Good Luck With That!

With the Corona Contagion just starting to take off in the US, My Pal Kevin D. Williamson says: "Goodbye Green New Deal." Because after two weeks of partial shutdown Americans are already getting restive. Yet the Green New Deal proposes decades of shutdown and subjection to administrative diktat. Good luck with that, he writes:

A couple of months of this is going to be very hard to take. Nobody is signing up for a lifetime of it.

Because, of course, life must go on. And the dead are soon forgotten, except by their Moms. Did you know, for instance, that the death toll from the 1918 Spanish Flu was way more than the butcher's bill in World War I? The truth is that the world is a mayhem of death and destruction. And life goes on.

But let us think of other things that are going to go the way of the Dodo.

Whatabout the New Urbanism, the cult that we are all going to live in yeasty "creative" urban environments full of high density housing, public transit, and woke cafés? Forget that!

See, back in the day, cities were so unhealthy that their death rate always exceeded the birth rate. Only since the discovery of the Germ Theory have cities begun to be even half healthy.

It is pretty obvious, e.g., New York City, that city life cannot exist alongside with social distancing, because you cannot get far enough away from other people to be safe. Whereas in the countryside...

Remember how liberals have been telling us for half a century that it was the eeevil oil companies that invented the suburbs? Probably not. Probably the suburbs were invented by women that wanted a nice safe, green place to raise their children.

Could the administrative state be another victim of the Wu Flu? It is pretty obvious that the health directorates, whether the World Health Organization or the Federal Drug Administration, are "not fit for purpose," as the Brits say. The reason, of course, is that the Follow the Leader administrative hierarchy is grossly inferior to the Have a Go (® Deirdre McCloskey) creativity of the market economy. You read, right now, of all kinds of people coming up with ways to make ventilators, or sew face masks, or stitch smocks for health care workers. To say nothing of the various drug cocktails doctors are mixing up. Nobody told them to do it. They just had an idea and decided to Have a Go. And it looks like President Trump is pretty good at waiving regulations aside so life can go on.

I also suspect that the four-year campaign to destroy Donald Trump is reaching its sell-by date. Here is Steve Sailer retailing the truth about Donald Trump. What, writes Scott Alexander, is it that real-estate moguls do? Answer: they are very good liars. The reason is that none of the participants, from banks to investors to renters, want to sign on the dotted line until they other guys have signed.

The solution – or at least Trump’s solution – is to tell everybody that all the other players have agreed and the deal is completely done except for their signature. 

This was written in 2016. Before the USMCA, the China Trade Deal, etc.

The other thing, it seems to me, is that Trump seems to be smart enough to be a couple of weeks ahead of the conventional wisdom: restricting travel from China early enough so the media could still be outraged by his xenophobia, but just in time to show he is "doing something" before the whole world demands that he "do something."

And isn't that really the secret of political leadership? To be just a little ahead of the curve but not so much that you look like a kook?

What I would really like to see is the delegitimizing of the educated Gentry and the realization among Commoner truckers keeping the supply chain going, and supermarket employees keeping the food chain working, and health care workers tending the sick, that they are the real America. And God bless them. I get the feeling that those folks are finally getting the respect they deserve, and they know it. And rightly so.

The other thing that can't come too soon is the delegitimizing of the mainstream media, the Democratic operatives with bylines. Back in the day journalists were cocky and insolent Commoners rather looked down upon by the educated as uneducated hicks. But then -- with Watergate? -- journalism became cool and all the Best People crowded in. Now we know the truth is that journalism by cool Gentry is a lot worse than journalism by barely educated Commoners. And now it looks like cool journalism is getting its comeuppance.

Really, of course, nobody knows nothing, and the future will be much different from our hopes and our fears.

And in the end, we all die.