In my political lifetime I have seen four efforts to remove a President of the United States from office: for Nixon it was Watergate; for Reagan it was Iran-Contra; for Clinton it was Monicagate; and now for Trump it is Russiagate. Note that each effort has involved Special Prosecutors.
I think it is about time we stopped this dangerous game, because sooner or later somebody is going to get hurt.
The fact is that Democrats were mortally offended when Richard Nixon was elected president. They had all convinced themselves that he was an evil Commie witch-hunter (my first liberal boss had a Nixon three-dollar-bill coffee mug) that had been sent to proper oblivion in the stolen election of 1960 (yeah, stolen for Kennedy by the Democratic Chicago machine: you could look it up).
If anything, Reagan was worse. Democrats persuaded themselves that Nixon was evil. But Reagan was an "amiable dunce," per Clark Clifford. How could a man like that be elected president? So they made hay with Iran-Contra, the diversion of funds by chaps like Col. North using money from selling weapons to Iran to fund the Central American anti-communist contras that Congress wouldn't fund.
Then the Republicans got back on the Dems by impeaching Clinton over lies he made in connection with young White House intern and daughter of a donor Monica Lewinsky. Only they couldn't convict him in the Senate: it takes a two-thirds majority to remove a president in the United States Senate. This effort rebounded on the Republicans as the Democrats won a few seats in the 1998 mid-terms, almost unheard of for a midterm election in the second term of a president.
Now we have the Democrats running their third removal effort in the last 50 years, against Trump on the strength of the Steele Dossier that was opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign.
I will tell you what is going on here. It is all about the end of the Democratic dominance from 1933 to 1968, and the refusal of liberals to understand that the world has changed. Liberals think that they have been ordained by some secular god to bend the arc of history towards justice using government programs and political power and activism. For 50 years it seemed that they were right, doing wonderful things like pro-union laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Civil Rights. Then, the day after all this was complete the American people turned away from the liberal project and elected Richard Nixon in 1968. The liberal world has never been the same since, and liberals can't understand why all those deplorables fail to agree that liberal governance has been the best thing since sliced bread.
OK, if you are a liberal then the world looks like the result of your wonderful wisdom. Imagine an America without pro-union legislation! Well, I can, and we maybe would not have lost all the jobs in union-dominated steel and auto if unions hadn't gotten special privileges. Imagine a world without Social Security! Well, I can, and the result would probably be that many more Americans would be saving with Fidelity and Vanguard and dying with a nice little nest egg for their children. Imagine a world without Civil Rights! Well, at least we wouldn't have the vile race and gender politics of Affirmative Action followed by Diversity and Inclusion.
In fact, a survey has shown that ordinary Americans really don't hate rich people much these days. But they really have a problem with the educated snobs in the administrative state that regulate them and order them around. Thus Donald Trump.
Now I have a proposal to my liberal friends. And that is: Give It Up. Your golden age is past. These days we are dealing with the unintended consequences of your wonderful ideas: with government spending that is all mewed up paying pensions to old people while young people get into ruinous student debt; with vile race politics encouraging the kind of tribalism that the nation state was designed to marginalize; with top-down administrative government that is bound to fail because Mises: that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices, and because Hayek: that no bureaucrat from Washington DC can outperform a million producers and consumers interacting through the price system. Also, of course, liberals have gravitated from enacting policy by legislation to administrative regulation by the bureaucracy. It is just too hard to pass beneficial legislation these days.
I encapsulate all this in my catchphrases: government is force, politics is division, system is domination. In the best society you want as little of these three wonders as possible.
It is telling that liberals in the last decades have been hard at work on a cultural project to deny their opponents a voice in the public square, by calling them racists, sexists, homophobes, and haters. Thus we have AntiFa that regards any non-liberal gathering as a fascist hate rally. Now we learn from James Damore's suit that Google has a policy that allows its lefty employees to blacklist co-workers on corporate communications whose opinions they don't like. Denying your opponents a voice is not going to end well, liberals.
I encapsulate all this in my catchphrase: there is no such thing as justice, only injustice.
Here's a brilliant idea, liberals. The whole idea of democracy is that, instead of having civil war, like in the good old days of Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays with Prince Hal facing off against Harry Percy and may the best man win in single combat, we have the sham war of elections. Instead of battling barons, or even mobs in the street, we have politicians battling it out in rallies, in political commercials, and in debates -- and latterly in insult tweets. It is the nature of this repeated sham fight that power alternates between parties, so that when our side is defeated we can say that while we are all Americans and should go home after the election, well, "wait until next time." Sean Trende has written that it is extremely unusual for one party to win the presidency more than twice in a row.
(Notice that after 1968 that Republicans won five out of six presidential elections. I wonder why?)
Democrats have basically not conceded the last two change elections that went against them after a two-term Democratic president. In other words, they object to the Sean Trende two-term rule. In 2000 they contested the Florida results, and Al Gore never properly conceded and never told his people to go home. So we had Democratic activists hopped up right through the two terms of Bush. Now we have had Hillary Clinton who failed to come out on election night and concede the election, and her supporters have responded with their "Resistance" and the various hysterical notions that Trump was colluding with the Russians, or that he is "mentally ill," or something.
The point is that if one side decides to stop observing the rules and habits of the democratic fake-war game then the other side is going to cotton on, and you are not going to like the results. That, to me, is also the lesson of Trump.
The conservative movement of the mid-to-late 20th century operated on the assumption that politics was a game of ideas: each side pitched its ideas to the electorate and may the best ideas win. But that ended in part with Bill Clinton, who ran as a moderate and then pushed government-healthcare Hillarycare on us. He got his hat handed to him in the 1994 midterms when the first Republican Congress in 40 years got elected. Then we had Barack Obama, elected in a normal change election, who decided that Americans had voted for "fundamental transformation." No they hadn't, and the Republican Congress and the Trump presidency are the result. Now we have the anti-Trump Resistance that seems to think it can use the deep state to spy on its opponents and run President Trump's troops through the ringer of a special prosecutor. In a vague way, even anti-Trumper David Brooks can see there is a problem with this.
Look, the point of democracy is that government power goes to the chaps that can persuade the electorate that it is either Time for a Change, or Four More Years. That is all. Democracy says nothing about justice or arcs of history, or the wonders of a compassionate educated elite that graduated from all the right elite colleges and scored all the right internships. In fact, because of the fact that democracy is just a trial of strength: my millions of voters vs. your millions of voters, we should not assume that any democratic government is elected to do anything more that reward its supporters for their votes. I like to remind everyone about this with my catchphrase that They are all Idiots. That's why we have change elections, when the voters get tired of the old idiots and decide to elect new idiots. Call it Rotating Idiocracy.
You may think that Trump is an idiot, and you may be right. Only one thing: he is hatching what amounts to the full conservative agenda, the ideas that conservative thinkers and think tanks have been incubating for the last 50 years, from reduced tax rates (because settled-science marginal economics, vintage 1870), to rollback of administrative regulation (because settled-science "regulatory capture," vintage 1955). But one thing is certain. Chaps like Barack Obama and the crazy-cakes gender studies professors are the real idiots, because they are going against the settled science of the last century, that big government is a real problem, because it cannot compute prices.
I add, in addition, that big government does not work because government finds it almost impossible to do reform. Once you have set up a program that distributes benefits to the voters it becomes almost impossible to reform or reduce it, for the simple reason that people adjust their lives to take advantage of the free stuff offered by government and strongly resist the notion later on that they should get onto their bikes and go get a job so they can pay for the benefit themselves. That is the difference between government and the private sector. In the private sector businesses and consumers must adjust their plans every day, based on the signals from the price system. But the whole point of government is to sidestep the price system, to set up a rigid regulatory system that grinds on with the same rules, year after year, rain or shine. Until the whole thing breaks down.
It is a vile conceit that my party has a monopoly on virtue, or that your party has a monopoly on hate. Politics is simply division, the game of demonizing the opposition and getting 51 percent of the vote in the next election. Conceit aside, the probable truth is that the administrative state and its one-size-fits-all government entitlement programs is past its sell-by date.
The only question is whether we will transition to the new order peacefully, or through the wringer of inflation and riot and revolution. Removing the other guys' president ain't gonna get us to those sunlit uplands, I guarantee, so stop it you crazy-cakes.
That is all.
I think it is about time we stopped this dangerous game, because sooner or later somebody is going to get hurt.
The fact is that Democrats were mortally offended when Richard Nixon was elected president. They had all convinced themselves that he was an evil Commie witch-hunter (my first liberal boss had a Nixon three-dollar-bill coffee mug) that had been sent to proper oblivion in the stolen election of 1960 (yeah, stolen for Kennedy by the Democratic Chicago machine: you could look it up).
If anything, Reagan was worse. Democrats persuaded themselves that Nixon was evil. But Reagan was an "amiable dunce," per Clark Clifford. How could a man like that be elected president? So they made hay with Iran-Contra, the diversion of funds by chaps like Col. North using money from selling weapons to Iran to fund the Central American anti-communist contras that Congress wouldn't fund.
Then the Republicans got back on the Dems by impeaching Clinton over lies he made in connection with young White House intern and daughter of a donor Monica Lewinsky. Only they couldn't convict him in the Senate: it takes a two-thirds majority to remove a president in the United States Senate. This effort rebounded on the Republicans as the Democrats won a few seats in the 1998 mid-terms, almost unheard of for a midterm election in the second term of a president.
Now we have the Democrats running their third removal effort in the last 50 years, against Trump on the strength of the Steele Dossier that was opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign.
I will tell you what is going on here. It is all about the end of the Democratic dominance from 1933 to 1968, and the refusal of liberals to understand that the world has changed. Liberals think that they have been ordained by some secular god to bend the arc of history towards justice using government programs and political power and activism. For 50 years it seemed that they were right, doing wonderful things like pro-union laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Civil Rights. Then, the day after all this was complete the American people turned away from the liberal project and elected Richard Nixon in 1968. The liberal world has never been the same since, and liberals can't understand why all those deplorables fail to agree that liberal governance has been the best thing since sliced bread.
OK, if you are a liberal then the world looks like the result of your wonderful wisdom. Imagine an America without pro-union legislation! Well, I can, and we maybe would not have lost all the jobs in union-dominated steel and auto if unions hadn't gotten special privileges. Imagine a world without Social Security! Well, I can, and the result would probably be that many more Americans would be saving with Fidelity and Vanguard and dying with a nice little nest egg for their children. Imagine a world without Civil Rights! Well, at least we wouldn't have the vile race and gender politics of Affirmative Action followed by Diversity and Inclusion.
In fact, a survey has shown that ordinary Americans really don't hate rich people much these days. But they really have a problem with the educated snobs in the administrative state that regulate them and order them around. Thus Donald Trump.
Now I have a proposal to my liberal friends. And that is: Give It Up. Your golden age is past. These days we are dealing with the unintended consequences of your wonderful ideas: with government spending that is all mewed up paying pensions to old people while young people get into ruinous student debt; with vile race politics encouraging the kind of tribalism that the nation state was designed to marginalize; with top-down administrative government that is bound to fail because Mises: that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices, and because Hayek: that no bureaucrat from Washington DC can outperform a million producers and consumers interacting through the price system. Also, of course, liberals have gravitated from enacting policy by legislation to administrative regulation by the bureaucracy. It is just too hard to pass beneficial legislation these days.
I encapsulate all this in my catchphrases: government is force, politics is division, system is domination. In the best society you want as little of these three wonders as possible.
It is telling that liberals in the last decades have been hard at work on a cultural project to deny their opponents a voice in the public square, by calling them racists, sexists, homophobes, and haters. Thus we have AntiFa that regards any non-liberal gathering as a fascist hate rally. Now we learn from James Damore's suit that Google has a policy that allows its lefty employees to blacklist co-workers on corporate communications whose opinions they don't like. Denying your opponents a voice is not going to end well, liberals.
I encapsulate all this in my catchphrase: there is no such thing as justice, only injustice.
Here's a brilliant idea, liberals. The whole idea of democracy is that, instead of having civil war, like in the good old days of Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays with Prince Hal facing off against Harry Percy and may the best man win in single combat, we have the sham war of elections. Instead of battling barons, or even mobs in the street, we have politicians battling it out in rallies, in political commercials, and in debates -- and latterly in insult tweets. It is the nature of this repeated sham fight that power alternates between parties, so that when our side is defeated we can say that while we are all Americans and should go home after the election, well, "wait until next time." Sean Trende has written that it is extremely unusual for one party to win the presidency more than twice in a row.
(Notice that after 1968 that Republicans won five out of six presidential elections. I wonder why?)
Democrats have basically not conceded the last two change elections that went against them after a two-term Democratic president. In other words, they object to the Sean Trende two-term rule. In 2000 they contested the Florida results, and Al Gore never properly conceded and never told his people to go home. So we had Democratic activists hopped up right through the two terms of Bush. Now we have had Hillary Clinton who failed to come out on election night and concede the election, and her supporters have responded with their "Resistance" and the various hysterical notions that Trump was colluding with the Russians, or that he is "mentally ill," or something.
The point is that if one side decides to stop observing the rules and habits of the democratic fake-war game then the other side is going to cotton on, and you are not going to like the results. That, to me, is also the lesson of Trump.
The conservative movement of the mid-to-late 20th century operated on the assumption that politics was a game of ideas: each side pitched its ideas to the electorate and may the best ideas win. But that ended in part with Bill Clinton, who ran as a moderate and then pushed government-healthcare Hillarycare on us. He got his hat handed to him in the 1994 midterms when the first Republican Congress in 40 years got elected. Then we had Barack Obama, elected in a normal change election, who decided that Americans had voted for "fundamental transformation." No they hadn't, and the Republican Congress and the Trump presidency are the result. Now we have the anti-Trump Resistance that seems to think it can use the deep state to spy on its opponents and run President Trump's troops through the ringer of a special prosecutor. In a vague way, even anti-Trumper David Brooks can see there is a problem with this.
Look, the point of democracy is that government power goes to the chaps that can persuade the electorate that it is either Time for a Change, or Four More Years. That is all. Democracy says nothing about justice or arcs of history, or the wonders of a compassionate educated elite that graduated from all the right elite colleges and scored all the right internships. In fact, because of the fact that democracy is just a trial of strength: my millions of voters vs. your millions of voters, we should not assume that any democratic government is elected to do anything more that reward its supporters for their votes. I like to remind everyone about this with my catchphrase that They are all Idiots. That's why we have change elections, when the voters get tired of the old idiots and decide to elect new idiots. Call it Rotating Idiocracy.
You may think that Trump is an idiot, and you may be right. Only one thing: he is hatching what amounts to the full conservative agenda, the ideas that conservative thinkers and think tanks have been incubating for the last 50 years, from reduced tax rates (because settled-science marginal economics, vintage 1870), to rollback of administrative regulation (because settled-science "regulatory capture," vintage 1955). But one thing is certain. Chaps like Barack Obama and the crazy-cakes gender studies professors are the real idiots, because they are going against the settled science of the last century, that big government is a real problem, because it cannot compute prices.
I add, in addition, that big government does not work because government finds it almost impossible to do reform. Once you have set up a program that distributes benefits to the voters it becomes almost impossible to reform or reduce it, for the simple reason that people adjust their lives to take advantage of the free stuff offered by government and strongly resist the notion later on that they should get onto their bikes and go get a job so they can pay for the benefit themselves. That is the difference between government and the private sector. In the private sector businesses and consumers must adjust their plans every day, based on the signals from the price system. But the whole point of government is to sidestep the price system, to set up a rigid regulatory system that grinds on with the same rules, year after year, rain or shine. Until the whole thing breaks down.
It is a vile conceit that my party has a monopoly on virtue, or that your party has a monopoly on hate. Politics is simply division, the game of demonizing the opposition and getting 51 percent of the vote in the next election. Conceit aside, the probable truth is that the administrative state and its one-size-fits-all government entitlement programs is past its sell-by date.
The only question is whether we will transition to the new order peacefully, or through the wringer of inflation and riot and revolution. Removing the other guys' president ain't gonna get us to those sunlit uplands, I guarantee, so stop it you crazy-cakes.
That is all.
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