Category Archives: Politics

The 1.3 Party System

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One of the many things that has been exposed by the Trump campaign is that America does not have a two-party political system. It has a 1.3 party system. A good example of this is how Paul Ryan probably had one of his cronies leak that lewd tape to embarrass the party nominee. Whether or not he orchestrated it is immaterial, as he clearly had foreknowledge and was prepared to pile on as soon as it was released. In fact, it looked like he was coordinating a revolt against the nominee until it became clear it was going to backfire.

This is not the normal functioning of a political party. Hillary Clinton could be caught on video, strangling a baby, and the party would rally to her side. The media would celebrate baby strangling for a week. Just look at how hard they tried to hide her severe health problems from the public. That’s how political parties are supposed to work. The role of the party is to advance all of its candidates, even the ones they don’t like all that much. John McCain is an obnoxious nutjob, but the party fully supported his candidacy.

The truth is that about a third of elected Republicans would prefer to be Democrats. Within living memory, guys like Paul Ryan would have been moderate Democrats or possibly liberal Republicans. The distance between Clinton and Ryan on the main issues of the day is tiny. Ryan and most of the party leadership are post-national globalists, just like the Democrats. Ryan would prefer to be a bit more tightfisted on some spending items than Clinton, but he has made it known, time and again, that he will not fight over these things

There is another third or more of the party that is not interested in rocking the boat. They just like the good life and generally think the status quo is pretty good, at least for them. In another age, many would have been seat warmers in the Democrat Party, but time and circumstance put them in the GOP. A guy like John Boehner, for example, would have been in the Democrat party in the 1970’s. He’s the sort of guy union boys would like as he is unpretentious and likes talking about bread and butter issues more than philosophy.

That leaves a small fraction of the party’s elected officials in Washington that are dedicated to opposing the dominant orthodoxy and its political party. The result is a guy like Jeff Sessions getting grief from his own party, because he is standing by the party’s nominee. The weirdness of this goes unnoticed in official Washington as the majority of the Imperial Capital thinks guys like Sessions are a nuisance. There are just 40 members of the House that can be described as traditional American conservatives. That’s 16% of the caucus.

Now, Gallup has been polling on ideological self-identification for a long time. The portion of the country that self-identifies as liberal is around 20% and the portion that identifies as conservative sticks around 40%. The rest are low-tax liberals and conservatives that live in liberal states. In all probability, this group of “moderates” breaks 2-to-1 to traditional American conservatism. At least, if they are given the choice between a Reagan and an Obama, for example, they would break toward Reagan.

The math suggests that about half the country has no party representing their interests. At best they have a third of one party, which happens to be controlled by the other party. The other 5/6ths of the political class speaks loudly and aggressively for the 20% of the public that identifies as liberal. As guys like Paul Ryan have made clear, they have zero interest in listening to the pleas of their conservative members. The House leadership has made it clear that the troublesome right wingers are to remain quiet and out of the way or else.

It’s why a rather poor politician like Trump has rocketed to the brink of winning the presidency. For the first time in decades, one party has put up someone that talks about issues important to the bulk of the the country in a way that is familiar to close to half, maybe more than half, of the voters. It’s also why Trump finds himself running against the leadership of his own party, the so-called conservative media and the full army of the Progressive establishment. Trump is essentially running as an independent.

Popular government cannot work when it is not popular. By that I mean the public must think their interests are being represented in the halls of power. Otherwise, it is just another form of despotism in the eyes of that portion of the public that feels excluded. What’s happening now may be a modern American version of the Conflict of the Orders. An unrepresented portion of the public is demanding to be represented and using the tools at its disposal to force reform on the established order.

Perhaps this election is a modern American version of the Day of the Tiles. Instead of throwing roof tiles at the agents of the state, the people are using the blunt weapon that is Donald Trump. In isolation it will just feel like a wacky event that means nothing, but in the fullness of time it will be viewed as a pivotal event. It’s hard to know, but what is known is that this system has lost its legitimacy because a swelling portion of the public is no longer represented by either party. That cannot last and it will not last.

Two Worlds

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I had no intention of watching the debate as I’ve seen enough of them to know they will always be “two-on-one moonbat fun.” The moderator will gang up with the Democrat to attack the Republican. Even mild nothing-burgers like Mitt Romney got the business from that fat woman on CNN. But, friends told me Trump was beating the old bag up, so I tuned in just in time to see him put the saddle on the fat cow and ride her around the debate stage. I did not watch a lot of it, but it was fun seeing the good guys win.

The thing that crept into my mind was how weird it all felt. As a normie, I know that the two airheads installed as moderators are way out there where-the-buses-don’t-run. In all probability they have been working with the Clinton campaign to try and setup Trump. Similarly, the audience questions would be hand picked and designed to help Clinton. I knew all that and I’m sure everyone watching knew it too. Yet, I got the distinct impression that the two moonbats really thought they were fooling us.

The same was true in the after debate programs. I ran through the cable channels and I saw chattering skulls swearing that Clinton had a great night. I saw others grudgingly saying that Trump did some things well. What everyone in America saw was a complete and total beat down. Even the squirrely guy with the bad wig, Frank Luntz, could not get his phony-baloney focus group to pretend it was close. I was left wondering if these people are insane and really believe this stuff, or they are just paid to lie so they lie.

Having had my fill of that nonsense, I flipped over to the sportball games and I saw an ad from the fat cow featuring a person claiming to be a Republican voting for the fat cow. The claim in the ad is Trump has autism so she is not going to vote for him. Think about that for a second. The man has been in the public eye for over three decades. He has been doing business deals all over the world. By now someone would have noticed that he has autism. Yet, they run the ad hoping that someone will believe it.

Steve Sailer has a post up about how everything the media tells us with regards to Hispanics and their voting habits is largely nonsense. If you went solely by what is broadcast by the media, you would think America is about to tilt majority Hispanic and their vote is critical. In reality, Hispanics are about two-thirds the black population and their votes don’t matter very much because they tend not to vote. As Sailer says, the media does not seem to know much about Hispanics. Alternatively, they are lying.

I think there is a third option. The media reports on the America they imagine, not the actual country. They stuff the news events into their model of reality. It’s why the British press runs laps around the US media when reporting on America. The people immersed in the American media eventually come to believe the model of the world and can’t imagine any other. The result is the people screaming at us through the megaphones often sound like crazy people, ranting about imaginary things that either don’t exist or can’t exist.

It’s not just the media. That’s the window through which we glimpse the managerial class. I’ve recently had reason to spend time among the Cloud People and I had the same feeling I get when traveling abroad. I was in a strange land with strange people,so  I was much more restrained in my speech and movement. Even though I speak the language, I really can’t read what’s behind the eyes anymore. They look like me and they make the same sorts of noises, but there’s a barrier between myself and these people.

Within living memory, professionals regularly interacted with the working and lower classes. Poor people got to see how middle and upper middle people lived. I grew up poor and had many examples of middle class people I could emulate to get out of poverty. Today, the Cloud People are increasingly insulated from the Dirt People. To the typical managerial class type, the great bulk of America is outside their field of view. In the case of the media, it is to the extreme as they live and work in the media centers.

When the “experts” pondered the Brexit result, they sounded like primatologists puzzling over why the monkeys they were observing suddenly acted in a new way. In the current US election, I’m often struck by the feeling that the people in the media are puzzled as to why Clinton is not up by fifty points. Because the answer is outside the set of things that sit inside their model of the world, they are left to either pretend she is up by fifty points or assign dark motives to the deplorable Dirt People outside the perimeter.

We are a nation of two worlds now. The Cloud People are in their world, which is just about divorced from our world. Increasing they speak in their own argot that uses English words, but with alien meanings. They don’t live where we live or live as we live. We have been colonized by pod people, who are only vaguely aware of the rest of us. Unlike the British Colonial officers of old, our rulers don’t have much interest in us. We’re just a bad smell to them, something they tolerate while dreaming of the day when will be rid of us.

This is similar to the Brazilian model, except that in Brazil, the ruling elite is at least a full standard deviation more intelligent than the lower classes. In the American model, the world of the Cloud People is something similar to the Marching Morons, except that the extraction system on which it is based insulates them from the consequences of their own actions. Hillary Clinton is a dangerously incompetent boob, but she may be elevated to the top job simply because the system protects her and repels even well-heeled challengers.

One of the lessons of Africa in the mid-20th century is that people prefer to be ruled poorly by their own, rather than expertly by strangers. The Managerial class spends all of its time debating how to expertly manage the economy and how to replace the Dirt People they find inconvenient with imported Dirt People they believe are more compliant. Meanwhile, the Dirt People slowly begin to realize that they are ruled by strangers. When the Africans were barred from taking command of the machinery of rule, they smashed it. That’s another lesson to remember.

The Return of The Mule

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If you go back and watch videos of Reagan in the 70’s and 80’s, one of the things that jumps out is how aggressively he attacked the Left. In his first inaugural address, he attacked the very essence of what Jimmy Carter stood for as a politician. The man was sitting just behind Reagan as the Gipper explained that everything Carter believed was dangerous nonsense. The other thing that jumps out, when watching old Reagan speeches, is that no Republican talks like that anymore.

Instead, every Republican that has aggressively pressed the attack against the Left over the last quarter century, has been attacked by the media and so-called conservatives as unacceptably “polarizing” as if that is a thing. Official Conservatism has instead insisted that they abide by a set of gentile rules designed by the ruling majority, intended to perpetuate their hegemony. You could be forgiven for thinking that maybe the whole thing was a setup, a game of bad cop – worse cop, in order to rig the results.

Whenever the futility of this arrangement has been pointed out to Official Conservatism, they sigh and concede that it is unfair, but principle demands “we abide by the rules because that’s who we are.” If you pointed out that “who they were” was a bunch of losers, they would put on their lemon face and suggest that perhaps you were disloyal or some sort of hate thinker. Conservatism in America became the candy coating to the liberal nut inside the system.

I was thinking about that over the weekend as first we get the leaked tape of Donald Trump talking like a normal man, who believed he was in a private conversation with another man. The beta male pansies in the managerial class don’t know anything about this, but normal men in private like to tell dick jokes, boast about women and reminiscence about their exploits. The faggots that take up space in Official Conservatism don’t know about these things.

Watching one traitorous fink after another decry Trump’s locker room talk from a decade ago, I was reminded once again that these people were never on my side. It was always a con, a grift, to fool otherwise decent people into putting down their weapons and surrendering to the Left. Buckley-style conservatism, whatever it was, is now just a tool of the managerial class to clear the field for nation-wrecking policies to benefit the ruling elite at the expense of the middle class.

Last night, I was reminded of why Trump was able to obliterate the GOP field despite being out spent a million-to-one. He is not a pussy. Any other Republican faced with the dirty trick pulled on Friday would have gone into the debate prepared to grovel and plead, begging for a second chance. It is not all all inconceivable that he would have offered to step aside. Trump went into the debate prepared to deliver a counter bunch designed to knock the old fat cow on her ass.

It was a sterling performance that turned the tactics and strategy of the government party back onto them. If the contest is going to be a referendum on Trump’s character, then Trump is going to make a big show of exploring the character of the Clinton Gang. Having Bubba’s many sexual assault victims at the event was a missile landing directly into the weapons cache of the Clinton campaign. His demand for a special prosecutor reminded everyone of the elephant in the room.

When even the most disloyal of craven rumpswabs concedes Trump won the debate, you know it was a great night for The Donald.

Guys like Jonah Goldberg  would sooner take a job in the dreaded private sector than say anything nice about Trump or the people prepared to vote for him. As I’ve pointed out in the past, Goldberg is Exhibit A for the case against Official Conservatism and the party it has infested. Trump stands as the rebuke of the surrender caucus, that has profited guys like Goldberg so handsomely over the last two decades. If he has to concede to Trump, you know it was a great win.

Trump probably will not win and even if he does, it’s probably too late to avoid disaster anyway. Democracies always murder themselves. That is the lesson of history and ours will do the same, sooner rather than later. If the worst is to be avoided, then the present arrangements must be de-legitimized in order for a reform effort to have room to grow. That’s the role of Trump in the election. He the destroyer of worlds that need destroying.

When this all started, I compared Trump to the character in the Asimov Foundation series called The Mule. One way of interpreting this character is as a destroyer that sweeps away that which must be swept away in order for something better to rise in its place. That’s the Trump campaign. By cracking the Conservative Industrial Complex and challenging the legitimacy of the managerial class, he is exposing the whole thing as a racket, one which the people can no longer trust.

Last night The Mule Returned.

Friends and Enemies

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For well over a year now, I have been talking about the Trump Effect™ and how it may be the single most important part of this election. Don’t get me wrong, Clinton winning is most certainly the end of America as an on-going concern. She will invite in 50 million foreigners, confiscate guns, auction off everything that is not nailed down in exchange for cash to her slush fund. She will weaponize the court by packing it with coreligionists. America will have become a banana republic and there is no peaceful way of returning from it.

That may be the end result, even if Trump wins the election, but what comes next will include a whole lot of people who are now fully aware of the reality of the political class. There are exponentially more people “fully woke” now than a year ago. Official Conservatism™ is circling the bowl, largely because the grassroots have looked around and decided guys like Jonah Goldberg are just low-tax liberals who hold them in contempt.

For a long time, the Cloud People have told the Dirt People that the great divide in America is between Liberals, who want to expand government and create a socialist utopia, and Conservatives that wish to restore limited government and a constitutional republic. The Bush administration put the lie to the latter and the mobilization of Wall Street behind someone’s wife in order to block Trump puts the lie to the former. Old school Progressive like Bernie Sanders are now outsiders on the Left.

In fact, among the Cloud People there is no divide. They unanimously agree that class solidarity comes before everything else. That’s made clear in this editorial from the Arizona Republic endorsing someone’s wife.

The 2016 Republican candidate is not conservative and he is not qualified.

That’s why, for the first time in our history, The Arizona Republic will support a Democrat for president.

This is the new team chant of Official Conservatism™. The logic here is akin to saying “They don’t have my favorite ice cream so I’m going to have rat poison instead.”

Trump responds to criticism with the petulance of verbal spit wads.

That’s beneath our national dignity.

By “our dignity” they are not speaking for you. You are not “our” and you better get that through your thick head.

Trump’s long history of objectifying women and his demeaning comments about women during the campaign are not just good-old-boy gaffes.

They are evidence of deep character flaws. They are part of a pattern.

These are not the words of serious people thinking seriously about the country. These are the words of teenage girls gossiping about one another in the bathroom. That’s what is dawning on many Dirt People. These feckless airheads allegedly carrying the people’s banner in the media are more concerned with their status among the beautiful people than anything else. There is no divide among the Cloud People. They think the Dirt People are revolting.

And increasingly the Dirt People are revolting. Even people like Ace of Spades are moving toward a break with Official Conservatism™ and the GOP.

The party — not just the party;the writers who are supposed to have telling the truth as their first mission, but instead of become nonstop liars all the time decrying Trump as a liar himself — has declared war on all of the Lessers beneath their station, those not in The Media and who should, therefore, not have quite as much of a say in things as they themselves have.

They’ve made themselves into exactly what they pretend to oppose — and exactly what I do in fact oppose.

Guys like Jim Geraghty, and other NR-types, used to quote Ace all the time, but now they don’t know his name. The reason is class loyalty. Ace has his ideas and loyalty to the managerial class is simply not a concern. Given the choice between Trump and Clinton, he rationally picks Trump. For the National Review types, this is treason. Class loyalty trumps everything or else, so Ace is now dead to them.

The sadness and frustration you see in that Ace post turns up all over as people begin to see the reality of their condition. More than a few look back at their support for Bush, for example, and wonder how all those big shots in conservative media were so wrong. They wonder why they never talk about it, much less admit it. The conclusion many are making is that it was just a scam, a con, a way to turn the virtue of conservative voters into a vice in support of the Progressive project.

Eric Hoffer wrote “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” That’s what happened with the conservative movement. By the 1980’s they had their charismatics, Reagan and Buckley. Next came the money making opportunities in talk radio and book selling. By the time Bush came along it was a racket, a bust out, where the only real concern was how much money these people could stuff into their pockets before the game was up.

The game is up now and the Dirt People are waking up to it.

A World of Problems

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Back when the Germans were threatening to shut down Greece and sell it off for parts, it was fairly obvious that there was no way to “fix” the Greek problem. Even it were possible to radically overhaul their public sector, the debt payments are too high to maintain the level of social services expected from a modern social democracy. Default was unthinkable because close to 80 percent of Greece’s public debt is owned by public institutions, primarily the EU governments and the ECB.

The “solution” was to kick the can down the road until a miracle happened, but now the problem is back.

ATHENS—Greece’s economic recovery is proving elusive, challenging the forecasts of the country’s government and foreign creditors still counting on growth reviving this year.

The International Monetary Fund said last week  that the economy is stagnating, in the first admission from creditors that Greece’s recovery is off track again. Growth will only restart next year, the head of the IMF’s team in Greece said on a conference call with reporters, without offering details.

Of particular concern is that exports, which are supposed to lead Greece out of trouble, are on a slow downward trajectory, hampered by capital controls, taxes and a lack of credit.

“There is no chance we will see a rebound unless we see some bold political decisions that would introduce a more stable business environment,” said Dimitris Tsakonitis, general manager at mining company Grecian Magnesite.

The bailout agreement between Greece and its German-led creditors assumes rapid growth from late 2016 onward, including an official forecast of 2.7% growth in 2017. Private-sector economists believe next year’s growth could be closer to 0.6%.

Weaker growth would undermine the budget, likely leading to fresh arguments with lenders about extra austerity measures.

Greece is still grappling with the measures it has already agreed to. Late on Tuesday the country’s parliament approved pension overhauls and other policy changes that have been delayed for months, holding up bailout funding.

Greek government officials are sticking to their view that the economy is on the cusp of growth. “We are at the turning point at which we can we say with certainty that we are leaving the recession behind us,” Economy Minister George Stathakis told supporters of the ruling left-wing Syriza party Sunday.

The economy will get a push from investors as of the end of the year, when lenders are expected to provide some debt relief and the country qualifies for a European Central Bank bond buyback program, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last week.

In other words, the miracle did not happen and the problem is now worse. This comes at a time when Europe’s biggest bank is in very serious trouble.

Hedge funds have started to pull some of their business from Deutsche Bank, setting up a potential showdown with German authorities over the future of the country’s largest lender.

As its shares fell sharply in New York trading, Deutsche recirculated a statement emphasising its strong financial position.

European regulators and government officials have kept a low profile in public over Deutsche’s deepening woes. However, in private they have struck a sanguine tone, stressing that in extremis there is scope under European regulation to inject state funds to support the bank, provided it is done in line with market conditions.

Marcel Fratzscher, head of DIW Berlin, a think-tank, said: “If push comes to shove, the German government would contribute because Deutsche Bank is the only global bank that Germany has.”

There is one solid rule with banking and that is when the biggest bank is in trouble, all the banks are in trouble. The reason is a bank in trouble seeks to increase its cash by unwinding its holdings. This puts downward pressure on the price of those assets, which forces all banks holding similar assets to revalue and perhaps raise their cash holdings, by selling assets. This can easily set off a cascading effect, which is popularly referred to as contagion. The ghost of Lehman now haunts Deutsche Bank.

Deutsche Bank has something north of €42 Trillion in derivative exposure. To put that into perspective, the GDP of Europe is €14 Trillion. The phrase “systemic risk” is starting to pop up in news stories for obvious reasons. Presumably the German government would step in and bail out the bank, but this is the same German government that invited millions of Muslims into the country. That and no one really knows how big the problem is at Deutsche Bank. There’s nothing more dangerous in the financial world than uncertainty.

If that’s not enough to have you stocking up on potable water and MRE’s, the news brings word that the Obama Administration is trying its best to start a war with Russia over Syria. They are ending talks with the Russians over the bombing of Aleppo. The Russians are threatening to impose a no-fly zone, while John Kerry is making noises about sending troops to Syria. The US position is completely nuts, which is what makes it so dangerous. The same people who screwed this up are now tasked with avoiding a mistake that will lead to a shooting war with the Russians.

The world always has some problem that could get out of control and bring the whole thing crashing down, but the odds are usually long enough to not worry too much. Pakistan is now threatening to nuke India, but that happens often enough to not take too seriously. Pakistan’s military understands that they will lose a real war with India. India understands that they will gain nothing by winning a war against Pakistan. This is one of those problems that can be managed by the permanent diplomatic service, with little help from the political class.

The three crisis I’m following all have some things in common. One is they will require hard choices from the political class to contain. In politics, a hard choice is one that causes a politician to lose support. Merkel’s government is already teetering so how willing is she going to be to make a bold move to rescue Deutsche Bank? The ECB proved unable to deal with the Greeks the last time. If Merkel is facing a financial crisis, who will she play bad cop with the Greeks when Tsipris inevitably comes calling, demanding a break on Greek debt?

The Syria debacle is the most concerning because it resembles so many European problems of the past. There’s a Seven Year’s War quality to it where you have two main players with the rest changing teams after every stage. With the US now increasing the troop levels in nearby Iraq, presumably to fight in one theater of this conflict, the chances of a mistake increase. In these situations, mistakes are often not mistakes, but even when they are, they become reasons to abandon dialogue in favor of military options.

We live in a world of trouble. One can be forgiven for having a sense of foreboding.

Election Reset

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We had the great debate and my guess is nothing much changed from 24 hours ago. This election has always been about finding a reasonable alternative to Hillary Clinton, someone a large majority of Americans don’t like very much. One of the oldest rules of politics is that a well known, well established candidate polling below 50% is in trouble. Often, an incumbent that is in such a spot gets a primary challenger as his own party smells weakness, so a young gun is sent in to finish him off in the primary.

The one thing the sissy boys of Official Conservatism™ probably got right about this election thus far is that the other choices in the GOP primary would have probably started with a huge lead over Clinton. The collection of dwarfs assembled by the party had all been vetted to make sure they were the emptiest of empty suits, thus ensuring the Left could not say anything mean about them that anyone would believe. Guys like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio would start out with the Cloud People seal of approval, thus beginning as an acceptable alternative to Clinton.

That’s why none of those options won the nomination. For good or ill, the GOP is the one place where the Dirt People can have a voice and they loudly rejected the dwarfs on the grounds they were nothing but low-tax liberals. Trump is not the ideal candidate, but he talks about the things normal people think are important and that made him look like a giant compared to the rest of the field. Going into the general, he was the high risk option, as far as an alternative to Clinton. As a result, he started from the trailing position in the polls

That has slowly changed over the last six weeks as voters were reminded of why they hate Clinton. Trump has also modified his approach, working on selling himself to the doubters, rather than throwing red meat to his fans. He has also avoided the traps the press has laid for him, which lets people know he can turn it on and off when he wants. People can tolerate a little bit of rough talk as long as they know the candidate knows when to behave. As a result Trump has closed the gap and may very well be leading now.

There’s another way to think of these things, which applies here. In every election, the three big categories are security, economics and culture. They are not of equal importance and some issues fall into all three buckets. Immigration, for example, has a bit of all three, depending upon how it is being discussed. The voters are looking for a general sense of which candidate is more compatible on each of these three areas. What holds it all together is the voter’s sense of the candidates trustworthiness on these matters.

For instance, Mitt Romney polled much better than Obama on the economy, but no one believed Romney. He had been on all sides of all issues for no reason other than expedience. Even though the things he was saying with regards to the economy made sense, the assumption was he was saying them because they polled well. Mitt is one of those pols who will come out in favor of bestiality, if some consultant tells him it is a winning issue. In his case, being right was of no value because he lacked authenticity.

In this election, Clinton’s honesty problem is not a big issue because her lying does not change the voter’s sense of where she stands on the big three items. On the other hand, Trump’s authenticity is a great benefit because it makes him trustworthy. You may not agree with his position on an issue, but you know what you are getting with Trump. His authenticity not only helps him on a personal basis, it helps him overcome the uncertainty issue all newcomers face. It makes him seem less of a risk.

This is why the walls are closing in on Clinton. If you look at the map, states are going from “too close to call” to “leans Trump.” If you look at the polling, states like Georgia and Florida are just about a lock now for Trump. Ohio has been abandoned by Clinton, suggesting her polling says it is over there. States like Colorado and Pennsylvania have now moved into the toss-up category. In all probability, more people were reassured by Trump in the first debate than were convinced Hillary is worth a second look.

There are more debates and plenty of chances for both to harm themselves. Hillary could fall over again or Trump could punch a hobo. At this point, you would rather be on Team Trump as the wind is at his back and his road forward is clearer and more controllable. Clinton will need some help and she has to hope everyone that has dirt to dish is too afraid to go public. Still, she has the media and most of the GOP behind her and that is no small thing. The state of the race at the moment is Trump ahead by a tiny bit.

The Great Debate

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When I was a kid, I used to cringe when the geezers would complain about the political debates, calling them “made for TV circuses” or worse. I enjoyed them, simply for the tactics. The moderator would try hard to help the liberal and trip up the non-liberal, if there was one on the debate. If it was just three liberals then it operated as a window into the hive, if you were willing to sit through it and observe. The adults were always puzzled by my interest in these things and they would say I was very mature for my age.

I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now. These days I’m watching solely for the yucks. I want to see Hillary have a seizure and begin speaking in tongues. I imagine her fielding a question about Syria and responding with “Cabbage toaster broccoli banana” and then running around the stage clucking like a chicken. The woman is a horrible shrew and nothing she says means anything, because she is also a pathological liar. The fact that she has made it this far suggests we are in the end times.

Of course, Trump is great TV, even if you don’t like him, and I’m really not a fan of his style. The blustering New Yorker has never been my favorite American type, but he does get off some zingers that you just never hear a politician say these days. His crack about Rick Perry wearing glasses so people would think he is smart is the sort of thing a guy from Queens says. Trump is a man, who has been putting on shows for Americans going back to the 80’s, so he knows how to do it well.

The thing about these shows is they are mostly about reassuring voters that their guy is OK and the other guy is not Cicero or Churchill. Bush supporters were on pins and needles before the 2000 debate. When Gore made a fool of himself, the Bush people relaxed and felt like they had a winner. The Gore people got their turn in the next debate when Lieberman and Cheney had an mature, sensible exchange over important topics. After that debate, both sides were back where they started, sure that their guy was OK.

They say this time will be different, but my hunch is most Trump people will be happy if he avoids throwing a chair at the moderator or calling Hillary a fat cunt. Trump’s reputation for saying outlandish things is wildly overstated. Most of the time, he is simply saying what everyone knows, but no one on TV ever says. In some cases, it is manufactured outrage over something he said. Still, he will be baited by the moderator into talking about touchy subjects and his job tonight is to avoid the traps and play it safe.

Clinton has a tougher task because she is the establishment candidate. The irony here is that she got into politics to be the radical challenging the man and now she is the face of the man. If she tries to sound like anything other than the defender of the faith, she will come off as a phony or a bigger phony than typical. She just has to make sure she does not look like death or have one of those hacking fits where it sounds like she is coughing up a lung. if she topples over or is wheeled out in an iron lung, then it will be curtains.

These things are TV shows and that plays to Trump’s strength. The first debate is like the first impression in that it colors the rest of the contest. Amazingly, millions of people will tune it tonight not having thought much about either candidate. In a sane country, these people would be sterilized, but we let them vote so they are a part of the dynamic. Trump’s TV skills will give him an edge in creating a good first impression. Clinton’s shrill personality is just not made for these things so she is going to have to try and get under Trump’s skin and hope he says something off-putting.

Everyone in the media and in the Cloud Party knows all this stuff. They have been working with the moderator to make sure he understands the the finer points of arkancide. The post-debate talking points are prepared and the reports and analysis are ready to go. The moderator’s job tonight is to hit Trump with a few zingers so they can put his words into their reports and post-debate sound bites. The chattering skulls of the commentariat are practicing their one-liners in front of the mirror as I type this.

My bet is the post debate spin will be based on Clinton’s “presidential performance” and the “gravitas” she displayed versus Trump’s “amateurish and unserious” performance. The words “dangerous” and “reckless” will be tossed around by the talking heads with regards to Trump. That’s the game plan from Team Cankles. They want to run on the message that Trump is too dangerous and unpredictable, so you can be sure the media types have been told to push those points after the show.

By next weekend, Trump will have a jumped in the polls and he will be pushing 50%.

 

 

The Death Wish

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A few times a month, I get an e-mail soliciting my opinion on Israel or on Antisemitism. Often, these queries are in the context of a question about one facet of the ideological landscape. “Why do you think Jews support liberals, even though liberals hate Israel?” I have not tabulated the results, but my guess is I get more questions about Israel than any single topic, despite the fact I never write about Israel. I’d have to check, but I don’t think I have ever posted about Israel. If I have, it would most certainly be in the context of the Arab world.

My limited interest in the Jewish people is purely biological and cultural. By that I mean I find it interesting that the Ashkenazim have wildly out-performed their numbers in the United States. Jews are about 1% of the US population, but they dominate the law, academics, entertainment and finance. When 1% of the population is 30% of the richest people in the country, that’s phenomenal. There’s also the fact that you really cannot understand the world without understanding religion and that means understanding the role of Judaism and Christianity, particularity how the former made the latter.

The preceding is just a little background for the new readers who may not be as familiar with my work as others. That way I can talk a little about this segment on John Derbyshire’s latest broadcast.

I’m not an anti-Semite; I never have been; and I don’t have much time for anti-Semites. I’ve written a couple of million words of opinion commentary this past thirty years, all of it archived on my website, and I defy you to find any evidence of anti-Semitism in it anywhere.

However, I’ve turned against the word “philosemite,” for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere. Basically, it’s patronizing. If pressed on the issue, I call myself an anti-anti-Semite. I cherish my Jewish friends, and I have publicly—and again, I think, more than once—expressed gratitude in print for the positive contribution Jews have made to our civilization, way out of proportion to their numbers.

I have been reading and listening to John for decades and I think he captures his, as well as most people’s attitude, perfectly. I’m not fond of rank anti-Semitism, any more than I’m a fan of racism, but my definitions are more narrow and specific than they are today so maybe John is correct to say he is an anti-anti-Semite. I don’t know a word for being an anti-racist that does not imply lunacy, but maybe there is one. My view is people are tribal and they will have tribal prejudices. There’s no hectoring that away.

The whole segment is best listened to rather than read, as John’s intonations convey additional meaning to the words. The reason for my interest here is what he has to say at the bottom regarding the anti-Trump phenomenon.

All four debaters were Bigfoot American journalists. Both sides of the debate were anti-Trump; the debate was over whose fault it was that Trump had gotten the GOP nomination. For the motion, arguing that it was the fault of the elites, were Ben Domenech and Timothy Carney, both Gentiles. Against the motion, arguing that it was not the fault of the elites, wereJennifer Rubin [email her]and Bret Stephens both Jewish.

That tells you something by itself. That atavistic style of Jewish paranoia that I spoke about, when it hears the word “elites,” at once flies to the thought:They’re talking about US! … and the hoofbeats of the Cossacks are heard drumming in the distance.

At some mental level Rubin and Stephens read the title of the debate as: “Blame the Jews for the Trump Phenomenon.” That’s why they’re arguingagainst the motion. No, no, it’s not our fault—it’s those damn peasants!

As someone without much of an interest in Semitism or Antisemitism, this struck a nerve. I too have noticed that the people opposing Trump most viciously all have familiar last names. Lots of gold and silver in the #nevertrump clown car. This has always struck me as illogical. Trump is our most Jewish presidential candidate in my lifetime. He has always been a big supporter of Israel and he is more than a bit famous for socializing and doing business with the Jewish business community in America.

It is a good reminder that there is always a portion of every population that has a death wish. They agitate for things that are against the interests of their ethnic group and they are more concerned with strangers than their own family. Jews are no exception. Progressivism is increasingly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. Trump and his voters are very much the opposite. Yet, that causes the Jennifer Rubins of the world to hate him even more intensely than one would consider rational. Self-loathing is a powerful drug.

There is a temptation to assume there is an anti-Christian vibe to what we are seeing from people like Brett Stephens and Jennifer Rubin. That’s not the case as they reserve special hatred for orthodox and ultra-orthodox Jews. This is where the self-loathing becomes more clear, These people sneer at the guys in the black hats and tzitzit hanging out. If there is any anti-Christian sense to this, it stems from the fact that American Christians are enthusiastic supporters of Israel and virulent anti-anti-Semites.

The point here is that John is correct that these people are haunted by the hoof beats, but they also wish they would return. The longing for death, the death of their people, is what makes them tick. There’s some element of this in all people. It’s just that Jews have been wildly successful in America so their death wish gets played out on TV, while the self-loathing Poles have to nurse their death wish in private. Luckily for all of us, most Jews are not crazy and the smart ones understand which way the wind is blowing.

The Neo-Liberals

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Jeff Jacoby describes himself as a conservative columnist. He has written for the Boston Globe as the house broken “conservative” since the early 1990’s. According to his Wikipedia page, he is “the region’s pre-eminent spokesman for Conservative Nation,” and a columnist who had “quickly established himself as a must-read.” Also according to Wiki, he takes a paycheck from the radical left-wing TV station WBUR, one of the many government run NPR affiliates in New England. He’s also been on the payroll of the Progressive cable outlet CNN.

It’s fair to say Jacoby is typical of Official Conservatism™ the last two decades, which is to say he is a neocon. There used to be time when there was a big enough distinction between Official Conservatism™ and the Trotskyites that migrated from the Left in the 70’s, but all of them are neocons now. Jacoby was gonzo for the Bush policy of invade the world – invite the world. He continues to say the Iraq War was a success and he is endlessly going on about the Czar and how Trump is a tool of Russia.

If opposition to the Soviets defined the neocons in the Cold War, opposition to Trump is what defines them now. You see that in this Jeff Jacoby column from the other day. The gist of the piece is to remind the reader of America’s past terribleness and then to tie that history of terribleness to the rise of Trump. You’re supposed to come away with the belief that voting for Trump is the same as forming a lynch mob and hanging some coolies. Just as all good thinkers look back with disgust at America’s past, future good thinkers will be revolted by Trump voters.

Logically, of course, this is nonsense. It is the fallacy of the undistributed middle. There’s nothing connecting today’s voters with the lynch mobs of 150 years ago. More important, no sane person would define America of the 19th century by these rare outbursts of violence. In every age, there are examples of people acting savagely to one another. That is the human condition. What we have here is a rather sleazy attempt to slime the people of the past, and by extension the heritage of everyone alive today, in order to disparage current Americans.

The implication is that discussing immigration is off-limits, because to do so risks being just as bad as those imaginary bigots that haunt our past. We can debate how much we bomb the Muslims, but we cannot have a public debate about how many foreigners we allow to settle in our country. Incinerating half a million Arabs over the last twenty years is perfectly fine, but hurting the feelings of would-be migrants from Mexico would make us worse than Hitler. It’s as if Americans don’t have a right to define what it means to be an American.

At the same time, neocons are forever prattling on about how America is not a blood and soil country. Instead it is a propositional nation. In other words, all you have to do is sign onto the bargain for what it means to be an American and you are an American. That sounds good, until they follow that with the argument that Americans don’t get a say in what it means to be an American. The proposition, according to guys like Jacoby, is that they get to use Americans as cannon fodder for waging pointless wars of choice and they also get to replace those Americans with foreigners of their choice.

You can be forgiven for thinking that guys like Jacoby really don’t like Americans very much. When he is not comparing us to blood thirsty, xenophobic murderers, he’s insisting we lack the moral authority to have a say in how the country is run. That’s what passes for conservatism these days. It is a laundry list of complaints about the American people. When they are not rooting for the death of working class whites, they are twisting themselves into pretzels in an effort to prove they are nothing like the savage Dirt People carrying Trump through the election.

It is a good reminder that neo-conservatism was always a Progressive heresy and never had roots in Anglo-Saxon conservatism. Modern Progressivism has curdled into a list of hatreds, offering nothing but an increasingly dark vision of society. The neocons are following the same path. Guys like Jeff Jacoby can only tell you what they are not, and increasingly that sounds like “not American.” To be a neocon today is to do little more than spew venom at normal Americans for not supporting wars of choice and unlimited immigration.

What we are seeing is the transformation of the neocons into neo-liberals. Maybe it is simply a return to their natural home, but the modern Right sounds pretty much like the Left, except they want to kill Muslims and reduce the tax on carried interest. They embrace the unhinged anti-racism that the Left now preaches and they fully embrace multiculturalism. Now that the Bush Crime Family has decided to back Hillary Clinton, the way is now open for the neocons to become neo-libs and take most of Official Conservatism™ with them.

Godspeed.

A Moral Philosophy of HBD

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Pubic policy in the West is argued on many fronts, but the roots of all of our debates are in the Enlightenment. Arguably, the three most important men of the Enlightenment are Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. They are the giants whose shadows are still felt today. When Progressives, for example, proselytize on behalf of equality and inclusion, they are relying on Rousseau, and to a lesser extent Locke, as the foundation of their argument. Libertarians root their ideology in the ideas of Locke, specifically with regards to property.

The starting point for the men of the Enlightenment was man’s natural state or how they imagined humans acted before civil society. Hobbes imagined that man’s natural state was a “war of all against all” and civil society was imposed to protect men from each other. Locke imagined that man was naturally cooperative, looking out for one another and that civil society was a natural outgrowth of man’s nature. Similarly, Rousseau imagined that man in his natural state was virtuous and altruistic.

Obviously, that is an absurdly generalized version of three of the greatest thinkers in human history. The point I want to establish is that the foundation of modern Western society is rooted in notions about man’s natural state. The men of the Enlightenment did not have access to detailed studies of hunter gatherers. They did not have the fossil record or an understanding of evolution and genetics. They were simply conjuring the possible starting places by working backwards from where they stood in the timeline.

And they were wrong.

While we don’t know the nitty-gritty details of early modern human society, we have some rough contours of how our ancestors lived before settlement and writing. We also have loads of studies of our nearest relatives that allow us to understand what pre-modern man must have been like before we split off on our own evolutionary branch. Even if you reject evolution, we have examples of hunter gatherer populations in the modern age that live, most likely, as our ancestors lived at one time in Eurasia.

What we know, with a high degree of certainty, is that humans were never in a state of nature as Hobbes imagined. We were always in cooperative groups, most likely kin based groups. While conflicts between groups of humans over territory and resources would have been common, these groups exchanged women and food with one another too. Marrying off women from the clan to men of the neighboring clan would have been an important way to keep the peace, settle disputes and bind people together.

Similarly, human societies were not egalitarian paradises as Rousseau imagined. Human beings developed compassion for one another based on familial relations. Trog guarded the interests of Grog because it was good for both. Similarly, they were hostile to strangers for the same reason. Compassion for others is no more or less natural than hostility to others. In both cases, they are driven by biological necessity. One group of humans would share scarce resources internally, but gladly let strangers starve to death

The point here is two-fold. One is that we know a lot about the biological nature of man that the men of the Enlightenment did not know. Genetics is opening up vast new areas of understanding. Continuing to base our moral philosophy on vague speculation that has proven to be incorrect does not make a lot of sense. For instance, we know with certainty that nature does not bestow her gifts equally, but she does so predictably. Continuing to operate as if we are born a blank slate is rather foolish, given what we now know.

Further, we know that human evolution was local and on-going after humans spread out from Africa. Asians have physical characteristics that are unique to people from Asia. Northern Europeans have physical features unique to them. These variations must extend beyond the physical, into cognitive areas as well. Assuming that moral codes, for example, are universal is as nutty as assuming that people everywhere have red hair. The way in which people see themselves, there relationship to one another and their place in nature is not universal.

An assertion like “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” works great if by all men you mean all the men of your tribe, your ethnicity or your lands. It falls on its face when you apply it to all humans everywhere. Similarly, the political economy of Sweden works great when it confined to Swedes in Sweden. It does not make any sense to the people of Syria because they are different people with different natural abilities and cognitive skills.

The Enlightenment came along with the revolution in commerce. The West was suddenly rich and the old feudal order was no longer workable. The industrial age gave us intellectual movements that built on the Enlightenment and attempted to create a moral philosophy to match the industrial world. We have just gone through a technological revolution and we are in the midst of a revolution in the understanding of human biology. Accordingly, a new moral philosophy is certain to develop and evolve to match our new understanding.

The next big thing in public policy will most likely be based in Human Bio-Diversity, unless the good thinkers go the Muslim route and begin to slaughter the men of science. Heading off down the road of mysticism and magic is not out of the question, but the more likely option is the people preaching equality and inclusion follow the Shakers into the history books. What comes next will be a public debate rooted in biological reality. How best to manage the bone-deep differences in human populations.

There will also be a degree of magical thinking as that helps grease the wheels of society, but the disaster of multiculturalism, the memory of it as well as the residue on the ground, will mark it in the same way the Holocaust has marked fascism. Instead, debates about what to do for X people will be bounded by the debate over the limits of compassion for out-groups. Many of these arguments will be just as wrong as the arguments in favor of inclusion are today, but they will be wrong in a different direction.