Joel Kotkin has a good piece today about "One Nation, Two Economies" right here in the good old USA. About how the Obama era benefited the post-industrial economy in the Blue States and how the Trump era is benefiting the industrial economy of manufacturing and energy in the Red States.
A point that he makes is that the new post-industrial economy is very hard for the lesser-educated to navigate. But I had already been thinking, in my early hours brain-dump, that I need to rehearse the work of Charles Murray, he who is too much of a hater for the tender Special Snowflakes at privileged Middlebury College to tolerate.
Because, taken as a whole, Charles Murray's big books are a devastating takedown of today's liberals and everything they stand for.
First, Murray wrote Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950 - 1980. It was first published in 1984. The argument is that Great Society liberals fully instrumented the Great Society social programs of the Sixties, fully expecting to report on their triumphant success and make the triumphant liberal social scientist researchers and reporters into household names. Only the research showed that the social programs weren't working. They were making things worse. So what did liberals do? They said nothing and did nothing and let the disastrous programs continue to this day.
Then Murray wrote, with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. It was first published in 1994. The argument is that the importance of IQ, or intelligence, in the economy of the future means that there is a real danger of America becoming a two class society, with the intelligent ones on top and the less intelligent ones on bottom. But Wait! said liberals. This is flat out Racism. Go and stand in the corner, Charles Murray, you eevil racist. (See the problem is that black people right now have lower IQs than whites).
OK. So Murray came back with Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. It was first published in 2012. The argument is that white America was sorting into three classes. The top 25 percent -- the sort of people that live in Belmont, Mass. where Mitt Romney lived -- were doing fine with education, great careers and merger marriages. The middle 45 percent were doing so-so, with rather too much divorce and employment problems. The bottom 35 percent -- the sort of lower-class whites that live in Philadelphia's Fishtown -- were not doing well at all. Basically the men didn't work much and the women didn't marry much.
Now, if you are a right-wing nutcase like me you say that, while it is probable that the folks that will wive and thrive in the new world order will be the people with good cognitive skills, the kind of people that do well in school and in tech bureaucracies, there are other people in this world, and we are social animals. So what should we lordly cognitives do to help the cognitively challenged?
Never mind that. What should we definitely NOT do? Well that is easy. I'd say that we want to throw out the entire welfare state from free education to welfare-on-demand.
What we SHOULD do is encourage the SJW chaps to bully billionaires and centi-millionaires with social media to sponsor bourgeois-boot-camp schools and get-back-into-the-game job-retraining camps.
What we should NOT do is encourage the artistical-black twentysomething culture and the gang-celebrating hip-hop culture.
What we SHOULD do is change the culture from top to bottom -- from TV to music videos -- to encourage marriage and children and stigmatize easy sex and divorce and abortion.
As they say: if you finish high school, get married before you have children, and don't have children until you are in your twenties, you will almost certainly live a useful life.
In my view, there is no hope of implementing this program without absolutely delegitimizing liberals and lefties and the whole ruling-class culture that supports the welfare state and identity politics. I've been reading a book on "revolution" lately and found it unsatisfactory. What is revolution? Well, if you ask me, it is a big social turning, when by means hardly understood a society changes direction, probably including the ejection of the Old Regime.
In other words, we should understand that the French Revolution could not have happened without the discrediting of the Old Regime of monarchical absolutism by a rising middle class that wasn't getting no respect.
We should understand that the New Deal could not have happened without the various lefties succeeding in discrediting the Coolidge-Hoover era as hopelessly out-of-date and uncaring.
We should expect that, if we are to change America from its globalist/identity-politics present course we have to discredit the current crop of lefties and everything they stand for. We have to persuade ordinary middle Americans that the left does not care about people like them. It shouldn't be that hard, because it's true, you deplorables and bitter clingers.
This isn't hard. But it will be difficult.
A point that he makes is that the new post-industrial economy is very hard for the lesser-educated to navigate. But I had already been thinking, in my early hours brain-dump, that I need to rehearse the work of Charles Murray, he who is too much of a hater for the tender Special Snowflakes at privileged Middlebury College to tolerate.
Because, taken as a whole, Charles Murray's big books are a devastating takedown of today's liberals and everything they stand for.
First, Murray wrote Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950 - 1980. It was first published in 1984. The argument is that Great Society liberals fully instrumented the Great Society social programs of the Sixties, fully expecting to report on their triumphant success and make the triumphant liberal social scientist researchers and reporters into household names. Only the research showed that the social programs weren't working. They were making things worse. So what did liberals do? They said nothing and did nothing and let the disastrous programs continue to this day.
Then Murray wrote, with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. It was first published in 1994. The argument is that the importance of IQ, or intelligence, in the economy of the future means that there is a real danger of America becoming a two class society, with the intelligent ones on top and the less intelligent ones on bottom. But Wait! said liberals. This is flat out Racism. Go and stand in the corner, Charles Murray, you eevil racist. (See the problem is that black people right now have lower IQs than whites).
OK. So Murray came back with Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. It was first published in 2012. The argument is that white America was sorting into three classes. The top 25 percent -- the sort of people that live in Belmont, Mass. where Mitt Romney lived -- were doing fine with education, great careers and merger marriages. The middle 45 percent were doing so-so, with rather too much divorce and employment problems. The bottom 35 percent -- the sort of lower-class whites that live in Philadelphia's Fishtown -- were not doing well at all. Basically the men didn't work much and the women didn't marry much.
Now, if you are a right-wing nutcase like me you say that, while it is probable that the folks that will wive and thrive in the new world order will be the people with good cognitive skills, the kind of people that do well in school and in tech bureaucracies, there are other people in this world, and we are social animals. So what should we lordly cognitives do to help the cognitively challenged?
Never mind that. What should we definitely NOT do? Well that is easy. I'd say that we want to throw out the entire welfare state from free education to welfare-on-demand.
What we SHOULD do is encourage the SJW chaps to bully billionaires and centi-millionaires with social media to sponsor bourgeois-boot-camp schools and get-back-into-the-game job-retraining camps.
What we should NOT do is encourage the artistical-black twentysomething culture and the gang-celebrating hip-hop culture.
What we SHOULD do is change the culture from top to bottom -- from TV to music videos -- to encourage marriage and children and stigmatize easy sex and divorce and abortion.
As they say: if you finish high school, get married before you have children, and don't have children until you are in your twenties, you will almost certainly live a useful life.
In my view, there is no hope of implementing this program without absolutely delegitimizing liberals and lefties and the whole ruling-class culture that supports the welfare state and identity politics. I've been reading a book on "revolution" lately and found it unsatisfactory. What is revolution? Well, if you ask me, it is a big social turning, when by means hardly understood a society changes direction, probably including the ejection of the Old Regime.
In other words, we should understand that the French Revolution could not have happened without the discrediting of the Old Regime of monarchical absolutism by a rising middle class that wasn't getting no respect.
We should understand that the New Deal could not have happened without the various lefties succeeding in discrediting the Coolidge-Hoover era as hopelessly out-of-date and uncaring.
We should expect that, if we are to change America from its globalist/identity-politics present course we have to discredit the current crop of lefties and everything they stand for. We have to persuade ordinary middle Americans that the left does not care about people like them. It shouldn't be that hard, because it's true, you deplorables and bitter clingers.
This isn't hard. But it will be difficult.
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