When reading about the Julio-Claudian dynasty, I’m always struck by the juxtaposition of Nero and Augustus. Nero seems to have hated the very idea of Rome and everything associated with it. Every description of his time as emperor brings to mind someone obsessed with debasing everything around him, including his own position. Shocking the sensibilities of the nobles and offending the people appears to be all that mattered to him.

Augustus, it seems to me, loved the idea of Rome. For instance, he carried on many of the Republican traditions, despite the fact he was the emperor. There was certainly a political motive to pretending the old system was still in place, but he had to have a fair amount of respect for the idea of Rome to see the value in maintaining the customs. Of course, Suetonius claims he said, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” That’s the mind of man in love with his city and what it represents.

I’m surely over simplifying, but this is not a post about Rome. I just find Roman history a great starting place when trying to noodle through events of today. One thousand years of history provides a lot of useful examples and lessons. Add in some of the great historians and chroniclers and you get a great source of material for a blog post by a random idiot.

Anyway, I was thinking about that when reading this the other day.

Margaret Thatcher famously said that her greatest success as a politician was the rise of Tony Blair to lead a party he called New Labour: “We forced our opponents to change their minds.” As yet, Barack Obama can make no similar boast. Just the opposite: He radicalized his Republican opponents, and empowered most those who agreed with him least. With the presidential campaign of Jeb Bush, Obama can finally glimpse Thatcher-style success. Here, at last, is an opponent in his own image.

What can the son and brother of a president, grandson of a senator, and great grandson of the founder of the Walker Cup have in common with the son of a failed Kenyan politician? Look beyond the biography to the psychology.

The first part is nonsense on stilts, but this is David Frum and most of what he says is nonsense. He does have solid connections to the neo-conservatives so it is often worth weeding through the nonsense to learn what’s going on with the Cult of Leo Strauss. The last bit is what got my attention. Obama is a bitter weirdo whose presidency looks like a revenge fantasy from someone with a deep antipathy for America. Making this comparison to Jeb Bush is no small thing.

This bit he quotes from Bush is stunning to me:

I’m bicultural—maybe that’s more important than bilingual. For those who have those kinds of marriages, appreciating the culture of your spouse is the most powerful part of the relationship. Being able to share that culture and live in it has been one of the great joys of my life. We chose Miami to live because it is a bicultural city. It’s as American as any, but it has a flair to it that is related to this bicultural feeling. I wanted my children to grow up in a bicultural way.

You cannot be bicultural. To quote my ancestors, a man who chases two rabbits catches none. You can be an American with an appreciation of or even a fondness for another culture. You can be a Mexican with an appreciation of America. On the other hand, you can be an American who moves to another land and adopts the culture of that land, just as millions of Mexicans have adopted American culture. You cannot be on both sides of the fence. Claims as such suggest to me that Jeb Bush really does not like America all that much.

As Jeb Bush himself notes, there is a Bush family tradition of moving away from the culture into which one is born, to plunge into another. George H.W. Bush, born to a family of Northeastern grandees, reinvented himself as Sunbelt conservative. George W. Bush, born in New Haven, Connecticut, was the only member of the next generation of Bush brothers not born in Texas, and yet became the most Texan of them all. Jeb Bush moved away first from Texas, and then from his family’s patrician identity as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

By itself, this can be easily seen as a tick of successful families. The sons want to distinguish themselves from the father so they go another way. It’s one thing for one son to embrace the earthy side of the family. It is quite another for the other son to go so far as to embrace another country’s culture entirely.

Bush seems to have something more in mind than just the familiar (if overstated) claim that immigration can counter the aging of the population. He seems to think that there is some quality in the immigrants themselves that is more enterprising—more dynamic to use his favorite term—than native-born Americans. This is not only a positive judgment on the immigrants themselves. It is also a negative judgment on native-born Americans.

I used to wonder how anyone could think it wise to put a guy like Obama in the White House. You have a better chance of getting struck by lightning and hitting the lottery on the same day than meeting a man with Obama’s bio. He is the very definition of un-American. At least his supporters could claim he embraced America and loved his countryman. It’s an implausible claim, but not an impossible one.

Jeb Bush hates his country and his countrymen. That’s clear in all of his utterances. Putting this man in the White House is akin to handing the purple to Nero, after knowing what Nero intended to do as emperor. At least the Romans had the fall back policy of assassinating their intolerable leaders. We have to hope there’s a Sirhan Sirhan out there and he is able to slip past the Praetorian Guard. That’s not much of a fall back plan.

It’s also no way for a sane people to manage their affairs. I’m not prone to doomsday thoughts, but this may be the critical moment in the history of the nation. If this self-loathing lunatic is put in the White House, the country is finished. Even if the people rise up and stymie this guy’s drive to gut the country, the consequences of that will be almost as bad. The senate murdering Julius Caesar may have stopped Julius Caesar, but it also put an end to the Republic.

Nero Bush must be stopped.

Libertarians and some conservatives often argue that Western political thought is divided into two camps, the heirs of Hobbes and the heirs of Locke. One camp wants to impose their vision of society on the people, while the other camp wants to let the people figure it out on their own. There’s really no third choice, so it is not a terrible way of looking at political philosophy. Democratic political systems would fall into the latter group and everything else would end up in the former group.

That’s fine but not useful beyond labeling the bad guys as authoritarians, which is probably the point. Both Locke and Hobbes started from a premise that we now know is ridiculous. Early man was not in a state of perpetual war or perpetual cooperation. Early man, before settlement, lived in small bands of no more than 150 members. Within the group, there was most likely little violence and communal property. Between groups, violence was common and brutal at times.

Putting that aside, the better way of looking at the great divide is between those who think there is a perfect social arrangement and those who do not. The former imagine there is a perfect way to order human affairs to achieve maximum happiness. That perfect way is both discoverable and achievable. Morality dictates that anything and everything be done in order to reach this state of social perfection. The Rousseau camp is focused on the end and prepared to use any means necessary to achieve it.

The other mode of thought rejects the human perfectibility. The best we can do is incrementally improve the material state of society by adding a few grains of sand, each generation, to the foundations of society. That necessitates preserving the traditional institutions, while adding to them as they are the storehouse of knowledge, built up over countless generations through trial and error. The Burke camp focuses entirely on the means knowing the ends are beyond the ability of man to perfect.

Obviously, that’s a very simple way of looking at things. Since the French Revolution, the Team Rousseau and Team Burke have been battling over the shape of western society. One side trying to create the perfect society, whatever it takes, and the other side trying to stop them from pulling the roof down on everyone. It’s a one way fight, of course, as the Team Rousseau attack and the Team Burke defends, but it takes a long time to pull down 2,000 years of cultural institutions.

This is supposed to be reflected in the American political system. The Democrats are Rousseau-ist fanatics and the Republicans are the Burkean Conservatives, defending America from the rage zombies of the Left. A lot of people believe that is how things work. Sensible people are convinced that if the GOP can get control, they will roll back the welfare state, chase the sodomites from the Temple and bring America back in line with her constitutional past.

At the same time, liberals are sure the other guys are going to roll back the welfare state, chase the sodomites from the Temple and bring America back in line with her constitutional past. They toss and turn at night over the prospect of another Bush siting on the throne. They think Sarah Palin is hiding under their bed, ready to stuff their uterus with Bibles and sew their legs shut. It’s why they never quit, no matter how disastrous their schemes.

Kevin Williamson goes goes down this road in his piece on the authoritarian impulses of the Left.

The Right is finally coming around to the understanding that what mainly distinguishes it from the Left is not its general preference for muscular foreign policy, its not always convincing defense of the Judeo-Christian tradition, or even its relatively faithful reading of the Constitution, as important as those things are. Rather, the fight between Right and Left is about coercion.

One side is willing to use any means necessary to reach the promised land. The other side is restrained by the means they will tolerate and they are willing to accept less than optimal results. If the people prefer high tariffs, for example, that’s fine as long as it is debated and enacted in a constitutional process. The Right can argue for something on rational grounds, but accept less knowing that people are seldom rational. That’s the claim, least ways.

That would be great, if it were true, but it has not been the case for a long time now, at least in American politics. In fact, what we call “conservative” is pretty much just the same stuff we call “liberal” but with slightly different ends. This thread on NRO is a good example of what I mean.

Abby McCloskey supports a universal maternity benefit on conservative grounds. Some women, including many high-wage workers employed by large firms, already have access to paid leave through their employers. The women who’d benefit most from a universal maternity benefit are low-wage workers employed by small firms, for whom paid leave is virtually unheard of. These women tend not to have the savings or the family support they’d need to ride out a long spell without paid work. When they fall out of paid work to care for a newborn, it can be difficult for them to find their way back in. Moreover, lengthy interruptions in work experience can lower one’s wages considerably over time. That’s why McCloskey, writing in Forbes, has suggested that a modest universal maternity benefit is best understood as a way to keep working mothers from falling into hardship without punishing employers. Because the benefit she proposes is fairly small, to help ensure that it doesn’t crowd out more generous paid leave policies currently offered by employers, McCloskey estimates that it would cost only $2.5 billion to provide six weeks of paid leave to workers without other paid leave options, an amount she believes can be raised by eliminating waste from the $93 billion spent on unemployment benefits in 2012 and the $200 billion spent on disability insurance each year.

Those ruling class women have all sorts of privileges that come from their status. They have private trainers and dieticians so they can remain slim and attractive, even into late middle-age. Maybe we should mandate that too. What you see here is a fight between green eye-shade types over which Utopian fantasy is more cost effective. Abby McCloskey, I’m sure, considers herself a conservative firebrand, yet she accepts every key premise of the Rouuseau-ists. Namely, the perfect arrangements are discoverable, achievable and we have an obligation to pursue them – no matter what.

The typical Republican and most so-called conservatives accept this without question. Bush the Minor famously said that “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, Government has got to move.” This is the very definition of the custodial state, the dreamed of end result of every Rousseau-ist cult since 1789. It is simply impossible to believe that and think they can be any limit on state coercion of the citizens. Those are the words of the police state. Yet, he was applauded by his party and most of the professional Right.

Young people can be forgiven for thinking a Ted Cruz is a far right conservative. It’s what they know and what they have been sold. Reality is a different thing. Our political culture now functions within a broom closet of the main room of western political thought. Within that small intellectual space, everyone agrees on the big stuff and most of the small stuff. The big fights over who gets to parade around in purple while the semi-permanent custodial state keeps a lid on things, like game wardens at an animal preserve.

At the risk of incurring the wrath of some readers, the Roman Republic came to an end in no small part because the ruling elite of Rome was unable to think critically about their dominant paradigm. The French Revolution was as much about the calcified ruling elite’s inability to understand the threat, much less respond to it. As the American political culture narrows and the factions close ranks, their ability to reform and respond to new threats diminishes. Correspondingly, the people’s ability to make their demands know through democratic processes also diminishes.

I’ve always been fairly open to immigration. I have a lot of immigrant friends and acquaintances. They are hardworking, mostly honest and good additions to America. Not all immigrants are the same and we should be cautious about who we let in to the country. Muslims, as much as possible, should be barred from entry. That seems obvious. Koreans, Chinese and Japanese are very successful immigrants with very strong support networks so we can be liberal with them. A country our size can easily absorb and assimilate half a million new citizens each year, maybe a little more in good times.

Now, if we shut off all immigration, as we have in the past, that’s fine too. We have roughly 40 million foreign born in the US. That’s a big number and the people would be justified in wanting a halt, in order to let the current immigrants get settled. It is only fair. Inviting these people in and then screwing them by gutting the labor market with more immigrants is pretty close to evil. If we are going to have immigration, we should make sure the immigrants succeed, as much as possible.

The problem is that immigration stopped being a public policy issue and became a rentier racket for the ruling class. Big companies like cheap labor from indentured servants. Small business likes cash labor so they can avoid paying taxes and insurance. Then we have an army of human traffickers that make money getting migrants into America. These brokers operate on both sides of the border. Of course, foreign governments have figured out to make money off this racket as well.

This story on VDare explain how the way the Mexican government, for example, profits from illegal immigration. Billions flow from America to Mexico through illegal immigration. Of course, the drug trade is intimately tangled up in the immigration rackets and with the Mexican government. All of this is facilitated by a banking system that operates beyond the reach of any government’s laws. If you go to a convenience store near where migrants live, you’ll find a wire transfer machine/check cashing machine located in the back. Western Union seems to own most of them.

The human brokers are probably the most offensive to the morality of a sane people. This story I stumbled upon from a long ago is a great example. The areas where these poultry plants operate are not suffering from labor shortages. In fact, light manufacturing locates to these areas because of the abundance of cheap land and cheap local labor. It is a hassle dealing with rural rednecks and rural blacks. They demand things like sick time and holiday pay. Slaves from Korea tend not to cause much trouble. They are much less likely to fall into a machine or blow the place up by accident.

The economics of immigration policy are easy to understand once you look into it. As the above shows, there are a lot of people making big money by flouting the laws. Getting easier laws to flout, presumably, opens up greater avenues for these parasites to profit. That’s the thing to remember. The cheap labor may mean cheap landscaping, but the American put out of work by the illegal migrant is on welfare, which drives up your taxes and social costs. In effect, these immigration privateers are taxing all of us by shifting costs to the tax payer.

On every other issue, we find politicians on both sides. Raising or lowering business taxes, for example, will get friends of business out in support of the proposals, but it also gets pols out who are emotionally opposed to profit making business. In other words, you can’t bribe Nancy Pelosi into supporting tax cuts. Immigration is the exception. Only a handful of pols dare speak out against the moneyed interests. Even pols who have nothing to gain and represent strong anti-immigrant constituencies are silent. It’s as if a madness has taken hold of the ruling elite, where any criticism of immigration is heresy.

The increasingly clownish Marco Rubio is back with a new scheme to flood the STEM fields with indentured servants. Keep in mind that his political prospects took a nosedive after he backed the last immigration scheme. Unless he is retarded, the guy has to know that the public is overwhelmingly against this. Yet, here he is throwing his career away for this cause. Even assuming he is getting bribed, why take the risk? Rubio is a young man who could be president one day. Why risk it all just for a few bucks and the pat on the head from the ruling elites?

That’s the key question. Simple bribery is never enough on other issues so why would immigration be the exception?

The answer is the secular religion we call liberalism, progressivism, multiculturalism, etc. A core tenet of this belief set is that all humans are the same. Economics and circumstance are what makes for different results. Ireland is the way it is not because it is full of Irish, but because of the accident of history. Put a bunch of Bantus on the island and before long you get black Irish who are remarkably good at track and field. It’s not just that race is a myth; ethnicity is a myth, a leftover from a bygone era.

When applied to immigration, the only morally consistent policy is open borders. After all, letting in one group over another means one group is better, innately better, than the other group. That blows apart the whole thing. It’s why Steve Sailer has it all wrong about how France can walk back from their immigration policies. Even saying that “we have reached our goal” on immigration admits that not all people are the same and therefore it is good and proper to make judgments about them based on culture. Admitting that culture is real and permanent is inconceivable.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” is a popular line from Emerson that is mostly used to dismiss critics. I’ve used it myself, almost always to dismiss criticism of my opinions on some matter. I also like saying the word “hobgoblin. I’m also fond of this line from Huxley, “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.” Again, it is used to brush away nitpickers and pedants. It’s a handy tool.

That’s the thing. Trivial inconsistencies and contradictions, otherwise known as exceptions, are to be expected in just about all things outside of death. In philosophical or political matters, where you are often dealing with gross generalizations and flowery rhetoric, everyone is a hypocrite to some degree. Events simply don’t fall so neatly into their categories, which leaves room for all sides to claim they support their side.

The most obvious example for myself is the forever war stuff with the Muslims. I was in favor of blowing up Afghanistan to make a point after 9/11. I was fine with sending in troops to hunt down the jihadis. By the time Obama came to town, I was all for leaving the dung heap to molder. That makes me a hypocrite, but events changed, I had more data and I simply changed my mind on some things. My liberal friends are still scandalized when I call Obama a worse war monger than Bush. They simply cannot fathom my apparent hypocrisy.

That’s what bugged me about the hysterical reaction from Conservative Inc. over the Pope’s words regarding the limits of speech. The left hates other religions in proportion to their proximity. Catholics are close so they are hated with great intensity, just behind Evangelicals. They also are always chanting about free speech as they implement speech codes. It made perfect sense for the Left to have a ritualized freak out over the Pope. It’s what they do.

Professional conservatives, on the other hand, are predisposed to respect religion, particularly Christianity. Even The Weekly Standard crowd is pro-Pope on the isseus that have no impact on their tribe. The caterwauling from Conservative Inc. struck me as contrived, as if they were trying to inoculate themselves in some way. We see that with race all the time. That, or they were hoping to deploy their libertarian chariots to out flank the Left on the matter of free speech absolutism.

Thinking about it, I suspect what really bugs me about it is that it concedes a more important principle to the Left. That’s the right of association. You simply cannot have freedom of speech without freedom of association, which includes the right to private discrimination. If the Christian baker must work for the homosexual couples trying to make a point that the baker finds objectionable, you have effectively given the state the right to regulate speech.

If I’m free to say what I like, but you are free to use the courts and the law to bankrupt me for saying things you don’t like, you have effectively stripped me of that right. Put more simply, if the state requires you and I to be in the same room, even though we say objectionable things to one another, we are going to want the state to set the rules for what we can and cannot say to one another. Otherwise, it ends in a knife fight.

That’s why the professional conservatives wet themselves when these issues arise. Freedom of association means the diner gets to hang out a sign that reads “Whites Only.” If Jonah Goldberg or Rich Lowry were to argue that a business owner should have the right to refuse service to blacks, he is fired in hours. They know that a wide range of opinions are forbidden in public so they avoid getting anywhere near them. Not everyone can afford to be John Derbyshire.

Therein lies the rub for me. Hooting about free speech when we encourage and tolerate enormous amounts of regulation of speech is not just hypocritical. It is illogical. It is compounded by the demands for state regulated association, embraced by all of the ruling class. The French prefer the government to play referee. Americans hand that job to corporations and academia. Complaints about the Pope’s formulation is haggling over trivialities.