Category Archives: Politics

The Social War

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For most modern Americans, the issue of “rights” is talked about in spiritual terms, more than practical or legal terms. The concept of Natural Rights has lost all meaning to the modern person, even though our system depends upon the concept. That is not necessarily a bad thing. As Western societies have evolved since the Enlightenment, the concept of rights has expanded and evolved as well. Today, what we think of as “our rights” fall into three general areas, civil, political and social.

For Americans, the concept of civil rights has been tangled up in racial politics, mostly because of baby boomers nostalgia. As a result, three generations of Americans have been steeped in the mythology of the Civil Rights Movement, thinking it only applies to black people. Putting that aside, we expect equality before the law and due process. The law should apply to everyone equally and the administration of the law should follow a transparent and predictable process.

While civil rights are about equality before the law, political rights are about equality in formulating the law. That means having an equal shot to participate in the political process which creates the laws. Equality before the law is not worth a lot if your enemies have the exclusive right to dictate the law. The real change in the Civil Rights Movement was in the political realm. Blacks are now fully included in the nation’s political process.

As civil and political rights have expanded, social rights have contracted. The right to live your life unmolested by others is increasingly difficult. It used to be a given that a man had a right to anonymity. That is just about impossible today. More important, it is increasingly difficult to hold unorthodox opinions and beliefs. Half a century ago, people dreamed of a colorblind future, but today, people dream of not getting fired for posting FBI crime stats on Facebook.

This relentless intrusion on our social rights is in the news on a daily basis. This story from Tampa is a representative example. Here is a woman, hounded by bigots, because she holds unapproved opinions. You can be sure that the ululating fanatics will be badgering her school system to fire her from her job. We now live in a society in which thinking things that were commonly understood a generation ago, is used to ruin a person’s life, making them a pariah in their own community.

This erosion of social rights is not just in the public sphere. If a group of people holding unapproved thoughts wants to socialize privately, the bigots will seek them out and call down the rock throwers on them. This story from Michigan is typical. These people are going to great lengths to avoid drawing attention to themselves, yet the local progressives are hunting them down, hoping to prevent them from having a private dinner together. Iran has more social liberty.

Of course, the war on social rights is just the start. The orchestrated assault on the nation’s oldest political rights organization is one example of the effort to extend the denial of social rights to the denial of political rights. The ongoing legal effort to deny Americans their civil rights, based on their thoughts, is another aspect to this war on our general liberties. The plaintiffs are asking the court to create a new legal status for heretics, which denies them the rights and privileges of citizenship.

Now, the reason Western societies evolved political systems that respect civil rights and allow for near universal participation in politics is to reduce political violence. When the working class can organize around the candidates of their choice, they do not have to stage bread riots. When minority groups can expect equality before the law, they do not have to make war on the majority. Participatory democracy, in theory, gives everyone a stake in the system and a reason to defend it against subversion.

What is happening today is a unilateral declaration that a growing list of opinions and ideas are off-limits. Anyone that embraces them, or is suspected of embracing them, is outside the sphere to which civil, political and social rights apply. These outside people become fair game, as they have no legal avenue to seek redress. A person who loses his job because he agrees with what his grandfathers thought, is quickly becoming a man without a country.

In this Tucker Carlson profile, he makes the point that he lives in a great neighborhood with smart wonderful neighbors. It is America as it was in 1955, so naturally the people living there are deeply satisfied with their work as a ruling elite. The reason for that is they have no idea what is happening out in the hinterlands. They avoid the consequences of their preferred polices. If hordes of migrants show up in their schools, they will not be so self-satisfied.

The same logic applies to what is happening in this social war being waged against political dissidents. The people hounding schoolteachers out of their jobs can feel self-satisfied, because they get to avoid the same treatment. The people harassing companies to break ties with the heretics, have no skin in the game, so they are free to overindulge in righteous indignation. At some point, this leads to violence, either against the victims or by the victims.

That is why the current climate is so dangerous. Nature supplies more men with nothing to lose than any society can need. A political system that systematically marginalizes large swaths of young men, telling them they have no place in the world, is a society begging for political violence. Rebecca Klein of the Huffington Post may be feeling smug, for having “outed” a bad thinker, but she is not going to be so smug when her Prius blows up when she tries to start it.

During the Civil Rights Movement, there came a point where the people in charge faced a choice. They could let reasonable men on both sides find an accommodation, or they could let the unreasonable men on both sides fight it out. Today, the people in charge have that same choice. They can put their unreasonable people on a leash and deal honestly with the reasonable people in dissent, or they can continue to wage this social war and invite the war into their streets and their neighborhoods.

This will not end well.

The Public Square

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If you wanted to start a delivery service, you would need vehicles of some sort to make your deliveries. You would need to hire drivers and people to help figure out the logistics of delivering whatever it is you intend to deliver. The other thing you would need is permits to operate your delivery vehicles on the road. The reason for that is the roads belong to the public. The job of the state is to maintain the roads and part of that is regulating how the roads are used. That means you have to obey the rules in order to use the roads.

This may seem obvious, but it is not something that was always obvious. For most of human history, the concept of a “public good” did not exist. In a feudal economy, everything belongs to the king or lord. The common grazing lands would be used by everyone, but they belonged to the king and so did the animals. The military, which defended the king’s lands, was the king’s army, because it was explicitly for the use of the king to defend his possessions. In feudalism, there were no public goods.

Under communism, in theory at least, everything is a public good. The people own the land and the capital that is accumulated through labor. In reality this is a fiction, of course, as it is the state that owns everything. The party controls the state and those who control the party essentially own everything. This is not a lot different from feudalism, except that the guy in charge is not the leader of “his people” in the ethnic sense. Otherwise, all goods, excludable and nonexcludable are held by whoever runs the party.

It is only in participatory government where we have to think about public goods. Things like parks, highways, seaports, rivers, the military and even the air are considered public goods. How these are used and regulated is determined by the people’s representatives in government. All of us get the benefit of these things so all of us have a say in how they are regulated. It is why a city has to issue permits for parades and protests, when the participants are unpopular. Even the ugly and annoying get to use public goods.

The concept of public goods, like the concept of participatory government, did not spring from nothing. It evolved over time as people worked through how to conserve and manage things like natural resources. The American national park system was created because it solved the problem of managing the great natural wonders of the country. The government manages fisheries, because we slowly figured out, due to overfishing, that even the coastal waterways are public goods and must managed as such.

This notion of public goods is what drives the idea of universal suffrage. The government itself is seen as a public good. The military does not just protect property holders or natives. The police do not just patrol the streets of land owning white males. If all of us are going to get use of the government, good and ill, then all of us should have some say in how the government runs, within reasonable limits. We bar criminals from voting, for the same reason we ban the insane from voting. These are exceptions that prove the rule.

This link between democracy and public goods is important to keep in mind when thinking about the on-going efforts by Progressives to shut-off dissent from the Internet. Like trucking companies, outfits like YouTube could not exist without the information superhighway, owned by all of us. It is why these big content providers fight to prevent the ISP’s from throttling their content. If Comcast can block Netflix from its networks, Comcast can suddenly operate like a protection racket, stripping these services of their profits.

Now, it is reasonable to demand companies like YouTube pay some special tax for their use of the Internet. They use this resource way out of proportion than anyone else, so a special use tax is a way to address it. Trucking companies pay special use taxes, because heavy trucks are more damaging to the road than your car. Similarly, parade organizers are often charged for police details and other security measures, because these are above and beyond normal use of the streets.

Like the parade route or the public park, there is an overriding issue and that is these public goods are intertwined with our democratic form of government. Controlling access to the park for a rally, is no different than controlling access to the public square for a political speech or access to the ballot for a political party. Even if a public park is managed by a private operator, a common thing these days, the rules governing this public good still apply. Regardless of who cuts the grass, the park is ours.

That is what needs to apply to these large social media companies. Like it or not, the internet is now the public square. These services like Twitter and YouTube only exist because the public square exists and the concept of the public good exists. If Twitter goes away tomorrow, the internet still exists. If the internet goes away tomorrow, all of the social media platforms go with it. In this regard, they are no different from a vendor operating in a public park. They must abide by the same rules as the public.

As far as the argument that these are private companies goes, well, that is true, but again, they cannot exist without this commonly held thing called the internet. If Facebook had to build out its own infrastructure to deliver cat videos and virility ads to your grandmother, it would have to charge granny millions for the service. In other words, these services benefit from this public utility we call the internet, the trade-off for them, like a public broadcaster, is they have to adhere to the rules the public sets for regulating that utility.

The rules we apply to holding rallies in public parks, holding parades on public streets and issuing permits for conducting commerce on public thoroughfares need to be applied to businesses that operate on-line. If Twitter wants to charge users like a private club, then they can impose ideological rules. If they want to operate as a public square, then they must operate like one. This is the California model that is now going to be used in a lawsuit against Twitter. It needs to be the model nationally so we can have a public square back.

Reality Returns

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All of the usual suspects are freaking out over Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum. Most of it is by silly people. Some of it is simply the innumerate throwing yet another tantrum about the bad man who vexes them. Some of the hysteria is due to the fact that people in the chattering classes were sure they had talked this bit of reality into going away for good. Reality, however, is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it. The reality of trade is now back.

The amusing thing about trade debates among the chattering classes is that they never bother to mention the trade-offs that come with trade policy. Trade is like any other public policy. It is all about trade-offs. Our rulers, however, were sure they had sacralized their preferred set of trade-offs a long time ago. It turns out that the only people on whom this worked were the innumerate numskulls in the press. The rest of us remain skeptical about “free trade.”

Trade between countries is a net benefit to both countries. Open trade with Canada means they can sell more beaver hats and hockey sticks to Americans, thus making the typical Canadian richer. Similarly, it means Americans can sell more apple pies and boomsticks to Canadians, thus making the typical American richer. In reality, there will be Canadians who suffer from free trade with America and Americans who also suffer in the exchange. That is how the world works.

While the hockey playing folks of northern Virginia will benefit from cheap hockey sticks from Canada, the suddenly unemployed hockey stick makers in Minnesota are the ones paying the price for it. Similarly, the apple growers of Canada get stuck with the bill for the suddenly cheap apple products in Toronto. The hidden cost of free trade is a lot of people you do not know losing their jobs. When you are the guy getting the pink slip, the cost is not hidden and that has a social cost, as well.

Now, trade can be beneficial to both countries in that it promotes efficiency. The lazy and unscrupulous hockey stick makers in Maine, suddenly have to compete with the crafty canucks. This means better hockey sticks, but also less waste. Protectionism, like all public polices, comes with a cost too. That cost is more often than not carried by the consumer. Worse yet, it often promotes the sorts of corruption of public officials that erodes public trust in institutions.

That is why the ruling class is in a panic over the Trump trade policies. It is not about the cost of steel and aluminum. It is not about the possibility of retaliation. The real fear here is that Trump is re-opening the debate about trade. It means all of these trade-offs that come with trade between nations will have to be discussed. The billionaire class that has benefited from the current set of polices, is in no mood to defend their fiefs from the rabble. So, in waddles the clown army.

The current trade regime, has proven to be the boondoggle critics like Pat Buchanan warned about 30 years ago. Open trade with Canada, an English-speaking first world country, is mostly beneficial. Trade with Mexico, a third world narco-state that now operates as a pirate’s cove, has been a disaster. NAFTA has made Mexico a massive loophole in American labor, tax, environmental and trade policy. A loophole ruthlessly exploited by alien predators like China.

The current trade regime is also at the heart of the cosmopolitan globalism that seeks to reduce nations to a fiction and people to economic inputs. This neoliberal orthodoxy has eroded social capital to the point where the white middle class is nearing collapse. It is not just America. The collapsing fertility rates in the Occident are part of the overall cultural collapse going in the West. Slapping tariffs on Chinese steel is not going to arrest this trend, but it does open the door a debate about it.

That is the reality our betters would like to avoid. What defines France is the shared character and shared heritage of the people we call French. What defines a people is not the cost of goods or the price of labor. What defines a people is what they love together and what they hate together. It is the collection of tastes and inclinations, no different than family traditions, which have been cultivated and passed down from one generation to the next.

Even putting the cultural arguments aside, global capitalism erodes the civic institutions that hold society together. Instead of companies respecting the laws of host nations and working to support the welfare of the people of that nation, business is encouraged to cruise the world looking for convenient ports. There is a word for this type of work. It is called piracy. Global firms flit from port to port, with no interest other than the short term gain to be made at that stop. Globalism is rule by pirates.

That is the reason for the panic in the media. To question “free trade” is to question the arrangements that keeps the current regime in place. It may seem like a small thing, tariffs on steel, but it is the sort of thing that can unravel the entire project, because it legitimizes the sorts of questions that threaten the regime. To his credit, Trump seems to get this, which is why he has pressed ahead with this. He is flipping over an important table in this fight.

Not My President

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There is a debate in dissident circles about the political acumen and the integrity of President Trump. One side looks at all the zigzagging and flip-flopping on DACA and concludes that Trump is just a liar, who has figured out how to con well-meaning white Boomers. The other side looks at the same issue and sees a strategy intended to move the ball forward on the immigration issue as a whole. His latest antics over the gun issue, however, suggest that is he is just a stupid bullshitter who got lucky.

The gun issue has always been the one thing in American politics where you can reveal both the integrity and the intelligence of someone. Gun grabbers are always very stupid or very dishonest. Sometimes they are both. The 2A people are often just reflexively opposed to gun grabbing, without having thought it through, but gun grabbers are never honest or informed. It is the main reason that the NRA has been successful. They have been blessed with an enemy incapable of honesty and unwilling to learn the facts.

Now, that enemy includes President Trump.

Trump knows even less about the gun issue than he does about marital fidelity, so no one on the 2A side figured he would be our champion. The assumption was that he knew enough to avoid the topic and not get in bed with the gun grabbers. On an issue like guns, doing nothing is usually the best course. Most states are sensible on guns, so letting the states handle it is good for us. Instead, it turns out that Trump is making the classic Republican error of taking advice from his enemies.

It would be one thing if Trump did the rope-a-dope, promising to sign a bill that everyone knows has no chance of becoming reality. Shining people on like he is doing with DACA is standard politics. This gun grabbing lunacy he is spouting is damaging to the cause of gun owners and it reveals Trump to be a mendacious blockhead, with no idea why he is in the White House. It is no longer possible to argue that his maneuverings are super-clever 4-D chess. Trump is simply an unreliable liar.

What is most offensive to the 2A community about what Trump is doing is that he is legitimizing that which our side has worked for generations to de-legitimize. One is using non-democratic methods to get around the people on gun control. His plan to ban bump-stocks by fiat is dangerous lunacy on its face. Worse yet, his endorsement of extra-judicial confiscation of guns on mental health grounds, elevates a crackpot scheme of the Left to something worthy of public debate.

Put another way, this jackass has undone generations of hard work by the very people who put him in office. Not even that feckless nitwit George Bush did something this egregiously stupid. Even Barak Obama was unwilling to go this far. This idiocy is right up there with Poppy Bush breaking his tax promise in order to get the Democrats in Washington to like him. It worked. They loved him, which was why he was a one term president. Trump is now setting himself up to follow Bush into the void of stupidity.

Now, the counter argument you will hear is that Trump is just playing more 4-D chess and this will amount to nothing. Well, a smart politician would know enough to not do that with this issue. This is not a parlor game. The pro-gun voter has no sense of humor on this stuff and they have zero tolerance for limp-wristed politicians too afraid of the girls to do the right thing. Speaking only for myself, I would vote for a gay black Muslim over Trump right now. That is right. I would vote for Obama over Trump.

I think everyone who voted for Trump understood they were getting a guy who would be long on bullshit and short on tangible accomplishments. The point of voting for him was to send a message, but also legitimize populist issues. Trump was the guy who would flip over the tables and discredit the status quo, opening the door for ambitious politicians to run on patriotic issues like immigration reform. Trump would maybe do a few things, but the real work would be up to those who come next.

So far, Trump is looking like he is not going to deliver anything other than blowing his own horn every day. Worse yet, the trade-off for his vanity will be the undermining of the one cause that truly defines what is left of old stock America. By legitimizing gun-grabbing and executive fiat, he has just made it possible for the next President Obama to DACA the gun issue, by issuing new gun laws via executive order. Trump is proving to be one step forward and ten steps backward.

The one lesson of the Trump era is to not put too much stock in what Trump says. He is, after all, a bullshitter. He is also a guy who will wheel on a dime if he senses he is on the wrong side. He is rather shameless in that regard. Still, the damage he has done to the cause of gun rights is incalculable and it will not be forgotten. Unless he eventually signs off on some bold pro-gun laws, lots of his voters will choose to spend next election day at the range, rather than cast a vote for a duplicitous gun grabber.

Things Are Looking Up

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A pretty good rule of politics is that your enemies will always give you terrible advice. It is a lesson the so-called conservatives and Republicans have never learned. The Left offers them advice and they jump at the chance to take it. The corollary to this is you know you are doing something right when your enemies try to steal your issues. The Tories figured out that UKIP was getting traction on immigration, so they moved right on the issue and offered a referendum on Europe. It worked, even though it tanked Cameron’s career.

We have not seen much of that since the start of the populist revolt led by Trump in the GOP primaries. In fact, the GOP went the other way. The higher Trump’s polls rose, the more they rejected Trump’s issues. It was a weird thing, but the Republicans are not called the stupid party by accident. Even after he won, his own party is struggling to come to terms with the new reality. The Left, in contrast, is good at politics, so seeing some rumblings on the their side about adopting nationalist themes is interesting.

Across the Western world, center-left parties are in trouble: In Germany, Austria, France, and the Netherlands, social democrats have suffered historic electoral defeats. Right-wing populists, meanwhile, have scored a series of victories, including Trump’s election, the vote for Brexit, and the continuing erosion of liberal democratic institutions in Hungary and Poland.

But while many people take for granted an inherent contradiction between nationalism and left-wing politics, there simply isn’t one, either historically or philosophically. Throughout the 20th century, progressives mobilized for social justice most successfully when they spoke in the name of national solidarity rather than focusing exclusively on class-based interests or on abstract notions of justice. Left-wingers often cite the adage that patriotism is the last resort of the scoundrel — and with good reason. But it is important to also remember that a deep sense of national commitment underpins the egalitarian institutions we hold dear.

The historian Michael Kazin put it mildly when he wrote that patriotism “is not a popular sentiment on the contemporary left.” The influential British left-wing commentator George Monbiot has equated patriotism with racism: To give in to patriotism, he writes, is to deny the plain truth “that someone living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington.”

Yet in giving up on appeals to national solidarity, the left has forgotten the basic political argument that served it so well in the past: that out of the ties that bind together our national communities emerges a deep commitment to the well-being, welfare, and social esteem of our fellow citizens. This recognizes a basic moral intuition: We have deep and encompassing obligations to those we consider our own, based on a shared sense of membership in a community of fate — or more simply, based on our shared national identity.

American Progressives are pegged as fanatical ideologues, but that misses an essential feature of the American Left. They can turn on a dime and reverse course if it has practical value. In the Clinton years, Bill Clinton scoffed at homosexual marriage. Even Obama seemed to be revolted by the idea. Yet, they spun around on a dime and embraced the whole rainbow collation of sexual deviants when it suited them. Hillary Clinton ran her 2016 campaign on the not so subtle theme that she was an old lesbian.

Bernie Sanders did a lot of damage in the 2016 primary because he had a reputation for left-wing populism. You can be sure that he regrets abandoning his closed borders position that he held for decades. There’s a good bet he would have done much better if he had embraced a halt to immigration as a way to help the working class. The alt-right guys will tell you that some of guys came to their thing from the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democrat coalition. You can bet Democrats have noticed this as well.

None of this should suggest the Left is about to go alt-right, but when old liberal warhorses are on the ropes, because the “New Americans” are voting for their own, you can be sure there is some soul searching going on now. The math says the coalition of fringes only works if the fringe types are just a supplement to the core white vote that has always voted Democrat. Once the fringes decide they want to be in charge, and they have the numbers to make it happen, there’s no room for whitey at the top of the party.

It’s hard to know where this will go. The Left is committed to identity politics and to open borders, but that does not mean they cannot find a way to adopt populist and even nationalist language. On the other hand, the Left has pivoted on issues when practical politics demanded it. Regardless, It really does not matter from the point of view of populists and nationalists. If the other side is trying to figure out how to steal these issues, it means these issues are working. It means we’re doing something right.

How Long?

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There are two rules of modern life, with regards to public debate. One is the Opposite Rule of Liberalism. Whatever the Left is howling about at the moment, imagine the opposite and you are probably getting closer to the truth. The other rule is that the cops rarely arrest a first time offender. Usually, someone caught in some sort of skullduggery has been at it for a long time. The law of averages simply caught up with them and he was arrested for the first time.

The first rule is an easy one, as we see with the FBI corruption case. Progressive fanatics accused the Trump people of colluding with Russia to undermine the election, but it looks like it was the Democrats who were doing deals with foreigners in an effort to subvert the election. It’s hard to know if this is just a very elaborate cover for the Uranium One deal or simple sedition, but the FBI, CIA and at least one Democrat Congressman were willing to cut deals with the Russians.

The second rule is now central. What is clear at this point in the FBI scandal is that Comey, McCabe, Strzok and Page were dirty. They cooked up a scheme to game the FISA court, so they could spy on Trump and his people. What is unknown is the complete narrative and the role of each player in the scheme. Another thing that is clear is they were exceedingly cavalier about what they were doing. Their recklessness is astonishing for people in their world.

Maybe they were just true believers who became increasingly berserk with passion for the task. Despite their titles, these people are career middle managers and this was their first taste of real action. On the other hand, the image that emerges from the texts between Strzok and Page suggests they did not see this caper as that big of a deal. There is no trace of a guilty mind. Instead, even in their cover-up efforts, you see just the bureaucrat’s concern for petty office politics.

Then there is the General Flynn issue. The whole case has been weird from the start, as Flynn is a guy thought to be a straight shooter. Yet, he gets charged with lying to the FBI, over something innocuous. Now we are are learning the FBI and possibly Robert Mueller sandbagged Flynn, using fake FBI records to compel a guilty plea. This “new information” used by the Federal judge does not appear to have come from Mueller, but rather the Inspector General.

Even if Mueller is just a dupe, and that seems increasingly implausible, it means he staffed his team with dirty cops from the FBI. It also means he staffed his team with dirty lawyers and political hacks from the former administration. After all, those lawyers had to be aware of what the FBI was doing to entrap Flynn. The picture emerging here is of an FBI and a DOJ stocked to the gills with people who struggle to understand the difference between a lie and the truth.

That brings us to the title of this post. How long has this sort of thing been going on and what other scandals are there? We know the Obama administration weaponized the IRS in an elaborate scheme to undermine Republican groups. We also know the whole thing was broomed by the FBI and DOJ. Knowing that those two organizations have been corrupt for a long time now puts the IRS scandal in a new light. What we may have seen was a cover-up in plain sight.

What about the 2012 election? We know that Team Obama was nervous about re-election after the debacle of the 2010 midterms. There were meetings immediately after to figure out how to get Obama a second term. One result was the overt use of the race card that eventually led to the plague of murders carried out by black lunatics, under the banner Black Lives Matter. How do we know the Feds were not also playing games with Team Romney. Maybe that computer crash was not just bad design.

Then there is the one story that has never made any sense. That is the case of Judge Roberts reversing course in the ObamaCare decision. He writes an opinion striking down the individual mandate, circulates it around and then suddenly changes course and supports the mandate. It was a such a bizarre turn of events that the dissent just used his brief as the basis of the dissenting opinion. People who investigate blackmail and extortion schemes look for these sorts of anomalous changes in behavior.

One of the lessons of Watergate is that the sort of shenanigans the Nixon people were doing had become so commonplace, they were getting reckless and brazen. The Kennedy clan loved wiretapping opponents. Hoover, of course, was basically the official blackmailer of Washington. The brazen disregard for law and order by the Obama people and the Clinton people suggests a culture of corruption that started long before Strzok and Page decided to become the Bonnie and Clyde of the FBI.

What was needed after the election was a truth a reconciliation commission. The point of this commission would be to clear the air. Everyone in the government class would have a chance to come forward and admit to their crimes, in order to receive a pardon for those crimes. It would allow the public to finally see the full scope of the corruption and begin the public debate over how to reform a very corrupt political class. That is looking like a good idea now.

Anarcho-Mendacity

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It used to be that conservatives held one piece of high ground in the long running intellectual civil war in the West. For all their faults, they maintained that the ruling elite of any society had a duty to safeguard the interests of the people. That was the check on social experimentation and overturning of traditional institutions. The interests of the people demanded prudence and a deference to the people’s traditional ways of living, in order to guard their interests.

Looking back at the intellectual battles in the West, the one thing the sides were forced to agree upon was that the duty of the state, the ruling class and social reformers, was to safeguard the interest of the people. After all, what would be the point of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, if it immiserated the proletariat? It was not just a material argument either. Much the critique of communism from conservatives was on cultural and moral grounds.

That is probably why libertarianism was always on the sidelines, more of a commentary than a serious political philosophy.  It was a set of running commentaries on the great works of political economy produced by socialists, communists and Marxists. Frédéric Bastiat does not make a lot of sense in isolation. His significance is only in contrast to 19th century industrial socialism and the reaction to it from the Right. Libertarianism is the peanut gallery of the Enlightenment.

It is why, in the fullness of time, the story of the collapse of mainstream conservatism will include a chapter on the error of fusionism. By grafting onto the Right, libertarian arguments about economics and individual liberty, the Right invited a cancer that gnawed away at its legitimate claims to proper elitism and traditionalism. In other words, they forfeited the one piece of high ground they held. You see this in the debates over immigration. The so-called conservatives no longer have the tools to argue the issue.

This piece at Reason Magazine is a good way of understanding the problem. Nick Gillespie is not a serious person, but he is one of the leading voices of American libertarianism. He is embraced by the so-called conservatives a fellow traveler, even if they have minor quibbles. His response to the immigration debate is a dog’s breakfast of mendacity and incoherence. The most charitable way to view his article is that he has never bothered to examine the issue, so he is pulling this out of his ear.

Of course, this is mostly true. Libertarians have not spent a lot of time thinking about immigration and that is because they long ago embraced the materialist view of humanity that animated left-wing ideologies since Marx. From the perspective of modern libertarians, people are just interchangeable meat sticks with no intrinsic value. The measure of a man is his economic utility. A factory worker from Bangladesh is no more or less useful than one from Bangor Maine. Whittaker Chambers was right about them.

It is when they are forced to address an issue like immigration that something else is revealed about libertarians. They are not honest. That which contradicts the faith is denounced or discarded, Gillespie’s first point is an example of this. It used to be an article of faith that the laws of supply and demand apply to everything, including labor. Therefore, the only reason business would want foreign labor is that it is cheaper. The reason they like illegal foreign labor is that it is even cheaper than legal foreign labor.

The innumeracy is one thing, but Gillespie is also conjuring a straw man. Yes, wages are one element, but no one makes that the focus of their brief against open borders. He also relies on two logical fallacies that gets a college sophomore flunked out of class. “Virtually all economists, regardless of ideology, agree that immigrants, both legal and illegal, have little to no effect on overall wages” is not an argument. It is a recitation of a spurious Progressive talking point that has shot down many times.

The mendacity is on full display when Gillespie addresses the rule of law. The very core of the libertarian critique of socialism is that it does not abide by the orderly administration of the law. Socialism is an ends justifies the means philosophy, so it cannot, by definition, respect the law. It is why flouting the law can never be tolerated. If a law is found to be unjust or improper, then there is an orderly way correct the error, a lawful way to address the natural mistakes that arise in any social organization.

Gillespie’s argument, with regards to illegal immigration is an embrace of anarchy. In this case, he thinks the immigration system is inefficient or incompetent, so that justifies the wholesale abrogation of the law. No reasonable person would argue the immigration system is logical or coherent. That is the reason for this reform effort that is at the heart of the national populism. By cavalierly rejecting efforts to reform the law, embracing a form of deliberate chaos, Gillespie reveals libertarianism to be nothing more than anarchism.

This gets back to the original point. The legitimacy of any ruling class lies in its execution of its duty to its people. A monarch loses his crown, and maybe his head, when it becomes clear that he is serving a narrow interest over the general good. The current managerial class is losing its legitimacy as it becomes clear that it not longer sees itself as having a duty to the people. A stable society is one that embraces a bi-directional hierarchy of duties. There is no place for selfish, materialistic creeds like libertarianism.

This is something the alt-right gets that no one bothers to notice. They often talk about this duty that a people have to one another and their posterity. It is something that the Founders understood, which is why they wrote this in the preamble of the US Constitution. This is why so many of the alt-right started out in libertarianism. They learned all this stuff about the Founding and natural rights, then figured out that modern libertarians really do not believe it. It was just a sales pitch to move product. That is why we have an alt-right.

Political Violence

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Why is George Soros still alive?

For most of human history, a person who caused trouble for rulers found himself either on the run or on a pike. An earl or prince that made trouble for the king was dragged before the king, humiliated and then hanged. If he fought back, then the king sacked his lands, killed his family and made an even bigger spectacle of killing the troublemaker. After all, the point of political power is to reward your allies and punish your enemies. Yet, George Soros, an international troublemaker, is free to make trouble wherever he likes.

The obvious reply to that is civilized nations no longer rely on political assassinations to handle their business. Political leaders have a self interest in discouraging the practice of killing heads of state. If ruler X has ruler Y killed, because it advantages him, the other rulers have no choice but to band together and kill ruler X. Otherwise, it is a lawless world of all against all. President Gerald Ford issued an executive order in 1976 prohibiting US intelligence services from conducting political assassinations for this reason.

That makes sense with legitimate political leaders, but George Soros is a rootless grifter, who has no allegiance to any government. Killing him would be no different than droning a terrorist. Some argue that international law prohibits targeted assassinations, but international law is mostly meaningless. The Israelis have been using targeted assassination against whoever they like for a long time, including the murder of Canadian engineer Gerald Bull. The US has droned more Arabs than we can count.

The most likely answer is that George Soros is not seen as anything more than a nuisance and only to certain members of the political class. He may be a billionaire, but he has no armies and he has no real reach. He is smart enough to know that, so he makes sure to keep on good terms with the right people. It is fair to assume that he is a master at not pissing off the wrong people. The proof of that is he has not suffered from whatever the Europeans call Arkancide. Still, no one stays lucky forever, yet Soros still lives.

It is not just Soros. What we do not see in the current age is any political assassinations in the West. For that matter, there are no attempts to take out an important person. The last such example in America was Patty Hearst and there is some question as to the reality of her kidnapping. Maybe there have been some recent cases of rich people targeted in Europe for political reasons, but none spring to mind. You would think with all the Muslim fanatics lurking around that some of them would decide to target a rich person.

It is a strange thing that makes even less sense when you consider the realities of the modern age. In the 1970’s, someone like Squeaky Fromme taking a shot at Ford had a certain logic to it. Today, killing the president does not make a lot of sense. Sure, Trump is a critical component of the current fight, but generally the head of state is nothing but the part of the iceberg we see. The real political power is the cabal of rich people under the waterline, controlling things out of site of the public. Regicide has no value these days.

On the other hand, blowing up a few important political influencers in the Imperial Capital would have an enormous impact. Imagine back in the Bush years if opponents of the war, started targeting neocons. Alternatively, think about the impact it would have if Muslim terrorists blew up Mark Zuckerberg. Sure, taking down an airliner is a big show, but it is really hard. Killing some billionaires is a lot easier and the impact is much more significant, assuming you kill the right billionaires. It never happens though.

Of course, we could be in a transition period as the world of political violence adjusts to the changing nature of politics. Thirty years ago, it made a lot of sense for political terrorists to attack civilian targets. The IRA and the Basques separatists lacked the capacity to take on the state, so they attacked the people in effort to put pressure on the state. Today, the state is not the only player and not the most important player in most of the world. Maybe political actors have not yet internalized the new global order.

The decline in political violence in the West sounds like a good thing. Most people would prefer it if car bombs were not going off in their cities. Even if heads of state are off limits, killing important political figures is destabilizing. The rise of a global order not only reduced the need for violence between countries. It may have reduced the need for violence within countries, as the political factions merged into a unified managerial ruling class. Rule by hyper-educated bureaucrat means disputes are handled over cappuccinos.

This may not be a good thing. For all of human history, power brought risk. The higher someone climbed the hierarchy, the greater their responsibilities and the greater their personal risk. The very real threat of personal violence had a tempering effect. Today, people in the managerial elite do not have to worried about getting fired, much less assassinated. They occupy a world where no one is ever held accountable for their actions. As a result, they have become dangerously cavalier about their duties.

In fact, the main feature of the on-going domestic espionage scandal of the last administration is the brazen and reckless way the players went about it. High moral character is what leads good men do the right thing when no one is looking. Fear of the hangman is what leads lesser men do the right thing when no one is looking. In the political game, personal risk has always been what weeds the reckless and dangerous from the game. That has been removed so our political class is full of reckless and stupid people.

Nature has a way of correcting itself. If a species evolves down a dead end, something else evolves to replace it. Maybe what comes next is a new brand of political violence that meets the needs of the managerial state. Instead of people shooting political players, managerial class types will get snuffed out when going for their mocha latte. The assassination of Seth Rich could turn out to be the model. Maybe what will evolve to provide vigor and discipline to the managerial state is a grad school version of Arkancide.

The Fate Of The NeoCons

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The term “neocon” has been a fixture of political debates in America for the last 40 years, being both an epithet, sobriquet and honorific. In the 80’s, a white person in the commentariat using the term was doing so as a stand in for “hawkish liberal Jews” and he would most likely be called an anti-Semite. It became important to neocons for people not to notice they were all liberal Jews. After the Cold War, Progressives started attacking the neocons, so the squealing about antisemitism lost its potency.

The truth is the original neocons were never conservative. Many were Trotskyists, but most were just very liberal Jews who wanted to use up America’s wealth to fight their ancient enemy, the Russian empire. Otherwise, they embraced the cosmopolitan Progressivism emerging on the Left. Probably the most generous description of neoconservatives was that they were anti-communists, who integrated into traditional conservatism in the effort to prosecute the Cold War. That was the spin, at least.

The years since the end of the Cold War has revealed them to be something else. The berserk, preternatural hatred of Russia is now a major component of neocon arguments, which is why they never shut up about Putin. After the Cold War, neocons opposed efforts to integrate Russia into the modern global economy and they have advocated in favor a hostile foreign policy toward Russia. They backed intervention in South Ossetia and they were behind the coup in Ukraine that has plunged the country into chaos.

Neoconservatism has also curdled into a bizarre hatred of Trump, with many neocons indulging in the most bizarre conspiracy theories. The people defending the FBI in conservative publications are all neocons. Here’s Ben Shapiro defending the FBI. Here’s Jonah Goldberg defending the coup plotters. Of course, the chief nutter of the NeverTrump club is Bill Kristol, whose son-in-law bought dirt on Trump from the now infamous Democrat dirty tricks operation, FusionGPS.

In the interest of accuracy, a major cause of neocon hatred of Trump is money. For eight years these guys were rubbing their hands together thinking about the great jobs they would land in the Jeb Bush administration. Jonah Goldberg’s old lady spent 2015 shopping for outfits, anticipating a six figure job in the next Republican administration. When you add up the book deals, salary, speaking gigs and insider dealing, Trump was a million dollar catastrophe for each of the leading lights of neoconservatism. Of course, they are mad.

That can explain some of the bitterness over Trump, but none of these guys are skipping any meals. John “Thanks Dad” Podhoretz takes $400,000 a year in salary just from his limited work at Commentary. Goldberg lives in a seven figure home in one of the most elite suburbs on earth. Max Boot just signed on with the Washington Post, where he probably makes $250,000 per year to write a weekly column. All of these guys were born into the world of “high pay, but low work” lifestyles that define the commentariat.

What really vexes them, is the fact they can no longer hide in the weeds of Buckley Conservatism. They used to be able to pass themselves off as conventional conservatives, who just had an active interest in foreign policy. Now, it is eminently clear that there is nothing conservative about them in the least. Whatever hand waving they offer in favor of traditionalism and normalcy, is always in the form of “Of course we should defend X, but let’s not waste political capital on that when we should be doing…”

Reverting to their liberal roots is one thing, but it is hard to see what is American about them, given their advocacy against Americans. When a central plank of your philosophy is that native stock Americans need to be replaced, you are un-American. Steve Sailer once described neoconservatism as “invade the world, invite the world” and it was an excellent observation. The growing recognition of this truth seems to be turning neocons in to outright, anti-white bigots. They despise you for noticing what is happening to you.

You see it in this Jonah Goldberg column the other day. The debate over immigration has made plain to white voters that the divide in Washington is between those celebrating the “browning of America” and those who oppose it. The Trump Effect is making that increasingly clear to voters. The people opposing Team Brown, want to preserve their communities and their culture. There is nothing more conservative than that, but the neocons have now taken to calling this a cult, an obvious reference to you know who.

Neoconservatism has come a long way from when Irving Kristol wrote “Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed ‘Neoconservative'” in 1979. The world has changed since the concepts that came to define neoconservatism were developed. Of course, all of the guys who founded it are dead. The people leading the movement today are mostly the ne’er do well sons of the founding generation of thinkers. The “Thanks Dad Chorus” that is modern neoconservatism is a good example of reversion to the mean.

Of course, what Eric Hoffer observed about causes is true of the neocons. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” In fact, this is true of the entire ecosystem that is mainstream conservatism. The Buckley crowd are just squeezing out every last dime from National Review, trading on nostalgia to fleece Baby Boomers of donations. Commentary Magazine has a dwindling readership of septuagenarians worried that Hitler really did not die in that bunker.

Even so, Jews in America have faced little in the way of Antisemitism. That is something white Americans have always celebrated. So much so that no one thought much of the emergence of Jewish triumphalism in the last decades. If that triumphalism curdles into anti-white ethnocentrism, then that could change. When you see a guy like Jonah Goldberg appropriating the title of James Burnham book for his next screed against white people, you have to suspect this is all going to end poorly.

Something’s Happening Here

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True believers are incapable of accepting disconfirmation. The reason for this is their individual identity becomes so entangled in the cause, that anything contradicting the cause is viewed as a personal assault. That’s why Progressives react to contacts with reality as if they have been violently assaulted. For them, there is no line separating themselves and the cause. An assault on the cause, even just contrary facts, is felt like a kick to the groin. It’s why Progressive women equate free speech with violence.

There’s another product of this and that’s the inability to adapt to political reality. They set off on a course, with a pleasing narrative in their head, and stick with it no matter what happens. This delusional determination is why the Left keeps at their pet causes with a great deal of success, but it is also why they eventually burn themselves out in an orgy of recrimination. They can’t let go of the dream, even when the cause is lost, so they look for people to blame. You see that in this Atlantic piece.

Remember “this is not normal?”

A year ago, it was the motto of the self-styled “Resistance”—the coalition of liberals, Democrats, and a few wayward conservatives who were implacably opposed to the Trump administration. The endless refrain represented the refusal to countenance Trump as an ordinary political actor. Doing so, they feared, would eventually lead to the acceptance of racism, xenophobia, corruption, and authoritarianism as a regular and unremarkable feature of politics and society.

People articulating  such views were easy to find—online, on the front pages, and on the streets. The day after President Trump’s inauguration, the Women’s March turned into one of the largest nationwide demonstrations in American history. A week later, tens of thousands of people turned up at airports to oppose and obstruct Trump’s Muslim ban. By harnessing this unqualified opposition, Democrats were able to score shocking political and policy victories: stealing a Senate seat in Alabama, saving Obamacare, winning deep-red districts in state races, and coming close to taking the Virginia House of Delegates in the face of heavy gerrymandering.
And yet, today, in the highest circles of Democratic party politics, resistance is waning. “This is normal enough,” many key Democrats seem to be saying. When Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote in advance of Trump’s State of the Union several weeks ago, he focused on finding ways to “work with” the president, such as infrastructure.

The lunatics are sure they are winning. It is written in the prophecies. How can their elected leaders not see this? Why are they quitting just when victory is at hand? Of course, that’s not reality, but reality is far too unpleasant to accept, so they are re-imagining the present in order to hold onto the dream. The Democrat leaders, especially Chuck Schumer, they know what’s happening. Thanks to Trump’s political maneuvering, white voters now see the Democrats as the Brown Party.

The outcome of any final immigration deal is unknown, in part because Democrats voluntarily relinquished much of their leverage by striking a bargain on the budget. But there can be little doubt that many in the party were prepared to make serious—and politically unpopular—policy concessions to Trump. At one point, that reportedly included funding for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border (opposed by 60 percent of Americans). As it stands, Democrats in both houses appear to be on the brink of dropping demands to protect the “Dreamers,” undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children (protections that are supported by 74 percent of Americans). “He’s not asking for the kind of money that would build a wall sea to shining sea,” reasoned Missouri’s Claire McCaskill. “He’s asking for the kind of money that can say he built a wall.”

The reality is the Democrats got a better deal from the seditious Mitch McConnell than they were ever going to get from Trump, so they cut a deal with the treacherous wing of the GOP. That was smart politics, even if the lunatics in the Democrat Party refuse to accept it. As it stands, spending for the wall is now off the table for two years and there is no reason for the cucks to bring immigration issues to a vote. Basically, the cucks are doing the heavy lifting for Team Brown to undermine the patriots.

That’s depressing, but the good news here is that Chuck Schumer suddenly realized that the whites are waking up to what’s happening and they are prepared to act accordingly. That means the midterms could very well be a referendum on Team Brown’s plan to turn America into Brazil. More important, Trump seems to have figured this out too and he is now talking about making the midterm a referendum on immigration. That’s a huge change in the political culture. It speaks to just how fast things have changed in the last year.

The better news is the mouth breathers of the “resistance” movement have decided to go full jihad over immigration. They see their leaders as insufficiently enthusiastic for the great brown future. They will want to make the midterms about immigration and send a message to their leaders. For decades, immigration patriots like John Derbyshire and Peter Brimelow labored just to get politicians to mention immigration. Now we appear to be heading a big political fight about serious immigration reform.

It’s just a symbolic fight. Chad and Stacy are now talking about chain migration and wondering if it makes sense to be importing Somalis into Minnesota. Up until recent, most Americans have known nothing of visa lotteries, chain migration and visa abuse. Now the granular details of the issue are circulating in polite company. People are waking up to the fact that the nice Hindu at the 7-11, also means a village of his kinsmen settling in your town, going on welfare and turning your town into a squalid mess.

It’s a long war, but Team White has gained some ground on Team Brown.