Monthly Archives: December 2013

The End of MARs

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The budget deal “negotiated” by Paul Ryan is a good example of why the GOP is struggling. The deal itself is mostly just some tinkering with minor elements of the overall budget. Spending does not change, taxes go up a tiny bit and some formula for hiking pensions is altered in a trivial way popular with people in the ruling class. This has the added benefit of allowing people claiming to be experts to get jobs in the bureaucracy, figuring how the new rules can be implemented. Regulation is a jobs program.

In reality, the reforms do nothing and the experts are just functionaries. The American system of government is designed to make change difficult even when the ruling class wants to make changes. When that intentionally sclerotic political system sits atop a massive continent-wide bureaucracy, change is damn near impossible. It’s like steering a super tanker with an oar. Maybe it can be nudged a bit, but the effects takes years for anyone to notice. When they are defending the status quo, change is impossible.

That’s the problem for the GOP. Historically, they have been the party of good management. They appeal to the middle class largely by promising stable, sensible management of the state. They are the squares. Radical change is not their thing. Even when it is their thing, like it was 30 years ago, it was more like the parents coming home to discover the remains of a house party. They make the kids clean up the mess and put the house back into its original order, or something close to it.

The trouble comes when a significant portion of their base has become radicalized. Guys like David Stockman and Rick Santelli make a living appealing to that growing segment of the population. Multiculturalism and globalism are creating two types of radicals in American politics. There are those who want to press the gas and drive society over the multicultural cliff, while another segment wants to grab the wheel and steer the car in another direction, without really knowing where to go or how to do it.

The Middle American Radical is restless. The country has been overrun by lunatics and they want something done about it. The trouble is the lunatics have a political party of their own called the Democrat Party. The MARs have tried over the decades to transform the GOP into a fighting force willing to take on the lunatics. The trouble with that is the GOP establishment is not radical. It is a collection of squares, chamber of commerce types and financial elites. Mitt Romney and John McCain are not radicals by any definition of the word. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are stay the course Republicans.

These folks know their constituency is not interested in radical change. They like things the way they are right now. Their constituents, of course, are the donors who bankroll their campaigns and the Republican Party. The donor class may be small in number, but they control most of the cash. You’ll note that the same people underwriting the GOP underwrite much of the Democrat Party and underwrite organizations promoting forever war in the Middle East. They are not interested in making any changes.

The Reagan Revolution was about rollback. In some important ways, the Left was pushed back, but in other more important ways, the Left prevailed. The MARs, being sensible people, accepted that you can’t win every fight. You come back another day and they did in 1994 with the Contract with America. They forced some reforms onto Clinton, but lost most fights. Again, win some lose some but live on to fight another day, which was supposed to happen when Bush was elected. That never happened.

Instead it was mostly a stalemate over foreign policy while the Left swept the field on the domestic side. The MARs began to question their allegiance to the GOP and started to walk away from the party. Mitt Romney lost because a whole lot of folks, supposedly in the GOP base, walked away. The ridiculousness of Mitt Romney, a liberal from a weird religious cult, being the standard bearer for a party that allegedly represents the interests of white people, is one of those things that will be studied for a long time.

That brings us back to the budget deal. Doing this deal is good tactics. As a party, the GOP needs to stand aside right now and let the clown show unfold. ObamaCare is a disaster that is cratering support for the Democrats. It is not going away either. In fact, it promises to get worse next year. That will impact the economy, no matter how much the BLS fakes the numbers. Sometime in the spring they can roll out a list of promises that are reasonable and current. Then they can sail to another midterm victory.

That’s the problem though. Good tactics are not what their voters want. This theater of the Left making demands, while the reasonable boys in the GOP meets them half way and finds a way to make it work is not selling. Those Middle American Radicals stayed home in 2012 in enough numbers to tank the election for Romney. In the 2016 election, they may just show up and vote for some outsider who promises to nuke the whole thing. At that point, the party is over for Conservative Inc and the party of squares.

Those Damned Sick People

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In the fullness of time, this age will be described as one where the people in charge had to re-learn everything about human nature, that people had known for thousands of years, but somehow been forgotten. Maybe forgotten is not the right term. It’s as if people have un-learned things. A deliberate effort has been made to deny basic parts of reality, in an effort to prove crackpot theories about human nature and human organization. This story about health care costs in the Washington Post is a good example.

The bottom 72 percent of Illinois Medicaid recipients account for 10 percent of total program spending. Average annual expenditures in this group were about $564, virtually invisible on the chart. We can’t save much money through any incentive system aimed at the typical Medicaid recipient.

We spend too little on the bottom 80 percent to get much back from that. We probably spend too little on most of these people, anyway. For the bulk of Medicaid beneficiaries, cost control is less important than improved prevention, health maintenance and access to basic medical and dental services.

The real financial action unfolds on the right side of the graph, where expenditures are concentrated within a small and incredibly complicated patient group. The top 3.2 percent of recipients account for half of total Medicaid spending, with average expenditures exceeding $30,000 annually.

Many of these men and women face life-ending or life-threatening illnesses, as well as cognitive or psychiatric limitations. These patients cannot cover co-payments or assume financial risk. In theory, one might impose patient cost-sharing with some complicated risk-adjustment system.

In practice, that is far beyond current technologies and administrative capabilities. Even if such a system were available, we couldn’t push the burden of medical case management onto these patients or their families.

Decade of analysis has revealed the shocking truth behind medical costs. It turns out that what drives costs are sick people. No kidding. This is why the word “wonk” has become a synonym for sophist or a grifter. Harold Pollack seems like a decent fellow and his credentials suggest he may even know a few things about the medical business, but you have to wonder what he was doing before he made this discovery. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would be shocked to learn that sick people drive health costs.

People have always known that the young feel like they are indestructible, because they are healthy and vibrant. As a result, they don’t need to see the doctor, take a bunch of pills or use various health services. On the other hand, old people have all sorts of things going wrong, so they need emergency services, doctors, pills and treatments. In modern societies like ours, old people organize their lives around regular trips to the doctor. Most of it is preventative and low cost, but it adds up as the population grows older.

That’s why the basic question, regarding public health, is how to pay for the old people and the sick poor people. The former need lots of care, often more than they can afford. The latter needs less care, but they have no money. People used to know this. One option is to rely on private charity and market forces to address the problem. Another option is to have the state pay for health care. A third option is a mix, where the state operates as the insurer of last resort, but otherwise private arrangements prevail.

Look at these discussions a century ago, when the notion of the welfare state first gained traction in the West. People understood these truths. No matter what sort of system you adopt, it means some form of rationing, as all goods and services are rationed. That means some people are told they can only have so much while others get more. In some cases, the person gets nothing at all. This is in every part of life. There are no goods that are not rationed by price or by some control over supply.

Rationing is a part of life, yet somehow our rulers have decided that health care is an exception, so there must be a way to arrange things so everyone gets all the health care they want, without having to pay for it. Guys who insist on calling themselves wonks keep working on their perpetual motion machines so that one day, if we arrange things just the right way, we can have plenty. It’s a form of alchemy. Instead of turning base metals into gold, the modern alchemists seek to conjure plenty from scarcity.

A Big Hoax

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The Left can believe things that are obviously wrong. So much so, they can convince people who should know better that up is down and down is up. Health care is a great example. For example, the ObamaCare debacle is turning into the greatest public works failure in the history of man. If the Hoover Damn had cracked open on the first day and crumbled into a pile of stones, it would not be as big a failure as ObamaCare.

Every day brings another hilarious failure of the website or some aspect of it. What has gained less attention is the fact few people have bothered to even try to sign up. Of those, almost all should have been on Medicaid all along. The Left claimed 20 million Americans were without insurance and would buy it if it were cheaper. They claimed another 20 million or so were young people who should be paying into the system, but are not.

The Left believed the 40 million uninsured myth with the intensity of a fanatic. As the numbers come in, they hold to it. Even non-Liberals still accept the claim. Never mind that the figures never held up to experience or reason. If you are young, you don’t need insurance. If you are poor or old, you can go on the dole. If you have a job, you most likely have a policy from work. Small business people have private plans.

Of course, a trip to the local ER shows it is full of illegal aliens who should not be here in the first place. The great uninsured never existed in numbers worthy of this initiative. The uninsured, those who legitimately exist, are like the unemployed. They are a temporary class, a shifting, dynamic cohort that is transitioning from one job state or life state to another. There was never a great emergency to be addressed, but the Left believed it.

The great uninsured was a big fat hoax. They never really existed in numbers warranting state action. Instead of asking to look behind the curtain, everyone went along with the claims made by the Left. So much so we have a multi-trillion dollar disaster on our hands that will end up helping a handful of people, who probably never needed the help in the first place. Those who did need help could have relied on existing programs.

Even now, the debate still focuses on how to replace it or how to fix it. No one is bothering to ask why the premise of the thing is not holding up to empirical fact. You can be sure that if anyone publicly challenges the claim they will be called a monster. Obama will keep wheeling out white people supposedly helped by his program and the liberal press will yammer about the lack of an alternative. No one will question the premise.

Lawless

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As I’ve grown older, I have found the police to be increasingly contemptible. That’s the opposite of what’s supposed to happen. You’re supposed to become more conservative and more respectful of authority as you get older. Perhaps there is something wrong with me or I am immature when it comes to these things. On the other hand, when you see stuff like this, cynicism is the only normal reaction.

Federal ATF agents in cities across the country reportedly used rogue tactics to go after guns on the street — allegedly exploiting the mentally ill, buying up weapons for way more than they’re worth and letting minors smoke pot and drink.

This is incredible:

In Pensacola, the ATF hired a felon to run its pawnshop. The move widened the pool of potential targets, boosting arrest numbers.Even those trying to sell guns legally could be charged if they knowingly sold to a felon. The ATF’s pawnshop partner was later convicted of pointing a loaded gun at someone outside a bar. Instead of a stiff sentence typically handed down to repeat offenders in federal court, he got six months in jail — and a pat on the back from the prosecutor.

The basic tactic seems to be entrapment. They used various methods to get people to commit crimes. In this case, the crime involved guns. This is often a problem with police departments in major cities. There is pressure on cops to make busts and they cut corners. What we are seeing with the ATF is different. This stuff is coming down from the top. You’re not renting out retail space without senior level approval.

Then we have this little gem. A maniac is running around Times Square so the cops start shooting into the crowd, wounding two innocent women. Naturally, they charge the maniac with shooting the women. The argument is the maniac caused the cops to start shooting people. If that’s not enough, the cops are not facing discipline for their reckless disregard for public safety. Why should they?” They are agents of the state which means they are beyond the reach of the law. This is a Soviet level corruption and it is getting worse.

Criminally Stupid

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Most people have no idea what goes on in their local government office, because they don’t work for the government. You can have some idea how the department of motor vehicles operates, but you don’t know what really goes on inside those offices. You just see the part that faces the public. The people inside know about the computer systems, the people who do nothing but take up space and the the ridiculous managers and supervisors who fill their days with busy work and pointless meetings.

The revers is true as well. The people working in government offices have no idea what happens in the dreaded private sector. Most government workers and just about all managers have never worked in the private sector, outside of college jobs. They don’t know about the drive for efficiency, cost cutting, and profit margins. They don’t know what it is like to keep the computer software up to date so the company can maintain its competitive edge and continue to reduce costs, by reducing labor.

The reason this matters is when the government decides they are going to increase the the number of interfaces between the government and the dreaded private sector, it means increased opportunities for a clash of cultures and technologies. The culture within the government office, for example, is never going to blend well with the culture inside a private business. Similarly, the technology and process are never going to interface smoothly with those in the private sector. There’s going to be problems.

This is what is happening with the ObamaCare exchanges. In government, IT projects are as mostly about rewarding favored companies in specific districts. They eventually get done and generally work, but they are never intended to reduce costs or lower the number of people in the government office. In the private sector, technology is a tool to cut people and costs, but often a tool to defend against mischief. Trying to bring government IT systems into the retail space, is like putting government workers in the private sector.

Now, the reason all of our government systems have not been compromised is they are not exposed to the world. Most people are unaware of the alternative “internet” used by security forces, but it exists and it used by national security, diplomats and parts of government. Secure communication channels are essential. More often, government systems are simply so old, they can’t be accessed over the internet.  There are plenty of government systems running COBOL applications to this day.

This initiative to upgrade these government systems so they can interface with the private sector systems sounds good in theory, but that’s where the culture problem comes into the mix. Since none of these legacy systems were written by people contemplating the Internet, they have nothing more than old school password security. By exposing them to the internet, bad actors can now quickly crack the security and get into the back-end systems where the sensitive data is stored. The whole system is now exposed.

Lessons From the Market: Libertarians

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I will often describe my politics as libertarian, but that’s just to avoid having to talk about it with people who can’t think beyond the Left-Right paradigm. For the most part, I hate libertarians. The good ones are mostly nuts. The bad one, which are most of them, suffer from the same defect as Progressives. They just refuse to accept the human condition and instead imagine a world in which humans act in ways no one has ever witnessed.

Libertarians, like liberals, tend to confine their thinking to the hot house where conditions are optimal. Unlike liberals who get to experiment on real people, libertarians have to confine themselves to thought experiments. That probably explains the obsession with legalizing weed. If you spend all of your time imagining a utopian society, drugs are a good way to break up the monotony, or at least get you pas the reality of the present.

Any political philosophy that does not start with the understanding that some portion of society is irrational, no matter how you define rational, is not getting very far. Well, it’s not going to work if you try to implement it. That’s why utopian schemes always end in a blood bath. It sounds good on paper, but the people never cooperate, so the solution is to get better people, which means getting rid of the bad people.

This is obvious when you go to the grocery store. My habit is to go on Sunday morning to pick up my provisions for the week. At 8:00 AM on Sunday the crowd is tiny and it is a quick in and out for me. Today I was a little late, showing up at 9:00 AM. We were expecting a snow storm. It is Christmastime. The parking lot was 80% full and the store was packed with people. Specifically it was packed with mothers toting children.

There were old people staggering around for no earthly reason. Then there were the families, who decide a trip to the store is a good time to share their family experience with the world. What should have been a 30 minute trip to the store took over an hour. It would have been longer, but I did not need anything from the deli so I avoided that line. I also got a little lucky when I hit the register lanes. A fresh one opened as I arrived.

Now, what does this have to to do with libertarianism? Libertarians start from the premise that, left to their own devices, people will self-organize. Yet, left to their own devices, people cannot figure out it is a bad idea to bring your kids to the grocery store. They cannot figure out that a little snow is not the end of civilization, requiring them to load up with groceries. They cannot navigate the self-checkout in an orderly fashion.

There’s no way in hell these people last a week in a world without rules and custodians to make sure they follow the rules. If they found themselves in such a world, their singular focus would be on finding people willing to setup a custodial state and make sure they are safe and protected. They may not be a majority, but they are a large enough minority to make libertarianism impossible. It is at odds with nature and the human condition.

Another Celebration for the Left

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The death of Nelson Mandela will no doubt result in a sanctimonious circus for the usual suspects on the Left. These people cannot control themselves, so even at funerals they put on a show, intended to display their virtue. That’s how it goes with these things. It is a shame because Mandela’s death could be one of those moments to think about the realities of Africa, but the people who deified him really don’t care about Africa or Africans.

Instead, it will be a week of one-upsmanship on the Left, as they compete with one another to be the most worshipful of a man who was mostly a failure. Chris Mathews is a great example. He lives in one of the whitest neighborhood in America, which happens to be outside of Washington. The Baltimore-Washington area is close to majority black, so a white-only town stands out. Yet, Mathews will lecture the rest of us about race.

Mathews is emblematic of the Left’s relationship to blacks. For the Left, blacks are merely a totem. They are something one worships in the abstract because it riles the enemies of the Left. At least they think it does. In the fevered imagination of the Left, The Man hates blacks and is always trying to keep them down. Naturally, The Man is always a cartoonish version of the the WASP elite, rather than a liberal Jewish guy.

Of course, the Mandela worship has always been about the Left celebrating itself and this funeral will be another example. They love Mandela because they backed him against the bad whites, who were on the wrong side of history. If Mandela had died of a stroke before apartheid ended, he would have been forgotten. It was never about him or his cause. It was always about the narrative in which the Left is always operating.

It is a shame because Mandela really was an extraordinary leader by the standards of Africa. His coevals on the continent competed with one another to be the most maniacally murderous and destructive. Idi Amin was a cannibal, for example. No African country emerged from colonialism and then prospered, except for two. Rhodesia thrived for a time under Ian Smith. The other is South Africa, at least until now.

The fact that South Africa did not follow the same path as every other African state is due to Mandela, in no small part. That’s not to say he was a saint or even a moral person. It’s just that he was not like the typical African leader, who runs his country in the same way local drug lords runs their gang. There was a chance to make the Mandela model the minimally acceptable in Africa, but that never happened and never will now.

None of that will get much of an airing this weekend. Instead it will be the Left congratulating itself for opposing Apartheid and embracing Mandela. It will also be an excuse to revive their passion for Obama. You can be sure our African prince will be there talking about himself, not so subtly reminding the Left why they worshiped him up until last week. The only thing missing will be a wicker man full of white people to burn.

No one will dare mention the deteriorating conditions in South Africa as the black majority slip back into their natural state and set about murdering the white minority. Whatever legacy Mandela could have had will be forgotten after the Left is done with his memory this weekend. In a decade, when the white minority is fleeing South Africa, no one will look back and wonder if it was a good idea to oppose Apartheid. No one will care.

The Words of Fake Intellectuals

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Certain words and phrases take on meanings because of who uses them. For instance, the noun “moderate” in the political context always means liberal. The only people who ever use it are liberals. All of my “moderate” friends, for example, are conventional liberals, who faithfully line up for the democrat in every race. They always lament the lack of “moderate” republicans. Of course, moderate republicans are always liberal.

In the context of personal health, the word is an adjective for the pests and scolds who think they can tell us how to live. In those cases, “moderate” means self-denial. Moderate drinking means no drinking. Moderate eating means no food you like. The common thread here is that fanatics have run off with a perfectly good word and turned it into a chilling horn blast signaling the arrival of people who reminder you of your ex-wife.

The neologism “wonk” is a favorite word on the Left. They say it means policy expert, but it really means agitprop expert. Ezra Klein is a good example. He repeats the politically acceptable dogma in slightly new ways, which makes him a favorite of the people in the political class. Nothing he has ever written would require critical thinking or knowledge of the subject. He just flatters his fellow Progressives, by telling them what they want to hear.

While in theory, the word “wonk” is supposed to mean a policy expert or perhaps an expert on existing regulations, it almost always means flatterer. A wonk is someone who comes up with clever sounding ways to conform what the political class thinks about something at the moment. Not even the political class really, just the army of camp followers that make up the commentariat. To be a wonk is to never question anything.

A word that has been totally corrupted is “data.” To the people fond of using it in social commentary, the word is a synonym for signs, like the ones a shaman would see in goat entrails. You see it in that Klein piece. “HealthCare.gov is clearly working better. But is it actually working? It depends on how you read the data.” This suggest data itself is meaningless, as what matters is who is reading and, of course, their motivations.

Look at the construction. He declares this thing is better, then suggests it may not be working at all, depending on information that has not been presented. In this case, “data” means “who you ask.” To an empiricist or anyone vaguely familiar with practical mathematics, data is what your mathematical representation of reality has to include in order to meet the minimum test of validity. To Klein, data is a sign to be read.

The dilettante is “a person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge.” In this increasingly fraudulent age, the pseudo-intellectual is something of a dilettante, but instead of learning enough to fake it, they make up new language or corrupt the existing language, so they sound smart without having to know anything about the subject. They don’t know anything. They know about things.

Perhaps another way to put it is we live in a meta-era, in that our intellectual class does not know things or even things about things. They are meta-intellectuals, in that they know things about being an intellectual, the clothes, the verbal cues and so forth, but they are not intellectuals nor to they know any. That’s really just a nice way of saying they are fakers, which is why they like fake language. They are as phony as three dollar bills.

Predators and Prey

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Most Americans have been conditioned to think of their government as a buffer between them and the unscrupulous. The not only patrols the streets for criminals, it polices the marketplace and the workplace for unethical behavior by the powerful. he FDA makes sure the drug makers are poisoning us with bad drugs.The SEC makes sure the rich guys are not ripping off the little guys on Wall Street. The FDA makes sure the drug makers are poisoning us with bad drugs. The government is the cop on every corner.

The custodial state has evolved to infantilize us. What that means is the state treats people like children, so the people become dependent on the state. In other words, it’s not supposed to feel like a prison, but rather a daycare center. The people are not rebelling against the imposed order, because they have come to see the state as the only thing between them and the dangers of the world. The state is more than mother and father to the people. It is the religious order of the civic religion that defines the state.

To put this in perspective, think about the last time a candidate explicitly ran against the government, as happened in the 70’s and 80’s. Reagan won the White House on the argument that the state was the enemy of freedom. He promised to slash government spending. He never did it, but at least he said it. In fact he went on a wild spending spree, but no one today would dare promise to slash the state. The GOP’s core vote is retiring Boomers and the Democrat cater to a swelling anti-white welfare class.

The custodial state is a new development in this world, made possible by the technological revolution. The Nazis and Bolsheviks tried to create such a thing, but merely destroyed themselves trying to make it work. Technology lowers the cost of this type of society and the more docile population helps, but it is hard to see how it can work. The custodial state needs to ruthlessly exploit its charges, but it can only survive in the people fully trust the state to care for them. This is impossible as we see in this story.

Lotteries have been a way for local government to raise money going back to the founding the nation. A popular collector’s item are the lottery tickets sold in the colonial period signed by famous Americans. It was a voluntary way to raise money for a public project like a road or bridge. Modern lotteries are just ways to quietly rob the foolish and unscrupulous. The odds are absurdly long and the money is not spent on what is claimed by the issuing states. It’s the sort of thing gangsters operate.

If a private casino did this sort of thing, the state would close them down. The reason is the people would howl with anger over the greedy casino ripping off the customers. The state does it and the rubes line up to play the longer odds. The trouble is, this sort of thing only works for so long. The cost of supporting the custodial state exceeds the benefit to the people in charge. That means they have to find these ways to rob their charges. The trouble is this reduces the long term benefit of the system to the charges.

In other words, the people at the top of the custodial state are parasites that become more parasitic over time. The initial relationship seems mutually beneficial. At some point though, the oxpecker starts to drill into the head of the beast. The protector becomes the predator. That’s what we are seeing all around us. The state is looking more like the predators than the protectors. This is an unsustainable dynamic. At some point, the charges realize their custodians are just different predators.

Scaring the Bleep Out Of The Honkies

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Something that jumps out when reading the chapter on Weather Underground in Destructive Generation, is that a big part of the attraction of radical politics in chaotic mayhem. Early on, the Weathermen did a lot or organizing. That required the leaders to travel around the country to visit other radicals. One of them was Bernadine Dohrn, Obama’s patron in Chicago. She was the main recruiter for the group.

In one passage, Horowitz described how she and her companion at the time liked to cause mayhem on airplanes, so the passengers would think they were crazy. The point, she said, was to “scare the shit out of the mother fucking honkies!” They would engage in raunchy behavior or dress in outlandish clothes, for no other reason than to irritate the other people on the plane. Their goal was to be disruptive just to be disruptive.

This is a major feature of radical ideology. The revolution is not going to start by itself, so the vanguard needs to first destabilize the system. The proletariat needs leadership, but they also need to be freed from the shackles of the system. The way to do that is to attack the institutions of the bourgeoisie. As faith in those institutions falters, the middle-class will be forced to choose sides. Those who side with the radicals will be rewarded. Those who side with the establishment will be killed along with the ruling class.

That’s why bombing campaigns were popular with the New Left here and in Europe. If the police and courts cannot protect you from the revolution, you’re not going to support the system. The point of this form of terrorism is to reveal the rulers as illegitimate, by making it seem  like their impotence is deliberate. Instead of blaming the bombers, the people begin to turn on their rulers, opening the door for the radicals.

Now, the New Left was not a real Marxist revolutionary group. They were just spoiled middle and upper-middle class kids from good families. They liked all the good stuff of the system, they just wanted to shortcut their way to positions of power. The Marxism language and radical politics were always a pose for people like the Weathermen. They just liked causing trouble. Most of their time was spent doing drugs and fornicating.

The few sober moments were spent screaming at one another about why they have done nothing but get high and fornicate like animals. A handful of hardcore nuts did some real damage, but most were just there for the party. Those nuts, however, were attracted to the cause for the opportunity to cause mayhem. By the time Dohrn and Ayers were running things, that’s all there was as the 60’s had petered out.

The way Horowitz describes these people, the impression is that their lust for mayhem was driven but a desire to get attention. One of the founders spent a lot of time cultivating an image suggesting he came from the lower-class, when he was a rich kid. Dohrn strutted around dressed like a hooker and banging men in public. Ayers worked hard to cast himself as a lady killer. The whole list of founders is distinguished by the amount of time and effort each put into crafting an attention grabbing image.

It’s easy to understand why these people were fond of declaring that all politics is personal. For them, it was literally true. The lust for mayhem became a part of these cultivated images. All politicians are in it for personal reasons, but most are defined by things outside of politics. Radicals are only defined by their politics. They have no true self that can exist outside their current politics. It’s why they are so angry and violent. Any push-back to their program is a personal attack, as it literally is personal for them.

It reveals something about all radical politics, regardless of the age or the issue. These people define themselves by their politics, which are by nature in opposition to the normal social order. They have to both attack that normal order, trying to overturn it, but also do so in a purely personal way. The effort they invest into “being different” is not really about the thing they are pretending to be. It is about that which they are rejecting.