Category Archives: Politics

Reform Week Part V

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This being the final edition of this series of posts and it being Friday, I thought it would be a good time to think about some radical reforms the ruling class could implement to address present problems. It is hard to imagine the ruling class making radical reforms, given their inability to manage small reform to this point, but events often force the issue. A century ago, giving women the vote was a crazy idea in 1919. It is a crazy idea now.

Anyway, I mentioned previously that a big problem for the American political class is the influence of the mega-rich. At the end of the industrial revolution, the answer was to bust up the great fortunes. Maybe this time, the answer is to embrace the great fortunes. Instead of having billionaires buying politicians, perhaps the answer is to create a chamber for the mega-rich. A third chamber of Congress could be something like the House of Lords. It is open only to those with a net worth in the top-1%.

The idea here is to get the mega-rich out of the shadows, so to speak. Instead of pouring money into campaigns and political action committees, guys like Mark Zuckerberg could claim a seat in the Patrician Assembly. The trade-off would be no other participation in politics. The top-1% would be banned from politics other than running for office. Since the ultimate spot would be membership in the Patrician Assembly, the mega-rich would compete for one of the spots.

The thing that makes divided government work is each branch has a unique power. The House has the power of the purse. The Senate confirms judges and executive appointments. The Patrician Assembly would need a unique power in order to be worth the office. The most logical power to give the super-rich would be the power to borrow. This would, in effect, be a veto over deficit spending. Raising the debt limit and authorizing new debt would be the job of the Patrician Assembly.

Another nagging problem in modern America is mobility. Americans move around for all sorts of reasons, mostly for work, but also for family. Of course, foreigners move here for economic reason. This makes maintaining local communities difficult and is a growing source of instability. A big reason Donald Trump is having so much success is that millions of Americans feel like strangers in their own neighborhoods. The place where they grew up is now alien to them.

A solution to this is to change how people vote. The new rule would require you to vote where you were born, in addition to where you reside. That means those Yankee lunatics born in Massachusetts can still move to sensible places like Texas, but they will not be able to start voting for drunken Hibernian politicians. If Mass lets them vote absentee, then they could vote Kennedy that way. Otherwise, they give up voting in exchange for the good life in Texas.

This solves two problems. One is it solves the problem of lunatics moving to a new unspoiled place and then spoiling it by voting lunatic. The other important feature is it solves the immigration issues. This rule means those fifty million foreign born will never vote. Their kids can vote, assuming they are born here to citizens, but the foreign born will never gain the franchise. This removes the benefit of citizen replacement that is so popular with liberal lunatics.

Finally, we are on the cusp of the great automation. No one reading this will see the robot future. Your children and grand children will not see it either. We will, however, see more and more jobs replaced by robots. That means fewer and fewer people working and earning money. An obvious way to fix this is to get women out of the workplace, but that is only going to come when Islam is the official religion of the West. Look for London to pass such laws in the coming decade.

A more plausible solution will be a guaranteed income. Instead of a welfare state designed for the poor, a new system of a monthly salary for all citizens could be implemented. Alaska pays its citizens a royalty from oil sales each year based on the idea that the oil is a public good. Maybe the same approach must be taken with the robots. The robot future is a communal good so everyone gets a royalty from the robot economy.

The Swiss are about to experiment with this idea. One excellent benefit is it applies to citizens, thus depriving one incentive for migrants. The bigger issue is it junks all the social engineering ideas from a bygone era. Social welfare programs are a solution to poverty in the industrial age. In the technological age, poverty is not the issue so much as the lack of work.

Here is where it can become even more radical. The annual income could also be an incentive for marriage and stable family formation. Married couple would get a bonus for every year of marriage. That way, Yolanda here in the ghetto has no incentive to breed outside of marriage. Her stipend would not change with more kids. Her chance to boost her income would be to marry and stay married. For ghetto women, children stop being a symbol of success.

In a matriarchy, this is a powerful incentive for the males to behave. All of sudden, Darius is not such a valuable mating option when he can’t stay out of prison, while the bookish Urkel comes with the bonus of extra cash in the monthly check. The welfare state broke this relationship and black crime went along with black illegitimacy rates. Restore those family incentives and let nature take its course.

 

Reform Week Part IV

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In the 1990’s the NBA started drafting high school kids and letting them play in the league. It was an idiotic decision that has haunted them to this day. High school boys are not ready to play at that level and they lack the maturity to develop as a bench warmer for a few years. It is fairly well established that the peak years for athletes of this type are from 25-to-32. Taking a player who is seven years from his peak is sure to retard his development and waste a lot of money. The result was a steady decline in the level of play in the league.

That is an important lesson. Even in sports like track that are based on pure physical gifts, you need more than natural talent. There is a set of skills and a degree of maturity that allows the athlete to fully exploit their natural talents. Development systems not only help nurture talent, but they also weed out the mercurial and erratic before they are put into a position where others are counting on them. More than a few great talents have washed out before they hit the professional ranks because they lack the character or maturity for the job.

For political athletes, a similar development system is necessary to police the ranks efficiently. One or two corrupt individuals slipping into the legislature is manageable. A whole parliament full of crooks is a recipe for disaster. Making the process of getting there arduous is a time tested way of filtering at the source. The Roman Empire became unstable right around the time they started taking shortcuts and cutting corners in their development of their political leaders. They started making exceptions and before long no one respected the rules and customs of the Republic.

American politics is suffering an NBA problem. The Senate and House are both stocked with far too many people who never served time in the minor leagues of politics. It is hard to find anyone who has a job, much less did the grunt work of being a town manager or city councilman. Instead of earning their bones in the minor leagues, they are jumping right to the big show.

For example, the great hope of the Trotsky wing of the GOP is Ben Sasse. He spent a year in the dreaded private sector after college and then got on the gravy train of government work. A dozen years on the dole and runs for Senate and is now the shiny new penny “representing” Nebraska, a place he rarely visited for twenty years prior to his election. Instead of working his way up from dog catcher or state rep, he just parachuted into the Senate without much vetting.

Marco Rubio is an example of trying to rush guys along before they are ready. Rubio had a successful career in the Florida legislature. Making the leap to the Senate was a big step, similar to going from AA to the majors. He had the skill to do it, as long as he was going to spend his first term learning the ropes and growing into the position. If he flourished, then maybe he could be offered a spot on the 2024 GOP ticket or perhaps run for governor of Florida. Instead, he is a has-been at 44.

One way to restore the development system is to return the Senate to the states. The original design was to have the Senate represents the interests of the states, while the House was the democratic voice of the people. The 17th Amendment, passed in 1913, changed that and threw the system out of balance, making it just as prone to democratic impulses as the House. More important, it has made the Senate more accessible to the overly ambitious. The result is a chamber increasing full of feckless climbers like Ben Sasse.

Repealing the 17th would not be an easy sell, but simply returning the selection of senators to the states is probably a workable compromise. Each state could then create a system for picking senators. Given this power, they will inevitably create a system controlled by local interests, even if it maintains the veneer of popular selection. Having the legislature nominate candidates for the public to vote on is an obvious solution.

Another reform that would help restore the development system is to expand the House of Representatives. The Apportionment Act of 1911 set the current size of the House in an age when the population of the country was a third of what it is today. Doubling the size of the house would get the apportionment closer to what it was a century ago. It would also make buying influence much more expensive. Buying off two hundred legislators is much easier than bribing five hundred of them.

Expanding the House would also make being a congressman less important. Lowering the prestige of the House, while increasing the prestige of state legislatures will help keep the kids on the farm until they are ready for the big show. That means state government gets better at protecting the interests of the state as a counter to federal power. The good people of Nebraska would washout a poser like Sasse long before he could be inflicted on the nation.

Finally, another angle of reform could be on the pay side. Paying Congressman and Senators $200K a year sounds like a lot, but Washington is not a cheap city. A pol has to maintain two homes and bear the cost of commuting, to some extent, from the district. It’s why guys like Paul Ryan take advantage of insider information to make money in the markets. It is perfectly legal and they all do it.

It is how a guy like John Kasich gets a net worth of $25 million, despite a lifetime in elected office. Harry Reid became a millionaire off shady land deals he was able to broker first at the state level and then in the Senate. One of the surest ways to become a millionaire is to get elected to Congress. On your first day there is a line of lobbyists ready to give you investment tips.

In order to strip away the self-dealing, the pay would have to go up considerably. Maybe giving Congressman and Senators an allowance for a house in Washington and a salary commensurate with the importance of the job would be enough to make a ban on self-dealing workable. There is some history here as Congress passed the gift ban twenty years ago. There will always be bribes and people willing to take them but removing some of the justifications makes it easier to police.

Reform Week Part III

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In 1916, John D. Rockefeller became the world’s first confirmed billionaire. One hundred years later the United States alone has 540 billionaires with a net worth of roughly $7 trillion dollars. That is about 10% of the entire US net worth. There are another 1270 known billionaires in the world, most of whom have extensive dealings in the US. Carlos Slim, for example, owns the American media by owning the New York Times. He may not be able to donate to campaigns, but he can get involved in other ways.

That is, in fact, how billionaires do politics. Giving directly to a candidate is not worth a whole lot to a rich guy due to caps on contributions. Even bundling contributions by getting all of your rich buddies and employees to give to a candidate is just a drop in the bucket to a modern campaign. The real impact is in funding the Super-PAC. A rich guy can give as much as he likes, without a lot of scrutiny from the press or regulators. In this election, just 50 billionaires are responsible for 50% of super-PAC spending.

The problem this creates for the political class is two-fold. If you are an ambitious politician, a Paul Ryan for example, you need to win elections and that means not making any enemies that can cause you trouble. The enemies that can cause you trouble are those who can finance a primary challenger to you in the next election. That means toadying up to the big spenders in politics, even if it means screwing your own voters.

The flip side of this is the fact that the technological revolution has made all of this public. Worse yet, it has made it possible for a challenger to use it against you via social media and internet campaigns. Paul Nehlen is not a well funded or well known candidate, but he is going to force Ryan to run a real campaign this summer. Big shots from the insurgency are flying in to help Nehlen simply to spite Paul Ryan.

The reason is people all over the country, via the miracle of the internet, can see that Ryan is a sellout so Nehlen is getting lots of help in his campaign. None of this would be happening if Ryan were relying on local funding for his campaigns. He would be tending to that knitting instead of ball washing the Koch Brothers at swank Washington DC restaurants. Instead, the third most powerful politician in DC is in primary fight.

The irony is that the technological revolution that created the donor class has also made it easier to spot a politician that is selling his vote. Thirty years ago, a Tom Daschle could be a conservative Democrat at home in South Dakota but vote with Ted Kennedy in Washington. He could do this while his wife made a tidy living as a Washington lobbyist. It was a nice grift, even though it was small time. The money is much bigger today, but it is all out in the open.

To their credit, many politicians have understood the dilemma and sought to mitigate it. Campaign finance reform was an effort to solve the problem, but the Citizens United case turned the virtues of campaign finance reform into a vice. The politicians have lost control of their own reelection efforts as they are now run by outside groups. The modern politician does little other than give speeches to curry favor with the donor class.

It is an interesting dilemma for Congressman and Senators in that the strategy they often use on the middle class has now been turned on them. The game of “top and bottom versus the middle” has been standard politics in America for generations. Now it is being used in Washington. You either piss off the Wilks Brothers or you piss off your voters. In the modern age, it is an impossible dilemma.

Of course, another aspect to this is the brain drain. It used to be that a gifted political talent sought elected office. Today, the big money is in running super-PAC operations, fund raising operations and policy shops. That is where the talent goes, leaving feckless grifters like Ben Sasse to be the bright stars of the GOP. The massive void of political talent in both parties is due to the fact the political talent is in the shadow campaign system.

I have pointed out previously that the non-profit rackets have become an enormous problem in American politics. One remedy is to pull the plug on the tax provisions that allow donors to deduct their donations. That draws down money flowing into these things. Another way, one that would have to apply to super-PAC operations, is to have full disclosure of all donors and the amount of their contribution.

This exists to some degree with contributions to parties and candidates. Extending this out to super-PAC and think tank contributors would most likely have the same effect it had on campaign spending, which is to diversify the donor base. This would also mean disclosing all salary data. It is the opacity of these operations that makes them so effective so letting the sunlight in would level things up a bit. It is not a perfect solution, but it is something they could pass and something the courts would accept.

A lot of people reading this will be horrified because they have been conditioned by the libertarian cult to worship rich people. There is a huge difference between the guy who gets rich building a better mousetrap and the the modern financial buccaneers riding the waves of credit money in the global economy. The former has a stake in his people and society. The latter sees every port as a chance for booty.

Even so, rich people will always be with us, but the concentration of wealth is not healthy for self-government. The Founders understood this which is why they designed a system to make it hard to concentrate power and in the current age, money is power. Having 0.0002% of the population controlling 10% of the nation’s net worth is destabilizing. Having fifty guys running the national politics of three hundred million is insane.

Reform Week Part II

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A reform oriented ruling class will seek reform is the areas they understand best and the areas that offer the quickest return. Governance has always been about picking the low hanging fruit. In a democratic system, long term planning is impossible, which is not the terrible thing many claims. More than a few disasters have been the result of grandiose plans cooked up by megalomaniacs looking for a legacy. There is something to say for muddling through the problems that are presented, in order of urgency.

The most obvious place the political class can be effective is in tax policy. In present day America, tax policy no longer serves the needs of the political class and is a source of mischief that is one cause of the public unrest. The point of taxes is to fund government, but the modern welfare state is funded by credit money, created via the banking system. How long this can go on is open to debate, but if there is ever going to be a return to sound fiscal policy in the United States, the tax system will need a complete overhaul.

Even if Congress wanted to fully fund spending, the present system prevents it. The acres of loopholes, exceptions and vague contradictions make tax avoidance too easy for the people with money. Washington faces the same problem Julian faced when taking command Gaul after defeating the Alamanni in 357. Raising taxes just meant more bribery by the rich to avoid paying any tax. The answer was lowering taxes in exchange for increased compliance.

It is not just the complexity of the code that is a problem. It is the underlying philosophy of who gets taxed and how that needs to be administered. Returning to Rome, a problem in late antiquity was that wealthy landowners not only avoided taxes, but they also avoided military service. They also shielded their workers from service. There was a chronic shortage of military age men. The result was a version of the tragedy of the commons. The people benefiting from empire contributed little to maintain it.

Today, large global enterprise pays little in tax, but gain enormously from Federal policy. Smaller businesses, on the other hand, have huge tax and regulatory burdens, getting little but trouble from the Federal state. Small business, of course, always sees government as an obstacle, because they have zero influence over legislators. Compounding the problem is that business taxes are ultimately passed onto employees and customers through reduced wages and higher prices.

A reform that would solve a few problems for the political class, as well as position the economy for the modern age, is to eliminate business taxes entirely. For starters it would re-shore about a trillion in assets squirreled away in tax havens. Companies like Apple spend a lot of time hiding money around the world to avoid US taxes. It would also encourage global corporations to headquarter in the US.

Corporate income taxes are about 11% of federal tax receipts so eliminating this tax is not insignificant. Some of it would come back through increases in other taxes as business activity ticks up due to the new tax status. The rest should be raised through increases in personal taxes on the rich. There is simply no reason for special tax treatment of capital gains, for example, other than as a sop to the wealthy. Government is about protecting the assets of the rich. They should be paying the bulk of the cost.

An overhaul of the tax code like this, with flattening of personal taxes in general, would be an easy sell to the public. On the one hand, it would be an instant boost to the economy. On the other hand, it would address the growing sense that the super-rich are out of control. No one will lose any sleep over the government taxing the billionaires. The amount of money involved to off-set the elimination of corporate income taxes is not so much that a “tax the rich” campaign would set of rich flight.

Finally, the elimination of corporate taxes means the end of charitable deductions and not-for-profit tax rackets. Washington is now ringed by 501(c)(3) operations that are just lobbying and public relations organs for the rich and various business interests. Eliminating the tax provisions will not make them go away, but it will eliminate the incentives to create them. These think tanks are a shadow government hobbling Congress, the regulatory agencies and damaging the normal functioning of the mass media.

None of this will do much to address public finances or the corruption of government, but it begins the process. It also offers the biggest bang for the effort. Overhauling the welfare state is a growing necessity but doing that is impossible in the present environment. With near zero trust in government and both parties in a state of disarray, passing difficult reform is impossible. Going for the low hanging fruit is an obvious first step.

As a final note, this is why a guy like Trump in the White House could be a boon to the political class if they decide to go down the reform road. Trump is not ideologically tied to any form of tax reform. He would be a good pitchman for whatever tax overhaul package comes out of Washington. He is already signaled his willingness to tax the financial class. He is the perfect guy to provide cover for genuine tax reform.

Reform Week Part I

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Societies go through reform in a few different ways. The most obvious way is revolution. We do not think of revolution as a reform, but it is a type of reformation. The stuff that does not work is swept away and new stuff is put in its place. The “sweeping” is often bloody as the stuff being swept is attached to people with a vested interest in it. That and every revolution is driven, in part, by revenge.

Similarly, conquest is a type of reform too. A neighboring power defeats the society, forcing it to restructure itself in response. Maybe that is as a vassal state or simply as a weak and defeated minor power as it retools for the world in which it finds itself. The Gallic sack of Rome in 390 BC ushered in a period of reform that set the stage for Roman domination of the West.

The usual way in which we think of social reform is the voluntary type where changes are initiated either in response to crisis or in response to defects in the current arrangements. The changes ushered in after the 1929 stock market crash are an obvious example of reform in the face of crisis. The 12th Amendment that altered the selection of the President is an example of the ruling class fixing something that did not work as intended.

Peaceful reform does not spring from thin air. The world changes and the current arrangements no longer satisfy the needs of the people in charge. The key point here is that this sort of peaceful reform is top-down, not bottom up. It may be spurred by popular unrest, but this sort of reform is in the interests of those in charge or those just taking charge, like our technological elites who got rich in the last generation.

In America, the last big reform period was after World War II. Yankee reformers blasted away the old system for managing blacks and they replaced it with a form of riot insurance we call the Welfare State. Youth culture and the sexual revolution came at the tail end of that reform period, as the ruling elite reconfigured the majority coalition that would dominate politics for the next fifty years. Steve Sailer’s coalition of the fringes is an entirely artificial arrangement that suits the needs of the ruling class. At least it used to.

The ructions going on today in the two parties are the result of old systems no longer up to the task of meeting the challenges of the day. The current arrangements evolved in a bygone era. The Cold War is long over yet we still have a political arrangement organized around fighting the Red Menace at home and abroad. America’s foolish blundering into the Arab world is the result of a system looking for a new enemy.

Reform is long overdue.

The question is what the nature of the next reform movement will be. The reforms of the 50’s and 60’s were cultural. The country was doing simply fine economically and the large financial interests had been tamed before the war. First came the knocking down of the racial institutions, followed by new political institutions to fill the void. Then the family institutions were plowed under in the sexual revolution. Things like gay rights and tranny rights today are mostly just nostalgic echoes of those reform movements of the 70’s.

The current age is nothing like the period following World War II so it is unlikely that the coming reform period will be anything like that time. That is why the causes of this Great Progressive Awakening have seemed so silly and pointless. They are silly and pointless. The one substantive effort at economic reform, Obamacare, devolved into a festival of vengeance against Christians, traditionalists and the white middle-class. The Left’s reformist impulse has long since burned out. What’s left is just spite.

This age is much more like the period starting at the end of the 19th century and running into the early 20th when taking on the monsters of industry was the priority. The Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890. The Clayton Antitrust Act was passed in 1914. Of course, Teddy Roosevelt made his bones in trust busting at the turn of the century. Financial reforms followed the crash of ’29, along with additional laws like the Robinson-Patman Act to limit corporate consolidation.

If you look at the economic reforms of that generation, the goal was to limit the power and influence of new industrial barons. Concentrations of wealth are the great threat to republican government so the logical response to it is to break up the large interests. A century ago, that meant trust busting and strong limits on the economic activity of the super rich. It also means laws against the sort of reckless risk taking at the root of every financial crisis.

This time around things are a bit different, but the same problems exist. The coming period of reform will be economic, aimed at returning power to the political class. That will also mean political reforms that will be necessary to enforce the economic reforms. Again, reform is about the people in charge and the public is secondary. Even so, the brewing unrest is the opening that allows reformers to usher in changes. In the coming decades, those changes will be economic and political.

More tomorrow.

Hothouse Foodies

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I’ve mentioned in the past that I don’t watch television very much, outside of live sporting events. I have nothing against television, I just never developed the habit of following a show every week. I forget to watch and lose track of what’s happening. Then I lose interest. Binge watching works for me and I have binge watched some popular series, but years after they were on the air. The advantage with this is you can abandon the show if it sucks after a few episodes.

The one type of show that has always worked on me is the cooking show. I’m a good cook and I like seeing new stuff, but I think what really works for me is that the shows are all bullshit. The cooking contests are hilarious because the judges have on their serious face and make up all sorts of idiotic reasons for liking one dish over another. My favorite is when they say “umami” as they do that thing with their mouth to indicate they are trying to figure out the taste. Umami seems to mean “I don’t know what this is.”

Food tasting, like wine tasting, is mostly bullshit. The cooking shows make this clear as they have contestants make dishes with all sorts of wacky ingredients they would never normally use. The judges then taste the dish and talk about how something made with Velveeta has a floral notes and umami. The show Cutthroat Kitchen is the best example of this. It is an unintentional send up of the foodie rackets.

The truth is, “foodie” culture is just signalling. If you are a droll sophisticated urbanite you pretend to like food made from exotic ingredients,served on plates the size of a car door. If you are a suburban square, you eat food out of a can that you heat up over a hotplate. That’s not too much of an exaggeration. This article in Slate points out that most people are still making food at home that is similar to what you would associate with 1950’s suburbia.

And at a time when readers of aspirational food websites are used to images of impossibly perfect dishes—each microgreen artfully placed by some tweezer-wielding stylist—Allrecipes offers amateur snaps of amateur meals. The site is awash with close-ups of sludgy-looking soups; photos of stuffed peppers that look like they’ve been captured in the harsh, unforgiving light of a public washroom; and shot after shot documenting the myriad ways that melted cheese can congeal. It is all, Kimball and his ilk would agree, extremely disappointing. It’s also perhaps the most accurate, democratic snapshot of American culinary desires.

Allrecipes is the most popular English-language food website in the world. According to ComScore, last December the site got almost 50 million visits, the biggest month by any food site ever. Thanks to its mastery of search engine optimization, the site’s recipes constantly appear near the top of Google search results. If you look for “lasagna recipes,” as I did the other day, you’ll immediately find “World’s Best Lasagna,” a recipe that has been one of the website’s most popular dishes for 15 years. The recipe (which makes a perfectly tasty lasagna) was viewed more than 6 million times last year alone and has received more than 11,000 five-star ratings. In an era of celebrity chefs and recipe-kit delivery services developed by experts, a pasta dish by a Dallas dad who describes his heritage as “entirely Anglo-Saxon” is quite possibly America’s most-cooked meal.

This reminds me of something from the dark ages. In the early 90’s newspapers were struggling so they brought in experts to figure out what was wrong. A newspaper in Ohio, it was reported, discovered that their readers never looked at the food section. The reason for that was the stuff covered in the food section was all haute cuisine, while the readers were eating Hamburger Helper and mushroom soup casserole. Put another way, the paper was trying to serve an audience that did not exist.

The food rackets are a good example of the great divide in America. People watch TV to escape and be entertained. I’ll watch the cooking shows because they make me laugh. Once in a blue moon I’ll learn something useful or interesting, but mostly is is a goof. Similarly, people are not watching Game of Thrones for deep, philosophic insights into the human condition. People like boobies, midgets and sword play. Throw in some corny drama and cool costumes and you have a hit show.

On the other side of the screen, the little people inside the box, that’s where things get weird. They actually believe their bullshit. The “foodies” on the cooking shows are starting to think they are leading a food revolution, when they are just a different type of clown, entertaining the masses. Our news media for a long time has be operating under the delusion that they are a secular priesthood, sent here to guard the truth for the masses. In reality, they are just paid spokesman for their bosses.

One way to understand why Trump was able to vanquish his enemies so easily is to think about that newspaper in Ohio I mentioned. At some point, they stumbled into a monopoly. They were the only newspaper in town. That meant they were no longer subject to the normal market forces that come with competition and the result was a slow decay in their quality as they indulged in one fad after another. The newspaper became a weird hothouse growing things that could never live outside.

A similar thing has happened to our entertainment rackets and our politics. Cable is essentially a monopoly. ESPN gets $8 a month from 150 million homes in America whether they watch or not and about 80% do not watch. That lets ESPN engage in deranged jackassery like tranny rights campaigns. The Food Network is on basic and gets a buck a month from cable fees. You can put on all sorts of weird food shows when you start with a guaranteed billion dollar revenue stream.

That’s what has happened with our politics, I think. For the last three decades, at least, it has been a closed system with no real competition. Both sides debated how much socialism and cultural Marxism they would inflict on the country. The Left would open the debate at 10 and the Right would offer 5 and they would settle in between. That’s how we went from telling AIDS jokes to jailing Christian bakers in the blink of eye. There was never a competition.

Nature abhors the lack of competition. The newspaper monopolies collapsed as soon as the hothouse doors were swung open. The inevitable break up of cable bundling will vaporize much of what we currently have on our television systems. Our politics, of course, is facing a similar threat. The hothouse doors have been flung open and many of the prettiest flowers on display have wilted. The Titum Arum opposing Trump is suddenly facing conditions for which it was not designed.

The Warning Shot

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One of the more irritating things about the current election is the obtuseness of the media, particularly the so-called conservative media. They insist on assigning motives to Trump voters that are at odds with observable reality. For months now the official narrative has been that Trump is powered by toothless hillbillies, high on meth and anger at the dusky fellows. Voting Trump is how these losers are lashing out in anger, always in anger. Never mind that the data says the opposite.

The narrative, coincidentally, always speaks to the wonderfulness of conservative media. Similarly, they tar Trump with every offense to decency, even though he is often saying the things these same conservatives used to say a decade or two ago. According to the modern conservative, anyone holding the opinions common a few decades ago is a monster. Hilariously, Trump’s lack of a political ambition is held against him by conservatives. Again, the critique is always about the critic in these cases.

That’s the cynical interpretation. These people know better, but choose to lie in order to flatter themselves and their owners. Another way to look at it though, and part of why Trump exists, is that these people and the entirely of the ruling class are divorced from reality. They live in their bunkered communities, work with other managerial types and spend their days agreeing with one another about their wonderfulness. To them, the status quo is fabulous. Why would anyone want to change it?

This story from the Imperial Capital is a good example of the blinkered nature of our elites.

Lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol are quietly launching a new effort to expand visas for low-skilled foreign workers in government funding bills — a push that could drive a deep ideological rift through both parties later this year.

Republicans and Democrats whose home states rely on immigrant labor are lobbying top appropriators to include language in this year’s funding bills to renew controversial provisions from last year’s omnibus spending measure that effectively quadrupled the number of low-skilled worker visas.

Nine House lawmakers, led by Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.), sent a letter last week urging the Appropriations Committee to keep those higher numbers intact. And key senators have already begun to discuss the issue.

“Many businesses will be severely impacted, and some may be unable to operate, without this cap relief,” said the House letter, obtained by POLITICO and addressed to Reps. John Carter (R-Texas) and Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.), who head the panel that oversees funding for the Department of Homeland Security. “Failure to enact this exemption will hurt seasonal businesses across the country.”

The program in question is the H-2B visa, which covers immigrants who work as landscapers, housekeepers and seafood processors. Those visas are legally capped at 66,000 per year, which pro-business advocates say is an artificially low number that could harm key U.S. industries.

We have two primaries going on in which immigration is the defining issues. On the one side, the guy promising to build a wall and bar Muslims from entry crushed the field, despite being outspent a million-to-one. On the other side, the old-time socialist, who preaches worker’s rights and obliquely opposes the immigration lobbies, is making life hell for the party candidate. If Sanders went back to his old anti-immigration ways, he would run the table on Crooked Hillary.

Despite this year long news story, the politicians and their backers in both parties want to increase immigration! Obama is violating Federal law so he can import hundreds of thousands of Islamic terrorists. You could be forgiven if you started to wonder if these people actually hate you. How is it possible to be this blind to daily reality in America? It’s as if these people live on another planet and pop in every once in a while to stage a political show.

I’m fond of pointing out that all you have to do is spend a little time with grad students at an elite university to understand why Mao sent these people off the rice paddies. They manage to combine wrongheadedness with smug condescension to the point where you want to smash them in the face. I suspect a corollary here is that you can understand the French Revolution by spending a few minutes following American politics. A normal man wants “to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

This is why Trump exists. It’s never been about Trump, what he says or what he promises to do. That’s just the glitter on the stripper. The Trumpening is about the people in charge and their callous disregard for their duties and the country they allegedly serve. It’s as if the voting public went out and found the one guy who most offends the ruling class. Trump is a more polished version of Chuck Tingle and the voters are the Rabid Puppies. It’s not about voting for something as much as it is voting against something.

Trump is the warning shot. He’s the food riots before the revolution. He’s the stack of letters to the editor in protest over some issue. People do not go from happy to bloody revolt overnight. It’s a process and the early stages are warnings, at least they should be viewed as warnings. If the people in Washington insist on flooding the country with helot labor, despite what’s happening in the election, the people are going to insist on building scaffolds in Washington. The Trump phenomenon is the warning.

The Monasteries of America

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Saint Fionán is claimed to have founded the Skellig Michael monastery in the sixth century. There is some dispute about when the monastery was founded, but it is largely considered one of the first Catholic centers of learning outside of Rome. There, the monks copied old texts, taught novices to read and write and proselytized to the Irish heathens. Slowly, monasteries were founded around Europe, doing the same work, often on behalf of the ruling families.

If you are an ancient history buff, one of the things you probably understand is just how important the Catholic Church was in preserving and maintaining the knowledge of the ancients. Throughout the Middle Ages, tucked away in monasteries, monks spent their days copying and preserving texts from antiquity. It was a slow and tedious process, but it was the only way to preserve and proliferate knowledge.

That last bit is important. Storing up knowledge in books at a monastery is fine but passing them around so others can learn and expand upon what is in those books is how civilization flourishes. Those monks copying old texts were increasing the mass of human understanding. Copying Aristotle meant that the copy could be sent to another monastery to be read and copied again. It also meant more men exposed to Aristotle, and not just in the monasteries. The nobility was able to build libraries too.

The thing about the medieval system was that it was tightly bound by Catholicism on one end and the state on the other. Intellectual life had to appeal to the king and the Church. In this regard, the Church served another key role. They vetted and filtered the books that were produced; thus, they controlled the knowledge of the society. The crown may have had a monopoly of force, but the Church gave it legitimacy and an intellectual structure through which to rule.

We like to think that the modern age is a time when information flows freely around society, unencumbered by the state or powerful interests. Colleges and universities are endlessly going on about having free speech and open debate. Journalists insist their job is to speak truth to power, which means saying things that are outside the approved list of truths. Even so-called conservatives bang on about the glories of free and open dialogue, usually while they denounce Donald Trump.

The truth is the monastery system is still with us. Instead of the crown financing the learning centers, it is billionaires, corporations, non-governmental organizations and international bodies. Instead of monasteries, we have think-tanks, research centers and foundations. All of which are “not for profit” which means contributions are tax deductible. The rich pay themselves for supporting the organizations that exist to promote the interests of the rich and powerful.

All around Washington DC, there are organizations, like American Enterprise Institute, that are financed by rich people to pump out papers, books, commentary and experts to populate TV and radio. If you look at their 990 filing, you see that the guy in charge made $700K in compensation. Board members made six figures, with most in the mid-200’s. Charles Murray made $270K just from this one job. His books, speaking fees and so forth probably double that number. Being a “thinker” pays well.

AEI is a big foot operation, but there many smaller ones too. The Fund for American Studies funds journalists and reporters with grants. The list of programs on their 990 is mostly benign stuff that sounds nice. Then you see the long list of trustees. The one name that jumps out is Fred Barnes who took $25K for his troubles. One of the benefits of being a journalist, who plays ball, is you get to sit on boards at these non-profits. Some pay more than others, but it is easy to see how it can add up.

Then there are the magazine rackets. National Review has a thing called the National Review Institute. Notice how they always call their people “fellow” to give it that academic feel. Their 990 is not remarkably interesting, but NRI is mostly a clearing house. The director makes $200K a year, in case you are curious. That is small potatoes compared to John Podhoretz, who takes over $400K in salary from Commentary Magazine, another non-profit operation.

Of course, it is not just indigenous billionaires paying these people to promote them in the press. Foreign governments get in on the act too. The government of Malaysia famously bought favorable coverage from conservative media a few years ago. You may recognize the name Ben Domenech from that article. He writes for the Federalist and was in on the anti-Trump crusade. He also got jammed up in a plagiarism scandal, yet he somehow remains in good standing with conservative media.

My favorite, I think, is Brent Bozell, who Mike Cernovich has been going after on Twitter. Bozell runs a racket called the Media research Center. It is supposed to police the media for bias. Brent makes $400K for his trouble, that’s when he is not penning anti-Trump pieces for Breitbart. No one should begrudge Bozell his money, but when the media watchdog is paid by the same people funding the media, it is hard to take him seriously.

The reality is our opinion makers are all kept men. They are the monks and clergy of our age, shaping intellectual life and setting the limits of what is and what is not permitted in the public sphere. This is done mostly to promote their own position, but financed by the donor class, on whose behalf the monks and priests of the commentariat work. When you are living the 1% lifestyle, you are not about to rock the boat by speaking truth to power.

The reason they are fainting over Trump and the rise of the Alt-Right is the same reason the Church panicked over Martin Luther. The difference is Jan Hus is an army of bloggers and writers on-line using the megaphones of social media. Trump, like Frederick III, is legitimizing much of it by speaking candidly on the issues of the day. Just as Trump supporters have no illusions about what Trump is as a politician, the commentariat is fully aware of what he represents, which is why he must be destroyed.

The Great Culture War

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Now that Donald Trump is about to clinch the Republicans nomination, the professional pundits, who got everything about this election wrong, are now busy trying to explain what it all means. The increasingly deranged Left is trying to jam all of it into their bizarre world view that says they are noble heroes fighting the dragon of oppression. On the Buckley Right, they are feverishly searching about for villains so they can avoid facing the reality of their position.

The one thing both sides agree upon is that Trump is being carried to the nomination by a wave of heroin addicts from the hill country. These snaggle toothed losers are angry at having been out-competed by the dusky fellows in foreign lands. Left out of the global nirvana, where well-scrubbed boys and girls take up positions in the media and think tanks, these hapless losers are lashing out by supporting Trump. It is the revolt of the hillbillies.

There is another thing both sides agree upon. Modern Progressives and Buckley Conservatives both hate the people to their Right. As Progressives have relentlessly dragged the Overton Window to the Left, The Buckley-ites have sprinted after them, fearful of being lumped in with the rabble to their Right. The window has been dragged so far to the Left that the number of people “on the right” is looking like a swelling majority. To the people peering out from their think tanks and limousines, however, we are on the verge of mob rule.

All of the wailing and gnashing of teeth over Trump disguises the fact that the American Left is collapsing. One place you see it is with their candidates. Hillary Clinton is a world class screw up planning to run as an old hen clucking about the men, with a mild whiff of lesbianism to spice it up. No wonder the 2000 year old man is giving her a run for her stolen money. The Left has nothing to offer so it coughed up these geriatric hairballs from the 1970’s.

In theory this should be good news for the Buckley-ites, but that has not been the result. Decades of trading away everything to the Left for a chance to guide foreign policy has left the Buckley-ites incapable of winning fights over cultural and economic issues. They have been surrendering for so long, it is now their default response. Worse yet, they have been trained to scold the rest of us about the need for compromise whenever the Left assaults a part of the culture.

There is another piece to this. Over the last quarter century, politics for both sides have become incredibly lucrative and largely unimportant. They risk nothing as money flows into Washington no matter which side is ascendant. When 90% of incumbents win reelection, there is never really much at stake for them. For the metastasizing pundit and think tank class, politics has been reduced to theater, like the battles at those medieval themed restaurants. Winning is not important. Putting on a good show for each other is what matters to them.

Outside the government class, it is a different story. Normal Americans are the ones paying the price for gesture politics. John McCain can be generous on immigration because he never experiences it. He lives in one of his wife’s twenty-three mansions, rides in government limousines and works in fortified government facilities. Men like John McCain live as strangers in this country. What they see of it is from a safe distance.

Similarly, the chattering skulls on television pull down six figure salaries and live in bunkered, whites-only communities. It is not an accident that they are crowded into the richest counties on earth, all of them around Washington DC. They are the petty royalty of the ruling class. To these people, normal Americans are aliens, indistinguishable from the people sneaking over the border.

The reality of the last quarter century for normal Americans is vastly different from the reality of the political class and the financial elites. Across the land has been a great stagnation, covered over by easy credit and financial legerdemain. For the average American, treading water has been a struggle, with many falling behind and losing faith in a system that no longer seems equitable. Mass media magnifies the yawning gap between the “winners” and the vast majority.

No one, on the Left or the Right, speaks to this. Instead, it is a repetition of the old platitudes from yesteryear. One side promotes minoritism at the expense of the middle and the other side champions globalist capitalism dressed up with libertarian moralizing. The tone and substance of the rhetoric suggests both sides see the common American citizen as the threat. It is as if we have been colonized. The rulers need us, but they detest us for it and can never trust us, because down deep, they are not one of us.

Almost a quarter century ago Pat Buchanan gave his infamous Culture War speech at the Republican convention. In it he said, “This election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”

It has taken decades, but the American people may be prepared to join the fight finally.

Voting in the Ghetto

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For years now I have been threatening to drop off the voting rolls, but I always find some excuse to vote every election. I have skipped some minor elections and I skipped 2012, but in the latter case it was mostly out of disgust. Standing in line knowing my vote counted for nothing and knowing I was expected to vote for the rabid pussies ticket was just too much. Maybe if the line had been shorter, I would have stuck it out and voted, but I bolted and skipped the whole election.

When you live in a one party state, voting really is a waste of time. The best you can hope to do is make some trouble. I vote against all of the ballot measures, for example. They tend to fail so I suspect I am not the only one who does it. In the primary, I will vote for the most deranged Democrat on the ballot. Again, this is out of pure spite. As a white man, the Democrat Party has nothing to offer me, but I can throw sand in their gears.

Voting in the ghetto has the added feature of seeing aspects of the underclass you do not often see. Even in the poorest neighborhoods, there are civic minded people. There is a nice black woman I see around town who works the polls every year. In the ghetto, the polling places are always run by black women. It makes sense. They are the people responsible for raising the children until they are old enough to go off to prison.

The other aspect of this is they love seeing honkies voting. I walked into the polling place and the nice black ladies lit up like I was a long lost relative. At some level, they sense that the presence of the honky is a good sign. We are the canary in the coal mine. When the honky leaves, your neighborhood is forever lost. Seeing me in the neighborhood and taking the time to vote means there is still some hope for the place.

I did not see any Hispanics voting yesterday. In past elections, I would see an organizer from the party ushering in the local illegals to vote for the party candidates. That is something our rulers never can grasp. They think all of these foreign imports will vote, but that is not how it works. People vote if they have a stake in the society and think voting matters. More important, they vote for one of their own so he can represent them.

All elections are theater and American elections are theater for white people mostly. Blacks participate, but solely as furniture for the good whites. All the signaling and language is aimed at whites and blacks. Neither party has the slightest idea how to do anything but the white-man overbite in front of these “diverse communities” during election season. Pandering and free stuff is just not going to get Jose interested in voting.

The funny thing I did see at the polling station was a couple of black ladies holding Trump signs. I have never seen anyone promoting a Republican in this neighborhood so that was a first. Trump being treated like ghetto trash by the party big shots is not missed by the black ladies. Black people are vastly more in tune with the subtleties of respect than the typical honky. Black people see what is happening with Trump and they relate.

That does not mean Trump will win many black votes. It just means they have no reason to fear him. That is why I suspect Hillary is in deep trouble. Blacks will vote for her over an old Jew, but they are not turning out in big numbers for her unless the Republicans run someone scary. Trump does not scare black people. In fact, blacks seem to respect him and appreciate his showmanship. It is a small thing but politics is a game of small things.

One of the goofier things yesterday is we are now back to paper ballots. The Left has been trying to shake down Diebold and ES&S for years. These are the firms that make the computer voting gear. Since they cannot get these companies to rig the machines in favor of the party, the party has made war on the companies. At least in Maryland, the campaign has worked so we are back to paper ballots. I guess if the paper company is found to be run by a conservative, I will be voting with colored rocks next time.

The other silly bit was how the party nominates delegates to the convention. I picked from a slate of women and a slate of men. By rule, the seven delegates voted to the convention must be four biological women and three biological men. You just know where this is headed. A few more turns of the wheel and there will be a list for the one tranny, the one left handed gay ginger and so on. The Democrats are the party of lunatics and black people now.

As to the results, it is pretty clear that the public has grown tired of the primary drama and has settled on Trump and Clinton. Sanders will stagger on for another month as he has the money and nothing better to do with his time. Cruz and Kasich will be looking to drop out in a week. The Trump sweep will give him momentum for next week’s Indiana primary, which is the last stand for the Cult of Never Trump.