Monthly Archives: February 2016

The Null Party

Posted on by

One of my gags I like to use in the comments sections of “conservative” opinion sites is to point out that the Republican Party is the land of unwanted toys. About a third of elected Republicans are traditional, middle American conservatives. Another third is just time serving barnacles who are in the best job they can ever hope to get. The other third would rather be Democrats, but circumstances put them in the GOP.

Sensible Americans often make the mistake of taking what the Progressives say about the GOP at face value. Who has not been harangued by some madman hooting and bellowing about the extreme right wing extremist Republicans? Turn on MSNBC and that unbalanced lesbian is always carrying on like Ted Cruz is at the door, threatening to fill her uterus with Bibles and sew her legs shut.

Reading the campaign websites yesterday for my screed about Rubio and Clinton, I was reminded of this reality about the parties. If you are a normal, traditional American of any race or religion, the Democrats hate you. Yeah, they hate white men with a purple passion, but they had middle-class black guys and Korean shopkeepers too. Their appeal is exclusively to poor minorities, plutocrats, government employees and the upper reaches of the managerial class.

If you are a mailman, the Democrats are the good bet, even if you are a pale penis person. If you are running a UPS Store franchise, the Democrats are your enemy, even if you are a one-legged black lesbian Elvis impersonator. That’s the thing. Their appeal is really just a relentless assault on an ever widening array of enemies. It’s a party of old rich white people promising to smash up the while middle class and give the bits to those who vote Democrat.

The point here is that for the majority of Americans, there’s nothing on offer from the Democrats. For a sizable minority, maybe even a majority now, the Democrats are a threat to them personally, professionally and culturally. Strip away the old white people who grew up voting for FDR Democrats and the party probably represents just 25% of the population. Given that 20% of whites are Progressives, 30% is probably the ceiling for the Democrats.

What this means is that for those with anything on the ball, voting Democrat is suicide so they have to find an alternative. The Republicans have nothing much to offer, but at least they are not threatening to pull the roof down on society. GOP majorities in state legislatures, governorships and the Congress are entirely due to there being no third option. When the option is slitting your own throat or voting for the Republicans, most people have no trouble pulling the lever for the GOP.

The problem with being the Null Party is twofold. When the other party has anything to offer, they end up looking magisterial. Bill Clinton was a vulgar clown, but he had an issue and he had a purpose. That was enough to beat an old patrician with no reason to keep his job. The same was true of Obama. Compared to McCain and Romney, Obama looked like Churchill. Something, even something stupid, is more than nothing and in a democracy, that’s what wins.

The other problem the Null Party faces is that when they are in the majority, as they are today, they have nothing but idle time. Since they never had a reason to win the majority, they can’t come up with anything to do with it. Instead of a strategy to roll back the excesses of Obama, for example, they spent years squabbling over trivialities and then finally conceded everything in order to gain some peace during the presidential election.

Given that they have become the default option whenever the Democrats go bonkers, which is often, the Null Party keeps drawing the wrong lessons from each election cycle. There are furtive attempts to confront Obama were blamed for their loss in the 2012 election. Curling back into a ball is credited with their stunning victory in 2014. That’s why they gave away the store in the last budget. Like a cargo cult, they just assumed more concessions meant another victory. Instead, they have a revolt.

At the end of the last Great Progressive Awakening in the late sixties and early seventies, there was an intellectual counterculture forming that culminated with Reagan winning the White House. The spiritual energy may have been drained out of the Democrats as the New Left burned out, but there were still plenty of sensible people in the party to give it some reason to exist. This carried us into the Bush years when everything fell to pieces again.

Today, there’s is nothing to fill the void now that the latest Progressive wave is receding. The Null Party may fill the seats in Congress, but they have nothing to offer the voters other than platitudes, references to Reagan and technocratic programs that amount to busy work for the bureaucrats. Nature and politics abhor a vacuum, which why the leading candidates in both parties are from well outside the mainstream. Something, even something stupid, is more than nothing and in a democracy, that’s what wins.

Marco Versus Hillary

Posted on by

On Steve Sailer’s site, I commented upon one of the election threads that the most likely result will be Marco Rubio versus Hillary Clinton. Just for kicks, I went on to point out that this was Clinton – Lazio 2.0 and a suspicious mind might wonder if this was not the scripted result. For those who don’t remember Clinton’s senate run, she used pretty boy Rick Lazio like a Q-Tip and then tossed him away.

I was mostly joking, but it is not an outcome that is beyond the pale. If Rubio wins New Hampshire, he is most likely the nominee. Despite her debacle in Iowa, Clinton is probably going to win her party’s nomination. Democrats have gone around the bend, but there’s no way the brothers and sisters are voting for the old Jewish guy. Think about that. Blacks are now the party ballast for the Democrats.

Anyway, after a long primary for both sides, let’s say we end up with Hillary Clinton versus Marco Rubio. I’m going to assume that most people reading this would not be enthusiastic with either option, but democracy is all about the lesser of two evils, picking between electrocution and poisoning. My guess is most readers face every election thinking both choices are unpleasant. So, how to pick?

My first litmus test issue for any candidate these days is immigration. I’m a squish on the topic, but I think open borders is grounds for commitment to an institution. Here’s what Hillary Clinton says, “We need comprehensive immigration reform with a path to full and equal citizenship. If Congress won’t act, I’ll defend President Obama’s executive actions—and I’ll go even further to keep families together. I’ll end family detention, close private immigrant detention centers, and help more eligible people become naturalized.”

Marco Rubio tried to pass exactly that in the Senate, but he now says, “Our reaction needs to be what we should be doing anyway, which is passing immigration reform, beginning with getting illegal immigration under control.” I guess if you really want to make a case for a difference between Marco and Hillary, you can say he is slightly less enthusiastic about granting citizenship to the world, but we’re splitting hairs now.

My second litmus test issue is gun control. Hillary says, “I’ll take on the gun lobby and fight for commonsense reforms to keep guns away from terrorists, domestic abusers, and other violent criminals—including comprehensive background checks and closing loopholes that allow guns to fall into the wrong hands.” While I have no doubt she is a gun grabber, this word salad here says she will do nothing about it.

Marco Rubio has no history of gun grabbing and he said, “It’s not the guns, it’s the people who are committing these crimes.” His voting record here is solid and he has never said anything to suggest he is faking it. Rubio is also from Florida and you go nowhere in Florida politics if you’re soft on guns. This is one of those times where you have to look beyond the position statements and Rubio is the safe choice on guns

I used to put abortion as a litmus test issue, even though there’s not much to be done about it. My view is that while abortion should be legal, but very limited, calling it a natural right tells me you are too stupid to be trusted. I used to hold the same view of homosexual marriage. The fact is, Progressives have won all these battles and it will take a revolution to alter that reality. Most of the GOP is fine with abortion and homosexual marriage so a candidate’s opinion here is irrelevant.

That’s it for the big philosophical questions. Next on my list would be the smaller issues like taxes, spending and regulation. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds on these things. Look at the candidates websites and they have thousands of words on issues that fall into one of those three buckets. Clinton has a whole section on legal reform, whatever that means. Rubio has a section on common core, a topic that should not even exist.

I’m just going to keep it at the 30,000 foot view. What do the candidates have to say about reducing the size of government? Stop laughing. God help me, but I read everything on Hillary’s site and I have no idea what she wants to do as president. Her whole site is just emotive nonsense about various demographics groups. The only reasonable score here is to assume she would be business as usual, which means steady growth of the state, with some extras for Democrat barnacles.

On Rubio’s site, he has a laundry list of issues organized so the blind and stupid can easily navigate the topics. To his credit he has a section on debt, which is pretty funny given his personal finances. As you can see, there’s nothing there but some platitudes about saving stuff by reducing waste and reducing waste by saving stuff. As with Hillary, there’s no reason to think he has any interest in cutting government spending.

On taxes, it appears both candidates want to move commas around the tax code, which is always great fun. It accomplishes very little, but it makes for great flag waving. Both candidates think social engineering through the tax code is a great idea. Otherwise. there’s not much to distinguish them and they don’t seem to be making taxes a big part of their pitch. That really says a lot when you think about it. It used to be that taxes were the main difference between the parties.

That leaves regulation. Like taxes, you just don’t hear anyone talk about clearing out the regulatory thicket anymore. The Federal Registry is close to 100,000 pages now. There are more than one million regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations. No human can know all of them. Hillary Clinton is promising more regulations for all sorts of nonsense like requiring people to be happy on alternate Thursdays, but her posted positions are, as a I wrote above, emotive nonsense.

Rubio, to his credit, has a section on regulation. Hilariously, he proposes new regulations on the making of new regulations. I miss the days when Republicans talked about cutting departments. It was a lie, of course, but at least they were not talking about altering the space-time continuum. I went looking around for a better understanding of his idea and it is basically a budget that limits the total number of regulations each year, based on some exotic formulas.

The funny thing here is Hillary, the old commie, is showing her age. In her prime, a good statist promised a laundry list of free stuff from the public treasury. Today’s statists replace laws passed by elected parliaments with administrative degrees ginned up by autocratic agencies. Rubio’s regulatory reform is a complicated technocratic response to the metastasizing technocratic state. It’s unleashing a cobra in your house to kill the mice.

The long and short of it, when you start comparing the two probable contestants for president, is they are not all that different from one another. Unless you have some weird reason to care about how they move some commas around the tax and regulatory code, the only difference worth mentioning is the gun issue. Otherwise, your life will not be any different under the tyranny of Hillary than the tyranny of Marco.

Just in case someone is tempted to mention the courts, just keep in mind that the most egregious decisions of late are from Republicans appointees. The lesson of the last year is that the courts have locked shields with their fellow in the managerial class against any attempts by the dirt people to reign in their excesses. Like abortion, only a revolution will do anything to fix the courts.

We’re doomed.

The Revolt

Posted on by

Back in the 1992 election, I was sitting in what we used to call a working class bar. This was a downscale neighborhood in Boston and people still worked so working class was the correct label. Nowadays, “working class” almost always means not working. As soon as you hear the phrase, “working families” you know that no one is working and there’s no father around to make it a family.

Anyway, this bar was white Irish working class. I was just killing some time, so I stopped in for a beer. The place was busy, but not so loud that you could not hear the TV. Pat Buchanan came on and the Irish girl next to me started to hiss. I was a little surprised, but then she volunteered that Buchanan was a racist and hated immigrants. She was as white as a ghost and her people came over in the 19th century.

As these things go, others joined her in talking about Buchanan and some other pols. I no longer recall most of the details, but the main take away for me was that these working class whites were trying really hard to not be working class in their attitudes. They may work in service jobs and construction, but they were not going to be blue collar. Class for them was not about economics. It was an aesthetic. It turns out Engels was sort of right.

Sam Francis said back in ’92 that Buchanan, while being right, was too nice for electoral politics. He was right about the last part as the managerial class painted Buchanan as a quasi-Nazi bigot and anti-Semite. About the former, the conventional wisdom was that Buchanan was a yesterday man, advocating policies that went out of style in the 1950’s. The future was technology, mass media and working class Irish gals worried about racism.

What happened, of course, was that the credit boom following the Louvre Accords allowed the people in charge to keep the party going, without the people taking notice of the great hollowing out of the middle. Cheap credit meant buying better stuff made in foreign lands so everyone could feel like they were doing well. Cheap credit also sent the stock market soaring, so everyone felt like they were rich.

I was at lunch today with someone who is a solid suburban Republican. We were laughing about politics and he said something odd. He said, “You know, old Bernie is a nut, but his description of what’s wrong with this country is not that far off. He’s the only guy talking about this stuff. I’m not kidding. If his solutions were not so crazy, I’d probably vote for the guy.”

I was a little surprised, but I had to agreed. In fact, I have agreed for a while. Somewhere along the way we deified rich people and they get to run wild. Look at all the bankers who walked away from their wreckage with millions in bonuses. The robber barons of Silicon Valley are trying to bring back slavery and supposedly sensible people defend it. Liberal Democrats defend open borders. Then there is the political class that seems to live a life without consequences.

That’s the thing about this election that does not get discussed. Bernie Sanders lacks all of Trump’s media savvy, yet he is about to drop a house on Hillary Clinton. These are Democrats so some portion of the vote really thinks communism is the answer, but the great bulk of those planning to vote for Sanders are doing so out of spite. It is a big middle finger to the political class.

Trump, with all his faults, is a better candidate than Sanders, simply because he does not have a head full of nutty ideas. Even so, he is no one’s idea of a great candidate. He’s rude and he is often crude. His speeches don’t make a lot of sense most of the time. My bet is most people planning to vote for him get that, but they want to send a message. They also trust he will not do anything crazy if he ends up in the White House. That and he is right on the big issues like immigration.

I think what we’re seeing is the long overdue reckoning for the mistakes of the 60’s and 70’s. The disastrous welfare programs, the massive expansion of the federal state, the rise of Cultural Marxism as the official religion of the ruling elite. The squalor of the 70’s should have forced a roll back of all these things. What should have happened in the 80’s and 90’s was a return to normalcy. Instead, the credit boom put all that on hold.

Worse still, it fueled the growth of the managerial class that is decidedly hostile to normal people. Turn on the TV and you see an endless stream of degeneracy that mocks the foundations of western civilization and the traditions that have preserved and nurtured it. Traditional America is treated as a hate crime. The people in entertainment live like royalty, while accusing middle American of an endless list of crimes.

Pat Caddell, the veteran pollster and social observer, is calling this a revolution. He may not be way off base. It is a revolt, but a revolt against thirty years of a ruling class papering over the mistakes of the past. Egalitarianism, anti-racism and multiculturalism are fine in the faculty lounge, but they are a cultural dead end as a ruling class religion. The people in charge have run out of ways to hide this truth and now the long overdue hell is going to be paid.