Because America is run by a religious cult that rewrites history to suit the current fads, it is easy to get history wrong. A good example is the Temperance Movement. Today children are taught that unhinged Christian fanatics banned alcohol. It was the good and liberal FDR, who beat back the lunatics and rescinded prohibition. The truth is the lunatics banning alcohol were on the Left. Crusades against vice are the stock and trade of the American Left, but history is written by the winners and Northern Liberals won the Civil War so we get an altered history.

Another example I like to use is the Great Awakening. It is thought of as a Christian phenomenon and it was in the first iterations, but it was a northern phenomenon in America. It had a major impact in reshaping the Congregational church, which was the seedbed for Progressivism in America. One of the many things the American Left inherited from their spiritual ancestors is the frequent spasms of spiritual revival that result in fevered attempts to cure some societal ill. Even though they have dropped the language of their ancestors, Progressives are still moralists.

If you look at Progressive history in the context of the Great Awakening, you produce a more complete narrative than when you look at the Left as a European import. Progressives go through periods of moral revival during which they make war on one bogeyman or another. These periods of revival are followed by a dormant phase in which the rest of society cleans up the mess and tries to get back to normal. The 1920’s, for example, were called the Return to Normalcy after Wilson’s excesses.

This current period of Progressive fanaticism got going in the 90’s, when the GOP won the ’94 election and Clinton tried to throw the Liberals overboard. The Green Party gained traction and the rumblings of discontent on the Left for the direction of the Democrat Party grew louder. The election of George W. Bush was the match that set the Left on fire. They saw Bush as a traitor to their kind. After all, his family is the bluest of true blue Yankees, but W rejected that and made himself into a Texan and an Evangelical Christian. “Witch!”

For Progressives, the Bush years were a provocation. Bush was not only a traitor to his people, but he also committed the cardinal sin of appropriating the ideas of the Left and then running with them. Bush spent extravagantly on education and the environment. He never stopped yapping about the wonderfulness of the “religion of peace” and the moral imperative of bringing democracy to the Mohammedan. This sent the Left into a purple-faced rage, in the same way that giving into a social justice warrior only makes them angrier.

To the Left, Bush was Fort Sumter all over again and it had to be answered. It was what they rallied around after the 2000 election. It is also how we ended up with Obama. The bad whites, who put the apostate in the White House, had to be taught a lesson and what could be more horrifying to the bad whites than a black guy from a mixed marriage with a Muslim name? It is why the Left never quotes Obama or pays any attention to his opinions. His utility is as a symbol, the Chi-Ro of the Progressive legions.

The last year strongly suggests that this Progressive Awakening is running out of steam. Participation in Democrat primaries was way down compared to 2008. The party was only able to muster two geezers to run for their nomination. Liberal support for Clinton is tepid, as they see her as a criminal loser. She was, after all, the person who tried to prevent them from spiting the bad whites in 2008. As far as the Left is concerned, Clinton is as a bad as those who sympathized with the South or sided with King George.

There is also the fact that the Left has stopped mentioning George Bush. It is not that they have forgiven him, or the Bush clan, for the 2000’s. It is just that even the fiery passions of Progressive hate burn themselves out eventually. They inflicted homosexual marriage on the country. They allowed deranged men in sundresses to stalk little girls in public toilets. They toppled over the Confederate statues and angried up the blacks, to the point where they are killing cops. Like children throwing a tantrum, they have reached the point where they no longer remember why they are angry.

This is terrible news for Hillary Clinton, who imagines herself riding a wave of enthusiasm for old crones, into the White House. There may be some residual passion for finishing off the country, but the return to normalcy appears to be underway. The global revolt against globalism seems to be superseding old movements like American Progressivism. It turns out that puritanism is just as tied to national identity as everything else. In the post-national paradise, Progressivism becomes just another thing for the custodial state to regulate.

That may be the hidden strength of Donald Trump in the fall election. The New Right that is emerging is nationalist, but the old American Left was always nationalist. His appeals to national renewal resonate just as much with Progressives as they do for the alt-right. Hillary could very well be leading a party of sterile technocrats, who thought Mike Dukakis was sexy. A future run by colorless bureaucrats sounds wonderful to the managerial class, but it does nothing for voters, on the Left or the Right. People always vote for something over nothing.

Independence Day always leads to an outbreak of stories about the glories of democracy from the usual suspects in the media. One of the stranger things in my lifetime is the fact that when I was young, democracy was a fetish of the Left, while the Right scoffed at the wisdom of the masses. Today, it is a fetish of the Right and the Left is making ominous noises about the foolishness of elections and democracy. The result is the so-called conservative media turns July 4th into a saccharine celebration of democracy.

Most everyone reading this is bright enough to know that America was never intended to be a democracy and it is not a democracy today. The Founders imagined a republic composed of sovereign states that would do the bulk of the governing. The Civil War obliterated the sovereignty of the states, thus allowing the Federal government to assume most of the governing. Our state governments perform administrative tasks on behalf of the Federal government, often financed by Federal tax dollars.

It is tempting to think America is on a long path toward Caesarism, where the institutions of republican government are hollowed out as power is transferred into the hands of an authoritarian. The trouble with that is the modern nation state is too complicated for that sort of autocratic rule. The nation state is a vast bureaucracy today with a semi-permanent staff loyal only to the bureaucracy. They take direction from the executive, but the scope of the government is too massive to control in a fine detail way.

Consider some numbers from the US government. Health and Human Services has about 150 employees who report directly to the president. These are appointees usually brought in the by the Secretary of HHS. The department has 78,000 employees that are civil servants. Most of what HHS does on a daily basis is unknown to the White House staff. Most of it is unknown to bureaucracy itself. An organization of that scale and permanence takes on a life of its own. It is a giant blob that absorbs what it touches.

This is why we have elections and not much changes. The rhetoric changes and maybe the way the bureaucracy is sold to the public changes a bit. Otherwise, the only thing that changes is the overall size of the state. It always gets bigger. Fifty years ago, the Feds spent about $4500 per citizen and today they spend close to three times that. This is in inflation adjusted dollars. That is a lot of elections with nothing ever changing, suggesting something else determines the size and scope of the state.

A better way to think of the modern nation state is as a corporation. The modern publicly traded corporation is setup to profit the owners, who are the stockholders. The people running the corporation, the CEO, the CFO, the senior managers and so forth, are put in place to run the enterprise in the interests of the owners. You, as a stockholder in Apple, want to see the company make money so your stock goes up in value. You do not get to set company policy, but you have a vote at a shareholder meeting.

Now, the major stockholders have some say in the management of the firm. These are the people who sit on the board and decide who is put in as a CEO or push for a shakeup of the management team when necessary. They are not running the daily operations, but they get to decide who is running the daily operations. Like the small stockholders, they want to see profit so presumably they have the same interests as those small shareholders. Sometimes they have other motives, which are at odds with the shareholders.

The modern state is similarly arranged. The super rich are not bound by the state any more than a major shareholder is bound to the company. They sit on the board as major political donors and fixers, but they may perform this function for many countries, just as a rich guy sits on the boards of many firms. Sheldon Adelson is just as involved in Israeli politics as he is US politics. George Soros is involved in the politics of a dozen countries, including countries that are in competition with one another.

The voters of countries are the small shareholders. They have some say in things, but only at the fringes. When the board puts up two candidates for the CEO position, the voters get some input on which one gets the job, but usually both choices are offering the same thing. Whenever there is a shareholder revolt and an alternative option is presented, the members of the board close ranks to fight it. They do this to protect their prerogatives as major shareholders. Even if the people are right, they cannot be allowed to dictate policy to management, much less the board. After all, the corporation is not a democracy.

That is the state of the West. The nation states are now just corporate states, run by a relatively small number of global billionaires. The small shareholders get to show up at shareholder meetings and pretend to have a say in things, but the management is not beholden to them. The managers in the corporate state are the politicians and their accessories in the political class. These people answer to the board that put them in their positions. It is why no matter who wins an election, the results are always the same.

It is also why we are seeing attempts at merging the nations of Europe into a single conglomerate. Consolidation is the natural dynamic in the corporate world. It is why we are down to three PC makers when 25 years ago there were dozens. It is why there are two mobile phone players when there used to be a dozen. Corporations must always grow to survive so when growth is no longer possible, they merge with others or acquire smaller firms. Global governance is really just Google streamlining the corporate states to make them more efficient for the purposes of the major shareholders.

It is tempting to say this has always been the arrangement, but it was not always thus. Within living memory, it was impossible for a guy like George Soros to play in domestic politics across borders. Countries were like family business and the owners were covetous of them. The credit age has allowed every nation in the West to go public and turn themselves into formless corporate blobs, slowly loosing their original identity. The planned merger of Europe into one big soap ball is intended to cleanse national identity.

How this ends up is anyone’s guess. The history of the equities markets is the story of bubbles and busts so the credit money era will do to nations what it has done to many businesses and industries. Of course, every corporate entity goes through tough times and must downsize. That usually means layoffs and terminations. The application of that to the corporate state should be interesting. Maybe that’s why both parties in Washington suddenly want to take away all the guns.

One of my favorite periods in history is the 17^th century. You have The Thirty Years War and the English Civil War just in the first half of the century. The second half was not quite as exciting, but you have the founding and flourishing of the American colonies, the Glorious Revolution, the Battle of Vienna and the Salem Witch Trials. Then you have the laundry list of men in arts and letters that continue to cast a shadow over civilization. The 17^th century was an exciting time to be alive.

The thing that always jumps out to me, particularly with regards to the evolution of the colonies in this period, is how much merit counted to the people of the age. We tend to think of this as being the age of royalty and inherited position, but merit was critical within the ruling class and within general society. Prince Rupert was on the wrong side of the English Civil War, but he was a talented general and outlived pretty much everyone. It mattered to his contemporaries, his peers and the people that he was a talented man.

Of course, when the American colonies split off, merit became the coin of the realm. A man could not have a career in politics without first having a career in something useful. Even the sons of the elite were expected to go into the military or the law before starting a life in politics. The result was that rich guys were common in government. The super rich of the 19th century ran for office, were governors and Congressman and participated directly in party politics. The rule was, you got rich so you could go into politics.

That is not the way things work today. In fact, it is quite the opposite. This story about Marco Rubio’s opponent for his Senate seat is a good example of the modern politician.

For Murphy, the newfound role as the Democrat’s Most Eligible Candidate is extraordinary; and not just because he’s only been a Democrat since 2011.

Murphy’s rise is extraordinary because of how little he seems to have accomplished to get here.

A child of divorce, Murphy spent his formative years living with his father, Thomas P. Murphy, Jr., who built a multimillion dollar construction empire from scratch. Thomas Murphy made sure his son attended private schools including an elite prep academy in the Northeast, The Lawrenceville School. The school’s alumni include five Governors, three Congressmen, a Senator, two Pulitzer Prize winners and a Nobel Laureate. The school has also produced an array of business titans in its storied history.

Patrick Erin Murphy circa 2010, however, did not seem destined to join their ranks.

A star athlete in high school and college, injuries kept him from pursuing that further, opting instead for a more functional degree in business administration from the University of Miami. His time at UM was marred by a drunken brawl at a South Beach night club that left him with a mugshot and a black eye. After graduating in 2006, he joined Deloitte & Touche as an audit assistant. He did not meet the minimum requirements to become a Certified Public Accountant in Florida, opting instead to apply for a license in Colorado, even though he did not live or work there. He applied in Colorado because the requirements were lower.

Before gaining approval in Colorado, Murphy took the licensing exam multiple times before passing it. Even with a CPA license in Colorado, his opportunities in Florida were limited because his license was not valid in the Sunshine State.

In other words, Patrick Murphy is a moron without a single accomplishment to his name, other than having won the lucky sperm contest. If his father had not been rich, Patrick Murphy would probably be wearing a blue vest down at the local Walmart. Of course, his opponent, Marco Rubio, is a feckless airhead as well. He has never had a job that did not come with a government check. The race for one of Florida’s two Senate seats will be a battle between pretty boy morons sponsored by billionaires.

This is not particularly unusual. The second in command for the Democrats in the House has never worked a day outside of government. Another House Democrat leader, Chris Van Hollen, went into politics right out of college. Like Patrick Murphy, Van Hollen is as dumb as a plank. If not for the family connections, he would be running a kiosk at the mall. That is the story all over the House and the Senate. Massachusetts has a Senator, who drove an ice cream truck, before getting into politics. His nickname is Mr. Frosty.

It is tempting to dismiss it all as the inevitable degeneracy of democracy. The word “kakistocracy” is common on the dissident right. That is not really what is happening. Instead, these nitwits we see in politics are basically actors hired by billionaires and corporate interests to stand in for them in the House and Senate. Chuck Schumer is a genius, but everyone in DC knows he is the Senator of Goldman Sachs. Marco Rubio is owned by Norman Brahman, the Florida billionaire. Paul Ryan is in his job because the money men behind the GOP know he will do what he is told.

The most obvious example is Barak Obama. He was stumbling around jobless until rich liberals in Chicago found him wandering the streets as a race hustler. Like casting directors or Hollywood agents, they discovered a talent they could make into a star. He was given the right back story, trained to play the role and taught how to read his lines from the teleprompter. Obama is a nice enough person and not the dumbest guy to occupy the White House, but he does not have a thought in his head. He does what he is told, like any other actor.

Our politics have become a play. We see the actors and hear some of the stage directions, but we never see the writers or the directors. The producers who fund these things are known, but no one really knows much about them. All the attention is on the stars and the supporting actors. If you have the right look and you can learn to say your lines convincingly, you can get rich being an actor playing a politician. Even the B-actors become millionaires. If you cannot do anything useful and you want to get rich, go into politics.

One of the few benefits of growing up poor is that you are exposed at an early age to hustlers, grifters and criminals. Everyone has someone in the family who is working an angle. It could be as simple as a disability fraud or as complicated as running drugs. Maybe it is just turning people’s virtues into vices in order to con them out of a few bucks. At the bottom of the economic scale the paydays are small, but the stakes are always high. That brings out the best in a hustler. They trust no one and they are always working some angle.

The thing you learn early on is that there is no beating these people at their game. You can be the smartest guy in the world, but you do not think like a hustler. The grifter has a different mind. They are motivated by different desires. More important, they are always working some angle, looking for a flaw, a weakness they can exploit. It is not what they do, it is who they are. Lying is as natural to them as breathing. The best thing to do is put as much distance between yourself and them.

That is a lesson, I suspect, the people around Barak Obama wish they had known back in 2008 when they decided to have Hillary Clinton as their Secretary of State. They thought they had found a clever way to keep the Clintons in a box after the election. They did not want them running around criticizing Obama to their friends in the press, so they put her in a job that would keep her inside the tent, but outside the country most of the time. After all, the action was going to be on the domestic side. What harm could she do?

That would keep Hillary from running against them in 2012 and it would make it impossible for Team Clinton to criticize Obama. They also had the issue of campaign debt. Team Obama promised to help Team Clinton pay off the debt so she could have a chance to run again once Obama left office. This looked like a great way to sideline the greatest threat to Obama’s position in the party and within the Cult of Modern Liberalism. It looked like a modern way of having the defeated king join a monastery.

The Clintons, being what they are, immediately looked for how they could exploit this new appointment. The news tells us that before she set foot in the place, she had her people working on the secret e-mail server. I would not be surprised to learn that when Team Obama was negotiating the surrender of Team Clinton, it was the Clinton side who suggested the job at State. They hit the ground running with their grift as soon as she got the job, suggesting they were a step ahead of Team Obama.

The reason you never try do business with a grifter is, in the end, they always find ways to compromise you. They keep working you and anyone around you so that at some point, you are left with two choices. One is you help them. The other is you hurt yourself. People being what they are, the default is to help, hoping that will be enough to be free of the problem, but that just gets you in deeper. It is why victims of con-men often refuse to go to the police. They either feel like morons or they fear they are compromised.

In this case, Herself was allowed to run this secret e-mail system, which the White House had to know about, but they looked the other way and now they are compromised. If they let the justice system take its course, Team Obama gets their dirty laundry exposed in the process, so they have to make all sorts of compromises to stymie the legal process. By looking past the server in the first place, they left themselves exposed and as a result, they have no choice but to help Clinton stay out of jail.

The meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch the other day is bringing out all the conspiracy theories, but all of them miss the mark. The point of it, from the perspective of Team Clinton, was to let everyone know that no one is without sin in this matter. My guess is Lynch was flattered to be invited to meet with her old boss and foolishly took the meeting. Clinton knows she is not terribly bright so he played on her vanity and used her to remind Team Obama of their exposure.

The lesson, once again, is that you never do business with con-men. Whatever choice presented, always take the one that gets as much distance between them and you. Team Obama should have left the Clintons out in the cold back in 2008, but they let themselves get talked into what they thought was a clever solution. Instead, they invited a cancer into their administration. Having Bill Clinton say bad things about Obama looks fairly good in comparison to years of blackmail from Team Clinton.

George Will has thrown down his pacifier and stomped off in a huff, breaking with the Republican Party and officially becoming un-enrolled. Of course, Will lives in Washington DC so being a Republican was pointless in the extreme. The GOP rarely fields local candidates in the District and they do not get to vote in national elections, except for President. The last Republican to hold office in DC was Mathew Emory in 1870. His office was abolished the following year. Being a Republican in Washington DC is an entirely symbolic act.

It is also in keeping with Will’s long-time role as a conservative on television. The bow-tie, the wig, the round spectacles and the elaborate speaking style were all in furtherance of his job as a domesticated conservative, who would not scare the horses. All of it was a pose, a gesture, carefully choreographed so he could set the right tone for conservatives at home, by endorsing the terms of the debate as set forth by the Left. He was the candy coating for the liberal nut inside every ABC chat show.

Like so many of the Official Right, Will earned his spot in the mainstream media by attacking his own side. In his case, he was a rabid Nixon hater. That made him useful to the Left and got him a job in the Washington Post Writer’s Group and eventually a TV gig. He was also no fan of Reagan, but once it became clear that Reagan was going to be successful, Will shifted gears and became a Reaganite. Unlike Charles Krapphammer, Will saw which way the wind was blowing before the ’84 election.

Of course, as is the case with everyone in the clown car that is #nevertrump, Will’s hatred of Trump is more about money than ideology. Will’s old lady is Mari Maseng, who has worked for Republican politicians like Bob Dole and Rick Perry. She was also an adviser to Scott Walker. When not on the payroll, her company provides consulting services to Republican candidates. She also works for a GOP political action committee. As we see throughout “conservative” media, Republican politics has been a lucrative racket for the Will family.

That said, I doubt anyone under fifty bothers to read George Will’s column or listens to his commentary, but he is worth studying. Will is the quintessential Yankee Conservative. I sometimes call it Buckley Conservatism, or if I am in a foul mood, the Wuss Right. Southern populists like Sam Francis called it Northern Conservatism. Yankee Conservative is probably more accurate as it is essentially a reaction to the Neo-Puritanism, we call liberalism today. It is not an accident that National Review is located in New York instead of Richmond.

Yankee Conservatives are not particularly interested in conserving anything. Their main issue is that the other team is in such a hurry that they often look undignified as they sprint off toward utopia. The Yankee Conservative places the greatest value on his dignity by putting up a choreographed resistance only to acquiesce to whatever it is the Progressives have in mind. It is why the Left has gone from triumph to triumph, despite popular support for the “conservative” candidates. They know the guys standing athwart history yelling “stop” do not really mean it.

It is why guys like Will are so fond of attacking their fellow conservatives. The point of their ideology is not to remain rooted in the present or hearken to the past. It is to be gently pulled behind the Left like a skier behind a boat. Anyone seen as a drag on this process is cut loose by any means necessary. That is why guys like Will are so fond of using the weapons of the Left against people like Trump. It cuts them loose and does so in a way that pleases their friends on the Left, letting them know they are the right sort, just a little reluctant.

It is a bit ironic that at the end of Will’s career, he finds himself back where he started. Nixon, for all his faults, which were many, was a Dirt People candidate. In 1968 you voted for Tricky Dick because he was willing to punch the hippies and their Ivy League commie enablers. Guys like George Will and the other members of Team Buckley hated Nixon for it. Just like we see with Trump, the Buckleyites claimed their principles prevented them from embracing Nixon, but it was never principles, it was class. Nixon was not their sort.

Now Will is back where he started, except this time there is really nowhere for him to go with it. The rise of alternative media makes having a perch on liberal media outlets pretty much useless. Now that he is at Fox, he has to compete with perky bimbos that say all the same things he says. Then you have alternative media voices that are nimbler with new media so they are able to bury the staggering geezers of Conservative Inc. Will makes a dramatic exit from the GOP and it is mocked on-line by the alt-right.

Like the rest of the Yankee Right, Will is fading into irrelevance.