into the nationalist camp.

That’s the first lesson of the election. Given a choice between the formless international corporatism offered up by Progressives across the West and even a mild form of traditional patriotism, the latter trumps the former and by large margins. Just imagine if Cameron was something other than a shallow twit who reminds most people of Piers Morgan.

What has been laid bare in Britain is the great divide is no longer between free market traditionalists and cosmopolitan socialists. No one is a Marxist anymore and everyone is some form of socialist. The competition these days is between parties claiming a better skill at running the welfare state. They quibble over minor aspects of the tax code and various nuances of the bureaucracy, but they agree on all of the big economic issues. Across the West, all parties have embraced managerial socialism as their economic model.

The great divide now is over culture and country. One side is post-national and post-cultural. The other is patriotic and rooted in the traditional culture of the country. You see this divide emerging everywhere in the West, outside of the US where the GOP keeps insisting it is 1978. The great political fights in the West will be waged between those with little or no loyalty to their host country and those who define themselves by the national and ethnic identity.

I think one reason this is blossoming in Europe and not in the US is the fact that Europe already has a lot of immigrants from alien cultures. Mexican carpenters sort of look like Italians, they go to church and generally fit into Western norms. Algerians and Pakistani Muslims clearly don’t belong and they are increasing making that clear to everyone. With a few million Africans poised to join them, the sense of urgency in Europe is greater than in the US.

There’s also the weird cultural ticks of Americans. We have romanticized immigrants and turned them into objects of worship. We also have a racial culture that makes it hard to say bad things about anyone not an albino. Further, both parties have embraced the American empire where the rest of the world is treated as provinces.

That’s the other lesson. What works in the UK is not necessarily going to follow in the US. Watch British TV and you see an unabashed parochialism that would be horrifying to American TV producers. Immigration policy in America must be discussed in economic terms, not cultural terms, at least for now.

On the other hand, American politicians look to Europe and they have felt the rumblings. The fact that Obama’s party is in revolt over his nation wrecking TPP plan is a good sign. They may not want to follow their analogs in the UK into the abyss. The GOP is going through an identity crisis that will be worked out in their presidential primary. For the first time in a long time, there’s hope.

The Left Versus The Clintons

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It’s generally assumed that religions are punctilious about enforcing their rules. Particularly the rules regarding personal morality. This is due to the fantasy versions of religious history taught in public schools around America.

In those versions, the Puritans were severe sexually repressed fanatics who stoned women for showing a little ankle. Further back, the Catholic Church was slaughtering people throughout Europe for missing confession. Of course, modern Evangelicals are peeping in your bedroom to make sure you’re not having too much fun.

That’s all nonsense, of course. The truth is religions are terrible at self-policing. The exception is theocracy. When the church controls the state and has a monopoly of force, it then has the duty of enforcing the rules. Its legitimacy is largely based on enforcing the rules.

That means policing itself as well as the populace. If a member of the clergy gets caught stealing they will face a more severe punishment than a commoner because the church has to maintain its legitimacy. A crime against the state is a crime against the church and therefore must be punished.

Theocracy is a rarity in human organization. The norm is a separation. In a monoculture this is not a problem because the church can rely on their coreligionists in the state to manage the enforcement of man’s rules. The church is free to worry about the spiritual side of things. It’s why multicultural societies are rare and tend to violence, but a topic for another day.

Catholic France is a good example of where the state was run by Catholic men who were not men of the Church. Britain after the Synod of Whitby is another that comes to mind. Pre-Civil War America was a land with a secular government run by Protestant Christians who were more than happy to let the laws be informed by their faith. It’s why the Civil War can be viewed as a religious schism amongst American Protestants.

Religions in lands where the secular authorities are hostile have peculiar pressures on them to not police their own too rigorously. They tend to focus on crimes against the faith like heresy or apostasy. Challenges to the hierarchy of the faith are also monitored. The issues that could involve the secular authorities present a problem. Turning over a criminal to the secular authorities could both violate the faith and place the faithful at the mercy of those outside the faith.

An example of what I’m getting at is the Catholic Church scandals. Priests are supposed to remain celibate and those who don’t face sanction from the church, but not expulsion from the church. Even sex with minors does not get you tossed, as long as you confess the sins to a priest and make satisfaction for them. Turning the priest over to the secular authorities is not on the book. More to the point, it invites the secular authorities into the church, which brings about a whole bunch of new troubles.

Now, most of what happened in the Catholic Church scandals was just good old fashioned sloth and corruption. It was easier to sweep it under the rug so that’s what happened. Then there was the Lavender Mafia that grew like cancer on the priesthood. Those elements in the Church not only worked to cover up these things, those outside that element did not want to reveal the existence of a Gay Mafia in the Church. The result was a decades long cover-up.

Now, what does have to do with the Clintons?

The new religion that is growing in the ruling elite is facing the same problems all religions face. How do they police themselves without undermining the legitimacy of the faith? Compounding that problem is the fact that the religion is largely defined by its political activities. Turning over a defective member of The One True Faith means giving political opponents ammunition to use against the faith. The Clintons may be dirtbags, but they are still members of the faith in good standing.

Christianity sets out a clear path to salvation. Act in certain ways, believe certain things, participate in certain rituals and you are going to heaven. Your salvation is not determined by other men. The rules are taught to the faithful as a part of their participation in the faith. Your priest could think you are a jerk, but as long as you take communion, go to confession and live a Christian life, you’re all set.

The new faith is occasionalist, in that the rules are always shifting. What makes you a member in good standing is that the clerisy considers you are a good liberal. In part, that’s why Rousseau-ist cults are prone to radicalism. Being pious means being more pious than the other guy. The result is a race into fanaticism. It’s also why the only sins that Progressives take seriously are heresy and apostasy.

The Clintons present a challenge to the faith in that their sins are outside the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Bill Clinton is a deviant and a pathological liar, but he has been devoted to progressive causes. Similarly, Hillary is a humorless harpy and a crook, but she never goes against the faith. The extreme members of the faith don’t like her, but their reasons have nothing to do with her selling influence as Secretary of State.

This new religion, let’s call it Spiritual Marxism, has to figure out how to deal with sociopaths like the Clintons and that means building out fixed rules. For an occasionalist faith, as we see with Islam, this is nearly impossible. In the case of Islam it reduces the authority of Allah. For Progressives it means stripping power from the trend setters, the people largely responsible for keeping the flame burning.

But, the alternative is to sanction general anarchy and no religion can last if it an assault on order.

Rapacious Vermin

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Way back in the olden thymes, I was sitting on a couch at a friend’s house, watching the news while having beers with friends. Bill Clinton had just slithered out from under a rock and was defending himself against pot smoking charges. That’s when he uttered his famous line about never inhaling. My response at the time was that Bill Clinton is a man who really enjoys lying.

In the South, this sort of politician is a part of every states lore. The archetype, of course, is Huey Long, but Southern politics are littered with minor versions of the Kingfish. It’s not just that these guys are crooked or unethical. Their crimes are usually trivial and venal, in the grand scheme of things. It’s that they enjoy the action. They love being on the edge, never quite sure if they will hang on or fall into the pit.

That’s the thing to remember with the Clintons. They really enjoy lying and all the intrigue that goes with it. That’s what gets them off. It’s at the heart of their relationship. They are like two con-men competing with one another as to who can run the most outlandish con. All the analysis of their relationship, it seems to me, has missed the mark because these are not normal people. They are sociopaths.

That’s what makes the coming response to the Clinton Cash book one of the most anticipated events of the summer. I heard the author on the radio detailing his findings and it is a very well thought out case. The author clearly went into it with an understanding of how the Clintons were likely to respond. Like a good bunko cop, he seems to have thought things through a few steps, anticipating how these two tend to play the game.

The thing with the Clintons, in addition to their love of lying, is their Chechen morality. Faulkner described the Snopes clan in his novels as having a vermin-like rapacity. That’s the Clinton way of life. Nothing is ever on the level and they are devoid of anything resembling a moral framework. They are moral nullities. That means they will do anything they need to do to win.

It’s what always baffles their critics. Presented with an ironclad case against them, the Clintons will respond with some lie that is so outlandish, no one can believe anyone would says such a thing. Bill Clinton was out the other day claiming the author of the book was jammed up in some sort of ethics issue over the book. Bill Clinton would call him a child molester if he thought it would work.

The problem as you see in this piece is their adversary this time did his homework on them. There can only be a few ways to defend yourself against corruption charges. One is to dispute the facts. Another is to smear the people. The other is to offer up an alternative explanation that fits the presented facts. This is often the best strategy because it quickly turns into a he said/she said controversy, where the accused looks like the innocent party.

Peter Schweizer let the the big foot liberal media operations vet his data before publication. That inoculated him against claims of shoddy research. He’s also a well respected writer so calling him a nut is unlikely to work. By letting the liberal media have special access to his research, he cut off the usual avenues for team Clinton, which is to make a bunch of bogus claims about the accuracy of the charges.

I don’t think any of it matters. The American media is too morally compromised when it comes to the Clintons to turn on them now. The political class is long past policing themselves. The people bankrolling Hillary don’t care that she is a sociopath. In fact, they prefer it. If your plan is to auction off what remains of the country it’s better to have someone in the White House who is a moral nullity.

At the end, Athens was not undone by a cunning Alcibiades, leading them into a foolish war with Syracuse. Julius Caesar did not defeat a robust and confident Senate on his way to becoming Emperor.  Eventually, a ruling elite loses its capacity to police itself and defend itself. That’s what has happened in America. The people in charge lack the will and moral authority to enforce the rules, which is why Bonnie and Clyde of the Ozarks have been able to flourish in Washington for close to three decades.