The Problem with Nominating a Weak Candidate for President

I feel for President Biden. I really do. I feel for the Democrats. I really do.

I feel for AOC. Here's her little problem. She thinks that the senior Dems are all sitting around doing nothing but slapping each other on the back and downing some bourbon. But they need to Act Now!

“If the president does pursue and start to govern decisively using executive action and other tools at his disposal, I think we’re in the game,” she said. “But if we decide to just kind of sit back for the rest of the year and not change people’s lives — yeah, I do think we’re in trouble. So I don’t think that it’s set in stone. I think that we can determine our destiny here.”

Guess what Sandy. The reason that Biden and Democrats in general are in trouble is precisely because you chaps in one year have managed to "change people's lives." For the worse. A lot worse.

Americans are in trouble, Democrats are in trouble, lefties like you, AOC, are in trouble because in early 2021 instead of saying: wow, after all the money printing and checks-for-everyone last year with COVID we had better trim our sails and get the economy back on track before we start handing out more loot and plunder.

But no. In order to "change people's lives" dontcha know, you guys passed the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 with checks for all.

So businesses all across the land found that nobody wanted to hire on to work for them. You think that maybe that is a problem, Sandy?

And now we have inflation roaring into double digits like it did in 1980. Before you were born, Sandy, at the end of 1989.

See, the way I figure, Sandy, you were conceived just after the third GOP president in a row had been elected. Do you understand why? Because in 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected to "make it stop." Meaning inflation and crazy lefties. Then Reagan was reelected in 1984 with a resounding majority to keep that "morning in America" going. Then George Bush was elected, three in a row. That very rarely happens.

And then, on or about your 3rd birthday, Sandy, Bill Clinton was elected president as a New Democrat promising that, hey, we aren't like the spend-and-inflate Democrats of the old days. No siree. We are New. We are Moderate. We are different.

And then, in January 1993, on taking office, Bill Clinton suddenly turned around and said OMG, I just looked at the numbers and things are worse than I thought. So it's going to be pedal to the metal on tax-and-spend. I just hafta.

And do you know what happened next, Sandy? Next was the 1994 midterms when the Republicans won both Houses of Congress for the first time in over 40 years! The GOP gained 54 seats in the House! Imagine! It's easy if you try.

So now President Biden is releasing about a third of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But, but, but! I thought that fossil fuels were Over. That the future was electric cars and buses and wind and solar. 

What's the problem Joey?

Well, we know what the problem is. It is that Joe Biden didn't really "win" the Democratic nomination for president. He was handed the nomination by the wise men of the party. In part because they didn't want Bernie Sanders to be the nominee.

In other words, the wise men of the Democratic Party wanted to run with a man who could be sold as a moderate. Rather than a crazy lefty like Bernie.

Are you still listening, Sandy?

But, because Biden was handed the nomination rather than winning it in a fair fight with all the other candidates, he is weak. He can't stand up and tell the crazies to go fly a kite. And lefties have spending plans from here to eternity.

That's why we have had the budgetary train wreck of the last year, with Democrats trying to pass multi-trillion dollar spending bills when they have a 50-50 Senate and a 222-213 House. You don't get to pass pedal-to-the-metal spending with those kind of numbers. But when the lefty idiots and the Progressive Caucus are demanding action, well the old guard like Biden and Pelosi have to sound the charge and let the young enthusiasts do their Charge of the Light Brigade and learn a bloody lesson. Maybe.

AOC is all upset that the young people that voted for Biden and worked to get him elected are being pushed aside.

Could be. But let's do an Ike and make the problem bigger. Maybe the problem is with lefty ideologues like you, Sandy, and the lefty profs at all the universities, and the lefty media that censors non-lefty content. So that young people Literally Know Nothing, except what they learned from their lefty teachers and the lefty comedians and the lefty social media that censors all non-lefty content.

Maybe, Sandy, you and your pals like Saikat Chakrabarti have flown young people into a box canyon, telling them lies and fantasies about what politics can do for them.

And maybe next year all those young people are going to be wondering what hit them and how come they believed the half-baked lies of people like you, Sandy.

But I expect it will take a while longer before they really start to wonder. People don't just quit a cult the first time it disappoints them. Typically it takes years, because we humans tend to believe our priests and our shamans and our handsome political leaders. Until we are dying on the field or battle or starving in some crazy lefty famine.

Yep. Things don't look to good right now for Sandy and Joey.  But there's a reason for that. It is that Joey is too weak to do the right thing, and Sandy is too stupid.

Just What is a University For?

Stop Press: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is re-instituting consideration of SAT and ACT scores for its student applicants. Said Stu Schmill, MIT dean of admissions:

“We believe a [testing] requirement is more equitable and transparent than a test-optional policy.”

So that's all right.

But really, what the Sam Blazes is university for? To learn a skill? You could get that in an apprenticeship or in on-line courses.  To build character? Yes, but that is such a guy thing. Clearly, the ladies are telling us, with all the talk of micro-aggressions and lived experience, that they don't like being challenged. They want to be baby-sat.

OK, then maybe university is to learn the wisdom of the ages. Well then, of course, there would be no right or wrong. No cancel culture or lefty professors from stem to stern. That was the idea, back in the day. Oxford and Cambridge made their young ruling-class scions study the classics because they wanted them to know about all the ups and downs and ins and outs of being a ruling class. No holds barred, because for them the name of the game was that to hold onto political power as the ruling class you needed to be smarter than the other guys.

Of course, university was also where they trained the priests in the state church. That was the idea of George Eliot's Fred Vincy of Middlemarch going to Cambridge. To become a priest in the Church of England. That would be higher status than his father Mayor Vincy's status as a businessman in Middlemarch.

Then the Germans invented the research university to make Germany strong enough to deal with France.

Today, obviously, the point of the university is to churn out good little boys and girls that all know how to be activists and get into the non-profit sector in NGOs and activism. You know, I think that would be cool if such an education were an internship. But to charge $60,000 per year? I think that the ruling class should pay for the training of its shock troops and not make the shock troops pay for their training. Of course, back in the day you had to buy commissions in the army.

But then I'm just a cranky old guy that never liked school, and got the hell out of education as soon as I got me a bachelors degree in civil engineering. And then became an autodidact by reading all the thinkers on my own.

Thing is: I think that education teaches people how to fit into the existing society in a nice little salaried slot in some bureaucracy somewhere. It might be corporate or it might be government.

But what if the future is different? What if the nice assumptions of today get turned upside down and the good little boys and girls dutifully prepare for a life that is Gone with the Wind? I suppose that's what a chap like Peter Turchin is telling us with his notion of "elite overproduction." Joel Kotkin is saying the same thing with his idea of "the coming revenge of the disappointed."

The question is: will the disappointed take their revenge on the ruling class? Or on the middle-class Commoners?

The best thing would be if they all signed up as activists in movements that attacked each other rather than ordinary middle-class deplorable America. Because, you know, when people are angry, they just want to draw blood. And don't necessarily think too clearly about who is to blame for their misery.

The other interesting thing is, of course, that the overwhelming majority of disappointed college graduates are probably women. And I don't know how women -- liberal women -- act politically when they want revenge. Like I say: women expect to be protected. When they are not they attach to a new protector. But how would that work in today's world? I just don't know.

No Liberals, Politics is Not the Answer!

Want to know the why of "gun violence" in black Chicago? It couldn't be, could it, that 

According to City of Chicago data, in every year from 1999 to 2009, more than 80 percent of all black women who gave birth were single.

I mean, imagine if poor women were pretty careful to keep the father of their baby around so that 1) they would have the financial support of the father and 2) the children would have a father around to teach them whatever it is that fathers provide.

Yes. Back in the day George Gilder wrote Visible Man about a teenage girl that had a baby and the father, a disabled ex-Marine, worked and supported her. Until she was old enough to apply for welfare and a gubmint apartment. Then she dumped him. I first wrote about this in 2011.

Then there is Ron Unz reviewing his California anti-bilingual education initiative of 25 years ago. Proposition 227 it was: "English for the Children." He was prompted to "do something" about bilingual education because he had read in The Los Angeles Times the following.

A group of poor Latino garment workers in Downtown Los Angeles had become so outraged at the refusal of their local Ninth Street elementary school to teach their children English that they had organized a public boycott.

Here are my takeaways on the issue from Ron's article:

• Republicans had opposed bilingual education for decades, but had done nothing about it.
• Experts said that the older you were, the easier it was to learn English.
• "schools were paid more money for every child who failed to learn English and financially penalized for those who did."
• "The official dogma behind bilingual education held that a young immigrant child required five to seven years to learn English,"

When the campaign got started, the anti-campaign (to keep bilingual education)

was a traditional, well-funded operation led by ace Democratic political consultant Richie Ross and a veteran campaign staff, backed by a field operation of thousands of local activists. It counted the public support of President Clinton, the chairmen of both the state Republican and Democratic parties, all four candidates for governor, every educational organization, every public and private union, and nearly every newspaper.

The anti-campaign tried to provoke a white backlash by portraying the measure as a giveaway to immigrants. And it messaged Latinos -- on Spanish speaking media -- to say "that the problems with bilingual programs had recently been fixed and that Proposition 227 would actually prevent children from learning English in school." 

But the measure passed with 61% of the vote, even though the anti-campaign had significantly reduced Latino support. 

Unz describes his experience talking to the Latino caucus at the California state legislature at the time.

At one point, I began suggesting that many Latinos didn’t like bilingual education, and [Diane Martinez] immediately interrupted and cut me off. “I know that!” she said, “Every election I walk door-to-door in my district, and everyone is always complaining to me about the bilingual programs. They all say that the system is no good, the classes don’t work, and their children aren’t learning any English. But they’re all stupid, ignorant immigrant parents, who don’t know anything about education. I’ve talked with the academic experts, and all the experts agree that the bilingual programs are successful.”

Guess what:

At her insulting characterization of her own Latino immigrant constituents, some of the other members of the Latino Caucus seemed to shrink down into their chairs in embarrassment, but none of them dared to challenge her harangue.

As Unz relates

Although the bilingual advocates were relatively few in number, they were fiercely committed to their programs and intensely focused upon that sole, overriding issue, expressing the sort of fanaticism that persuaded far larger organizations to steer clear of any direct conflict.

And so the Latino organizations in California kept out of the campaign and the Republicans stayed away, afraid that they would be tarred as extremist racist-sexist-homophobes. 

That's really the way that all politics works. Most people just want to live their daily lives and not get into arguments with other people.

But then there are the political activists -- and there is no politics without an enemy. The activists cow ordinary people and ordinary leaders who don't want to rock the boat. 

And so, you get a country bullied and bashed around by extremist political activists.

Like the "trans" issue.

Honestly. I don't know how we neutralize this power of the activist. Especially since all good little girls have been raised to believe that there is no nobler -- or more fashionable -- calling than to become an activist.

But politics divides, it make enemies out of friends and it makes people duck their heads to keep out of trouble.

And, of course it creates a political support system of "academic experts" who get government grants to produce the "science." In other words, they are well paid to support the activists.

And so every political issue reduces to "defeat the enemy, plunder the losers, and reward the supporters."

There's gotta be a better way.

After the American Empire

I've been seeing pieces that say, more or less, that if you don't hate Putin you're a traitor. Funny how the folks that were dancing toe-to-toe with Soviet Commies back in the day and saying that anyone that objected was a McCarthyite are now playing the Traitor Card.

Well, all I can say is, call me a traitor.

I think it is high time the US stopped trying to run the world and start to mind its own fences.

I'm sure that Vladimir Putin is a megalomanic. I suspect that Ukraine has become a puppet. Of someone. Because if Hunter Biden was trolling for million dollar bills in Ukraine with 50 percent for the "big guy" then I don't think we are talking about a sweet innocent virgin any more.

Look, it's only natural for a newcomer on the world scene to start throwing its weight around. As the US did in the Spanish American War in 1898. But, if you ask me it was pure imperialism.

But I fail to see the point of getting into World War I, President Wilson. Except that all the cool kids were dukin' it out in Europe. So, as any college president would do, the former president of Princeton decided he had to get in on the action. College presidents are so into cultural fashion, as we have seen in the last decade.

Then President Wilson decided that we needed a Carthaginian peace to teach Germany a lesson with the Versailles treaty that made the Germans into second-class citizens and set the stage for Literally Hitler. Thanks President Wilson. Only a college president could set up such a disaster.

So let's suppose we had to get into World War II. So that Hitler didn't conquer the world. Because we had screwed up in 1919. But would he have done so? What would have happened in his Russia campaign if the US hadn't been sending Russia lots of Dodge trucks for Solzhenitsyn to drive around in?

Anyway, after World War II we decided it was time to really teach the Germans a lesson so that they would never descend to aggressive nationalism again. Except that the occupying forces in Germany didn't have a clue how to run the place top-down, as Edward N. Peterson related in The American Occupation of Germany: Retreat to Victory. So by 1948 the occupiers just let the Germans take over their own country and ignite a Wirtschaftwunder. Anyway, we needed the Germans to help fight a Cold War against Stalin's Russia.

Anyway, no doubt we had to hold back Soviet Russia in the Cold War. I suppose, what with Europe absolutely devastated and all.

But I think, looking over the current Putin thing, that the Euros can handle this one on their own. I think the current situation is a great opportunity to say: hey, you guys are great, and you are closest to the action, so we'll trust you to do it right.

And then bug out of Europe and bring all the US troops home, and go to work on America. Of course, it will reduce the career opportunities for well-born young men to have careers in the foreign service. That might end up demoralizing the entire educated class.

Notice how nothing has changed. Today we have a new generation of the ruling class, and guess what: they have a top-down plan to rule America and Build Back Better towards a renewable future. Just like the ruling class had a top-down plan to run Germany in 1945.

Hey kids: Remember the Rules?

• Rule One: Don't invade Russia
• Rule Two: Don't invade China
• Rule Three: Don't do top-down

Oh yeah. Remember socialism? Top-down economic management by the experts? Treating people like Newtonian machines? And the New Deal? Top-down economic response to depression? And COVID? Top-down response to an infectious disease?

You know, you educated people, I am sure that you have read all the books and know that the current thing, the fashionable thing, is that mechanics and hierarchy and top-down management are so yesterday, darling. 

Today all the smart people know that the world works by "creative emergence." Something changes, maybe a butterfly in South America, and the whole world changes and we humans deal with it by adaption. Because the one thing we know that cannot work is a top-down program designed and managed by credentialed experts.

That's what I want for the next America. Creative Emergence. Adaption. Ordinary people running their ordinary lives, and credentialed experts keeping the heck out of the way.

Understanding the "Why" of the Current Crisis

Back in the day, writes Scott McKay at The American Spectator, we had a rough consensus. As in

the political consensus that has persisted for essentially all of our lives was established, to oversimplify the case, by William F. Buckley conservatives and Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberals. That consensus fueled an era marked by the welfare state, the regulatory state, the military-industrial complex, the education-media-political complex, and foreign adventurism for fun and profit particularly in the post–Cold War phase of the era.

But that consensus is dead: No more GOP Buckleyites, and no more Dem Moynihans. 

To guys like us, it seems like the left commands all the high ground. Sure, says McKay, but the left has a problem. Its crazy everything-is-oppression has led to the ridiculous moment in the Senate where a Supreme Court nominee dare not define "what is a woman."

McKay is an optimist. He writes that this moment will not tear the country apart, but rather prompt a political realignment, like Jefferson in 1800, Lincoln in 1860, and Roosevelt in 1932. In other words, Trumpism will win.

What? The Lincoln realignment did not tear the country apart? Ahem. 700,000 dead Americans might disagree with that.

Now I think that the Democrats have three problems.

1. Everything-is-oppression is a lie.
2. Politics-with-everything doesn't work.
3. Cancel culture is a sign that your agenda isn't working.

So let's unpack the three problems.

Everything-is-oppression I just read Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America where he recites the history of all the major ethnic groups in America. The key was not oppression, but the degree to which each ethnic group's culture was already adapted to individualistic life in the city -- before it hit the beaches.

The Germans already had a culture of responsibility. The Irish, Italians, and Blacks did not. Therein lies a tale. So when your politics is all about "we was robbed" instead of "how can we learn to thrive in the city" things ain't gonna go too well for you, because you have missed the point.

Politics-with-everything The problem with politics is Curtis Yarvin's maxim that "there is no politics without an enemy." He means that every political issue degrades into a battle against the enemy. Thus the everything-is-oppression agenda which is all about fighting the white oppressors. But human society is about social cooperation, and in the modern city, economic cooperation. If the other guy is an enemy, then that really limits the amount of social and economic cooperation.

Back in the day the New Deal coalition had a political solution with a government program for everything. The whole point of the Buckleyite GOP was to say, well, not exactly, and it got to enact some moderating economic policy in the late 1970s and 1980s. But in the 2010s the Obama people went back to government with everything, including universal health care. And, because blacks hadn't caught up with whites, they bumped up the government's racist policy of "diversity" into the Allies narrative of we Allies stand with the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.

Cancel culture When a political movement lurches into a Cancel culture where people can lose their job for having the wrong opinion, it is a sign that the movement isn't delivering on its agenda. This is actually true of every political movement that goes beyond fighting off the Huns or the Nazis or the Commies. Politics is about the enemy, it is about war. If war is not an appropriate means for achieving something then the political movement will fail, and in the last phase of the political movement's existence it will probably be doing a Reign of Terror like the French revolutionaries, a Great Purge like the Stalinists, or a Cancel Culture like the Wokies.

Earth to liberals! An ideological frenzy like Cancel Culture is a sign that your agenda isn't working, not because your opponents are monsters but because your ideas don't work!

The point of politics is to mobilize the tribe or the nation to fight against a frightful enemy. If the problem is anything less than that, then politics is probably not the appropriate means.

And that is not just because not every problem is an enemy. It is that politics cannot get out of the circle of defeat the enemy, loot his granaries, and distribute the loot to the supporters. Needless to say, this agenda is always a wealth-destroying process. If you look at any government program, or any election, you can always reduce it to the enemy, the plunder, and the goodies for the supporters.

Want an example? The education system under COVID. The agenda of the teachers is to protect themselves from the disease-ridden students. The teachers are not saying, we will risk our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to teach the next generation of kids the knowledge and skills they will need to navigate the world. Not at all. They are saying, we will not teach these grubby kids unless we are safe.

As Eric Hoffer wrote: "What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation." One upon a time, universal education was going to save the world. Now it is a racket for teachers to get paid. See more in my "Age of Liberal Grift."

Stay tunes for more exciting episodes of The Next Regime.

Sowell's Ethnic America: Conclusion

After telling the stories of Ethnic America, from Irish to Germans to Jews to Italians to Chinese to Japanese to Blacks to Puerto Ricans to Mexicans, Thomas Sowell has a conclusion or two.

He starts by reminding us that "factors that advance or retard the progress of groups" are not necessarily moral or immoral. We are born into a group, for good and ill, and its culture may make things easier for us, or not.

It is... simply good fortune to be born into a group whose values and skills make life easier to cope with.

And it is equally important to understand what skills help, and why.

Is wealth important? But Eastern European Jews arrived with nothing, and are now in 1980 the highest income group.

Does politics help? But the Chinese and the Japanese avoided politics and now have higher incomes that average whites.

The open frontier? But the Scotch Irish were on the frontier and didn't do too well.

Education? But Jews, Chinese and Japanese rose by hard work before they got education.

But there are patterns and conclusions we can draw from the American ethnic experience.

Patterns

All ethnic groups have risen and thrived in the United States. But all of them have faced obstacles and suffering on their ascent -- that were less than what they experienced before coming. Even the African slaves in the US did better than Africans sold to the Arabs.

It makes a difference whether migrants came here as "sojourners" -- trying things out -- or as committed migrants. It matters whether people came here when convenient, such as Scandinavians and Germans, or as refugees like the Irish and the Jews. Or as captives, as African slaves or indentured servants.

What we call "white flight" is not new. When the Irish flooded into Boston and New York slums, the existing residents got out. The first blacks in Harlem were fleeing tough Irish neighborhoods in midtown Manhattan.

Strikebreakers? First it was the Irish, then Italians and Negroes were used against the Irish.

Education? Jews were passionate about education; Southern Italians were hostile to education.

Family? Both Jews and Italians had strong families, but Jewish families pushed their children towards upward mobility, while Italians felt they betrayed their family by moving into a wider world.

IQ? Lots of immigrants scored low -- even Jewish soldiers in World War I! -- but improved their standings with time and education.

Culture

National recovery after the devastation of war -- such as the Germans after World War II -- reminds us that "human capital" is more important than physical capital. Migrants can come to the US destitute and rise by effort and thrift despite impediments like racial prejudice.

Police brutality? The Jewish Daily Forward reported in 1907 that "the police in the Jewish quarter of New York are the most savage in America."

Inequality? Immigrants often start way "below the level of existing members of their own ethnic group in the country, but eventually rise to not only equal but surpass them." Often it takes fifteen to twenty years. This suggests that 

migration is a selective process, bringing the more ambitious or venturesome or able elements of a population.

And culture matters. 

Groups today plagued by absenteeism, tardiness, and a need for constant supervision... are typically descendants of people with the same habits a century or more ago.

And businesses formed by the followers of Father Divine of the Black Muslims typically do better than the "government-sponsored 'black capitalism' programs of the 1960s and 1970s."

And acculturation is a two-way process. Anglo-Saxon Puritans were overwhelmed "by the German easygoing attitude of good clean fun." American popular music owes everything to black jazz and blues. American political machines were invented by the Irish. Nothing is more American than hamburgers, frankfurters, pizza and tacos.

The "melting pot" is now disdained, but is working better than ever before. It is after people are assimilated that they begin to intermarry. 

While the public square debates the differences and conflicts between groups, there is also the question of intragroup differences, sometimes generational, sometimes differences in acculturation and affluence. And intergroup conflict is often between similar groups, such as blacks and Irish.

Discrimination is a big question in our time, meaning everything from underpaying individuals to actual barriers inhibiting the development of individuals. But employer discrimination cannot explain income differences between, say Hong Kong Chinese and native-born Chinese Americans. Nor can the average employer distinguish between "free persons of color" and other blacks. And overt economic discrimination can be costly to "profit-seeking competitive firms" although less so for government, monopolies and the non profit sector. It is perhaps the most talented and the most brilliant -- the W.E.B. Du Bois or the Paul Robeson -- that suffers most from discrimination, and is most enraged by it.

The fact is that ethnic identity is a complex question. Some people wear it as a badge of honor; others are embarrassed by it. But, writes Sowell,

It cannot be a simple morality play. It is a story of similar patterns and profound differences, of pain and pride and achievement. It is, in one sense, the story of many different heritages. In another sense, it is the story of the human spirit in his many guises.

Yes, What Should We Reform?

The Zman is complaining today that back in the 1970s and 1980s our rulers more or less came together to do some reform.

[In] the 1970’s, before Reagan was a realistic option, a consensus was forming among the various elites of society around important reforms.

Mind, you, they still didn't like Reagan. Nevertheless they did do deregulation, as in airlines. And they did decide to fight inflation with Paul Volcker. 

But, when Reagan proposed a balanced spending and revenue cut, the Dems balked. And even though Bill Clinton promised to be a New Democrat the first thing he did was try to push through a government takeover of health care. But, the Zman points out, nobody actually voted for tax reform or regulatory reform. It was an elite thing.

But now? Wall Street seems to be packing the suitcase and heading for the border; business is currying favor with China and India; the military-industrial complex is just trying to stay alive; the political class? Nothing but old men trying to beat back the radicals, populist and woke.

And yet Joel Kotkin can write about how the Dems are a dumpster fire that is blazing higher and higher with nobody calling the fire brigade. What is going on?

Yes, what is going on?

Know what I think? I don't think things have got bad enough yet for conventional wisdom in the elite to move. I'm reading a history of the US occupation of Germany after WWII, and you know what? It was a dumpster fire. Everything we complain about now was going on then: Congress just posturing; various departments unable to decide on anything. President flapping to and fro without really engaging with the issues.

So if we assume that government is always incompetent and quarreling over silly issues, and just shoveling goodies to the supporters as usual, then, obviously, it  does nothing until things are really starting to get out of hand. And getting out of hand they were in the late 1970s.

And it was only when things were really getting out of hand that a Reagan or a Thatcher could get elected.

Know what I think? I think that the Trump win in 2016 was a bit of a fluke. The people got to elect their guy without the permission of the elite. And things were not yet in the dumpster.

The elite could get together and dump Trump in 2020 because it wasn't yet obvious that the elite had totally screwed up. We weren't to the point where the elite was saying to itself: wow, we better get our house in order or we might get voted outta here.

But it could be that by November 2022 and especially 2024 the elite is going to find itself really under the gun, and decide to forget its silly conceits like climate change and systemic racism and wokism, and coalesce around a sensible reform agenda.

But what reform agenda? OK let's do an exercise: a serious reform agenda and a possible reform agenda.

Serious Reform Agenda

1. Convert gubmint pension programs to universal Fidelity/Vanguard accounts.
2. Decredentialize and decentralize and deregulate health care.
3. Move mortgage financing to eventual max50 percent down
4. Make all post-elementary school education into employer-financed apprenticeships.
5. End child labor laws.
6. Hand welfare system over to tech billionaires.
7. Put Big Tech censors in jail.
8. End vote-by-mail.

Yeah, I know. It's craazy.

Possible Reform Agenda

1. Allow people to opt-out of employee side of FICA tax.
2. Mildly deregulate health care
3. Max 75 percent mortgages plus subsidized "down payment" accounts for first-time buyers.
4. Expand education vouchers
5. Tax breaks for social media that doesn't censor.
6. Voter ID.

Now, when you look at my Possible Reform Agenda it doesn't seem too wacko or way out. No like my wacko Serious Reform Agenda that would represent Real Change. It's the sort of agenda that responsible and moderate leaders could get behind without worrying too much about appearing too extreme.

So we really aren't as far away from a decent reform agenda. We just need things to get a bit worse first.

Sowell's Ethnic America: Puerto Ricans and Mexicans

After learning about the Chinese and the Japanese from Thomas Sowell in Ethnic America, it's time for the Puerto Ricans and Mexicans.

The Puerto Ricans

Puerto Rico became part of the US in 1898 as a result of the Spanish American War, but its culture reflects "nearly four centuries of Spanish rule." There were 40,000 people there before Columbus discovered it, but most died of disease and in rebellions. What with import of slaves and Spanish and population explosion, the population was about one million in 1900.

Puerto Ricans didn't start migrating to the US in significant numbers until after World War II, and the migration has been notably two-way, with people maintaining contact with the folks back home. By 1970 the Puerto Rican population in the US was 1.5 million, half of the population back home. Most Puerto Ricans live in New York City.

In 1900 Puerto Ricans "worked in agriculture under primitive conditions. Illiteracy was 83 percent in 1898 and still 31 percent in 1940. They learned little English, and the Catholic priests were mostly Spanish. The family was important but broke up frequently. Female chastity was protected and young men had a machismo culture.

As an agricultural people Puerto Ricans were not big on education, and 70 percent of households speak Spanish. Children have not done well in school and "bilingual" teaching has not seemed to help. Puerto Ricans "have had high rates of crime, violence and dependence on relief." In 1969 "almost 80 percent of Puerto Rican men were either blue-collar... or service workers... and 60 percent of women." Incomes are lower than other groups because Puerto Ricans work less.

Although Puerto Ricans are eligible to vote, most do not do so, but when they vote, it is overwhelmingly Democrat. They mostly arrived in the US after the construction of the welfare state. As a result they have not built their own grass-roots organizations like the NAACP or B'nai B'rith. In some ways things have been easier for them, but it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. But the race wars have pitted Puerto Ricans against other ethnic groups. Minimum-wage laws and occupational licensing laws make it difficult for Puerto Ricans to get started.

Although Puerto Rican progress does not seem great, the bulk of the population is still the first generation of immigrants, where the young lack experience and the old lack education.

The Mexicans

Mexican Americans are both the oldest and the youngest of Americans. There were settlements of people from Mexico in the southwest long before Americans arrived. But most Mexican Americans arrived in the 20th century and especially after World War II.

The term Mexican American covers a variety of peoples, including the descendants of the original Mexican settlers in the southwest, illegal aliens from Mexico, legal migrants from Mexico, legal transients, and naturalized Americans. Altogether, about 5 million in 1980, according to the US Census, but probably 8 million. About 4 million live in five southwestern states, half of that in California where Mexican American well outnumber the black population. Racially and culturally they are both Spanish and Indian in various degrees.

Before Mexico there were the Aztecs, of human sacrifice fame. But when Cortez arrived the emperor Montezuma showered him with gifts, including gold. So the Spaniards had to conquer them. They were assisted by Indian tribes and by European diseases. Right from the beginning, Spanish soldiers began sexual liaisons with native women, and by 1800 the mestizos outnumbered the Spanish-born and the Negro slaves.

From Mexico the new rulers spread northwards into the American southwest. Mexico declared independence from Spain in 1821; they allowed US citizens to settle in their northwest. But as the number of Americans swelled they wanted independence from Mexico: thus a Texas war of independence and US troops capturing Mexico City in 1847. Territory acquired from Mexico included what is now California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Texas, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. So the Mexicans in the US southwest became a minority and tended to lose their land from fraud, corrupt officials, and violence. The multicolored masses were "rigidly excluded from social and political participation."

But railroads, the Mexican revolution of 1909 -- one million killed -- and the rapid development of the US attracted Mexicans to the southwest where they could make double or triple the wage back home. As with the Italian padrone system, US employers employed Mexicans in gangs through a "coyote" labor contractor. This lasted until Mexicans learned the language and the country of the United States. As with other ethnic groups the whiter and more acculturated Mexicans were accepted into mainstream society but the new migrants were shunned and exploited.

In the Great Depression, migration stopped and a massive program of deportation was begun. The Mexican population of the United States declined from 600,000 in 1930 to 400,000 in 1940. But in World War II there was a sudden demand for labor and the bracero program of contract laborers began in 1942, starting at 50,000 per year and ended at 400,000 per year in the late 1950s. The program was terminated in 1964. But there were other forms of admission, including illegal immigration. There was also a program of expulsions: 0.5 million in 1951, one million in 1954.

The expulsion drive did not last long. 440,000 immigrated legally in the 1960s, and  small border force was not able to stem the flood of illegal immigrants. Meanwhile social agencies and civil rights organizations intervened in deportation cases and raised the cost of deportation. And the Mexican government did nothing to discourage Mexicans from migrating to the US; it has regarded enforcement of the border as an American problem.

The three great waves of Mexican immigration -- pre World War I, post World War II, and post-1960s -- mean that Mexican Americans differ in the length of time their families have been in the US. Today Mexican Americans are more urbanized than Americans in general, but they have been urbanized for a shorter time than most Americans. Half the high-income Mexican Americans in Los Angeles live in predominantly white areas, and half their daughters marry outside the Mexican American groups. Less than 10 percent of high-income Mexican-American family heads were born in Mexico.

Over the years Mexican-American incomes have risen, absolutely, and relative to other Americans. 

In 1949, the personal income of Mexican-Americans was 57 percent of that of non-Hispanic whites in the southwest... By 1971 they earned 73 percent of the US average.

But meaningful comparisons are difficult because Mexican Americans are younger than average Americans, and have larger families, and have fewer people working per family. Labor-force participation among women is less, and unemployment among Mexican-American men is about double that of black men and triple that of white men. And in addition, substantial numbers of Mexican-Americans are illegal aliens.

The family is central to Mexican-American culture. Female chastity is important, and leads to early marriage and low college attendance. And family breakups are much less common. Divorce is less than white and less than half that of blacks and Puerto Ricans. Family size is larger, but goes down with increased education.

About half of Mexican-American families speak Spanish at home, and this affects educational achievement. But their values have never centered on education.

In politics Mexican-Americans have not shown much interest, and not too many have, by 1980, risen to political prominence.

Still, Mexican-Americans hold their own with other ethnic groups. In 1979 family income was 18 percent higher than blacks and 54 percent higher than Puerto Ricans, and 73 percent of the national average. 

Next: Conclusion.

Sowell's Ethnic America: Blacks

After learning about the Chinese and the Japanese from Thomas Sowell in Ethnic America, it's time for the Blacks.

The Blacks

Black Americans are unique in that the vast majority came to America against their will, as slaves, and two centuries of slavery served to separate them from their ancestral culture, making them "a cultural and biological product of the New World rather than Africa." And their history is complicated by emancipation followed by Jim Crow and involved several massive internal migrations. Thus "many blacks are only in their second generation in the urban world... about where the Irish were a century ago."

However all blacks are not alike. Although most American Negroes were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, there were already about half a million "free persons of color" that were emancipated earlier. And there are immigrants from the West Indies.

It was the Arabs that began the massive trade in African slaves after their conquest of northern Africa in the eighth centuries. Some of these slaves were introduced into Spain and Portugal, so that when the Spanish started to colonize the New World they brought along African slaves to do the heavy work. In the mid 17th century 10,000 slaves a year were shipped across the Atlantic, reaching a peak of 60,000 a year in the eighteenth century, totaling more than 10 million over the centuries. About 400,000 were shipped to the American colonies, beginning in 1619, when Africans landed in Virginia were made into indentured servants and subsequently freed. Slavery appeared as "a perpetual condition" in Virginia in 1661.

Preventing escape is a central requirement of a slave system and this was achieved by making the slaves ignorant and dependent. It was easy to escape, but not easy to escape the white patrols. The dependency imperative created cultures of "foot-dragging, work-evading patterns that were to remain as a cultural legacy" long after the end of slavery.

But the slaves developed a unique, self-reinforcing culture. "Racial solidarity was basic and betrayal to whites unforgivable." Thus a violation of solidarity meant pariah status and "personal devastation." The most important relationship was the family. Slave marriages -- without legal standing -- "usually lasted for decades, if not for a lifetime." And slaves maintained their surnames, secretly, down the generations. Although slave owners could separate slave couples, they avoided it, because "the remaining partner might try to escape." However, owners were uncertain about slave marriages. They wanted to avoid fights over women, yet regarded slave families as inappropriate to slave status.

Slave labor is most suitable for "crops requiring routine, mass-production labor" easily monitored by overseers. With the invention of the cotton gin, this meant expansion of slave labor in the Deep South with its suitable soil and climate, and an associated forced migration of slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South.

Opposition to slavery took many forms, ranging from the desire to avoid the problems of living in a society with a "racially distinct people held in bondage" to rabid defense of slavery and notions that the slaves were inferior "and lacked the feelings that would cause them suffering" from their bondage. And what would happen if the slaves were freed? 

Division between North and South heightened after the Revolution. Northern states avoided the problem by announcing a future ban on slavery, which sent all the slaves to the South. Meanwhile the South doubled down on its support of slavery, with "black codes" and censorship. Opponents of slavery migrated out of the South.

During the Civil War, relations between black and white were ambiguous. Some slaves escaped to fight for the North; one slave carried his wounded master off the battlefield and then escaped to join the Union Army. Whites were also ambivalent, praising and damning blacks.

And after the War, white resentment of blacks was widespread. Yet both whites and blacks had their lives utterly disrupted.

The position of newly freed blacks was made precarious by the undependable protection of the Union Army and the rampant terrorism of white mobs and vigilantes.

And that only got worse after the end of Reconstruction.

After the War, most blacks continued as agricultural laborers and a large minority worked as domestic servants. A major problem was lack of experience in budgeting or managing day-to-day life. Thus blacks worked in ways that were hardly different from slavery. Only as they acquired the skills and culture and education of free men did they begin to rise: from slaves to share-croppers to tenant farmers. And when there was competition for labor, incomes grew.

Politically, black participation was held back by Jim Crow laws, segregation, and lynching.

Under slavery, education for blacks was forbidden, and this was tightened after the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831 in Virginia. But after the War blacks, children and adults, flocked to education when they could find it. Various agencies, from the Freedman's Bureau to missionary associations, tried to help. And blacks went from nearly zero to 75 percent literacy in the fifty years after emancipation. But public education was slow to open up to blacks, and the new black colleges taught pre-college material for many years.

Black leadership was divided between former slaves like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington that pushed for raising up the masses and free-born W.E.B. Du Bois who advocated for the "talented tenth."

Migration of blacks towards the North began before the Civil War; thus antebellum "free persons of color" were more urbanizes than whites. Meanwhile black slaves were being moved southwestwards. Migration to the cities after the War began modestly, but ramped up in the 1880s and thereafter, with 0.75 million leaving the South in the 1920s. Reasons for the exodus included worsening race relations, the boll weevil, and demand for labor in World War I. By the end of the 19th century blacks were integrating fairly well into northern cities, sometimes earning more than Irish and Italian immigrants, and residential segregation into black ghettos was not a thing.

But acceptance of blacks in northern cities went down in the early 20th century.

The masses of unacculturated, ill-educated, rural southern Negroes who flooded into the northern cities were bitterly resented by blacks and whites alike.

And so barriers were raised against all blacks and some northern cities passed residential segregation laws.

Migration paused in the Great Depression of the 1930s but resumed in the 1940s. Over 4 million blacks migrated from the South between 1940 and 1970, a major population migration. It was a "mass uprooting from a rural southern way of life," the sort that takes generations to adjust to. Normal social pathology appeared -- violence, alchoholism, crime, delinquency -- and whites and the black middle class moved away from the new migrants, if they could. Most of the migrants were male, unmarried and unskilled. As late as 1925 72 percent of black males in New York were either unskilled laborers or service workers; the bulk of black women were domestic servants. But black family life typically featured two-parent households, with 80 percent headed by the father. "The unwed teenage mother emerged in a later era."

Literacy improved, but slowly. In 1900, about half of the black population was illiterate; by 1920 it was down to less than a quarter. In 1930 blacks averaged six years of schooling compared to ten for whites. As late as 1930 only 14 percent of black children in the South reached high school. But a few high-quality black high schools delivered a cohort that in later years were graduating from Ivy League colleges. And the new black masses in the cities developed a new cultural style, and their music developed into modern jazz.

The slow rise created a new black middle class that "displaced or merged with the old [black] elite in many northern cities." And some blacks made substantial fortunes.

Blacks from the West Indies started immigrating in the early 20th century. About 1 percent of the black population, they are overrepresented as professionals and public figures, and have not intermarried much with native US blacks. Although West Indian black slaves were treated worse than US slaves they grew and prepared their own food and sold surplus food in markets, giving them experience in running their lives and in buying and selling. They were emancipated in 1838 but were given a period of preparation for freedom, unlike the overnight emancipation in the US. Many West Indian blacks have risen to leadership positions in the black community.

President Truman made "civil rights" a major part of his platform in 1948, splitting his party and losing the South. But he started a process, with court decisions striking down discriminatory laws and practices. But black improvements in incomes, occupations, and education have not eliminated "gaps" as other groups have also improved their lot. Still, in the 1960s black income and college enrollment rose faster than white. The number of blacks in elective politics soared, quadrupling in state legislatures in the South. Overall black progress appears less than expected because half of American Negroes live in the South where incomes and living costs are lower.

Blacks have experienced retrogression in the proportion of one-parent families; the proportion of blacks on welfare has increased, and the proportion of blacks in work has declined absolutely and proportionately to whites. Government has attempted to advance blacks with "'affirmative action' or racial quota hiring" but economists believe these efforts have "little or no effect." These policies have "engendered strong resentment among whites in general."

Prominent blacks are disproportionately descended from black elite families and West Indians: Thurgood Marshall, Andrew Young, Roy Innes, Shirley Chisholm.

Blacks have progressed from a "position of utter destitution... to a place alongside other groups emerging the in the great struggles of life. None have to to come from so far back to join their fellow Americans."

Next: Latin Americans

Sowell's Ethnic America: Chinese, Japanese

After learning about the European immigrants from Thomas Sowell in Ethnic America, it's time for the East Asians.

The Chinese

Chinese people started migrating away from China during the decline of the Ming dynasty. Migration to the US started with the discovery of gold in 1849. But nearly all the migrants were from one province, Kwantung, and even one area, Toishan. The immigrants worked as contract laborers in agriculture, railroad building, and worked in gangs under the supervision of a fellow Chinese. But they worked so hard, and for so little wages, that they provoked the fear and hatred of white workers. As in attacks and murders. 

Things got so bad that the US passed a Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. This created great hardship for the mostly single male workers, because they could not bring wives over -- especially given how family-centric Chinese culture is. There were special fees and taxes placed upon Chinese businesses like laundries. Because of these impositions, the Chinese kept themselves apart in "Chinatowns" and did not use the legal system to resolve disputes. So local Chinese leaders and the secret society "tongs" kept the peace.

The Chinatowns became notorious as centers of vice: prostitution, drugs, and gambling, and that attracted white "ruffians and hoodlums." But eventually they developed into tourist attractions and needed to keep the vice down to a dull roar.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was not relaxed until 1945, when a predominantly female immigration allowed husbands and wives to be reunited and provide partners to a predominantly male community. Many of the new wives were selected by matchmakers.

Although the economic rise of Chinese Americans was mostly in Chinatown business -- financed by Chinese credit associations -- by World War II there was a labor shortage and Chinese were able to move into the general economy. It didn't hurt that Americans felt sorry for China being invaded by Japan.

In education, Chinese American children did well, whether in segregated schools or not. And the Chinese sent their children to college, so the Chinese moved into the professions. By 1959 the average income of Chinese Americans was above that of other Americans.

After the Maoist revolution, the Toishan Chinese in America were invaded by refugees from Communism that came through Hong Kong. They did not speak the Chinese dialect spoken by the Toishaners, but neither did they speak much English. On the other hand the new immigrants had been partially westernized in Hong Kong and did not have the strict family culture of the Toishaners. Conflict ensued.

Today Chinese Americans have higher incomes than the average and "higher occupational status." A quarter of Chinese Americans work in "scientific and professional fields." But mostly their prosperity issues from the fact that Chinese Americans work more than the average American.

The Japanese

Migration from Japan to the US began after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, in a culture that admired the US. The first migrants were contract laborers to Hawaii and did not work out. But later migrants, as sugarcane workers in Hawaii and mainland US laborers "on railroad and in mines, lumber mills, canneries, meat-packing plants," were so efficient that they were "feared and hated by American workers and American labor unions." As they moved up from agricultural laborers to tenant farmers they provoked hostility from white farmers. Thus the Alien Land Law of 1913 that forbade California land ownership by aliens -- Asians in general and Japanese in particular.

But, because of the rise of Japan, there was no Exclusion Act. Only the "Gentlemen's Agreement of 1908."

Under the terms of this agreement, Japan itself severely limited the number of immigrants to the United States, and the American government allowed the wives of of existing Japanese in the United States to join their husbands and for parents and children to be reunited here. 

Thus the extreme sex imbalance of Chinese immigrants was avoided. And the immigrants and their children became Japanese Americans.

The first generation of immigrants, the Issei, had been selected by the Japanese government "for their health, character, and willingness to work." They were predisposed to "accept and emulate the American way of life."

The second generation, the Nisei, were significantly different. They spoke English, and very little Japanese, and the values they learned from school and American culture were in conflict with the values of the Issei.

But then came World War II and the internment of the Japanese Americans. Rising hysteria against the Japanese encouraged President Roosevelt, by Executive Order, to remove Japanese Americans from "military areas" into internment camps in the middle of nowhere. The impact of the mass internment was devastating, as the victims had to liquidate their property in hasty sales -- to the tune of $400 million in 1942 prices. And also devastating culturally, as the family-oriented Japanese Americans were forced to live in military-style barracks.

But the US needed labor. So in the spring of 1942 "some seasonal agricultural laborers were allowed furloughs to help ease farm labor shortages" and the furloughs were eventually changed to "permanent relocations." Then it was hundreds of railroad workers, then 4,000 Nisei college students -- to safe Eastern and Midwestern colleges. And in January 1943, the US started to recruit Nisei into the armed forces. Despite their bitterness, many Japanese American youth "seized the opportunity to prove their loyalty in combat." Then there were the Nisei in every military formation translating often un-coded Japanese military communications into English.

The internments proved a turning point for Japanese Americans.

Never had a group so proved their loyalty under impossible conditions.

In 1946 in California, an anti-Japanese initiative was defeated overwhelmingly by the voters. 

After the war, the Issei returned to their former lives and tried to rebuild their businesses. But the Nisei, educated and English speaking, were able to enter the mainstream. Their college degrees enabled them to build careers in "engineering, optometry, or business administration." By 1980 Japanese Americans were earning 11 percent more than ordinary Americans.  

Japanese American success is partly because they work more, and partly because they are educated more. But the Issei generation got its start in occupations with little education: "farming, contract gardening, small-business ownership." The new generation is assimilating, and intermarrying, reaching 50 percent in Los Angeles County in 1970. However, among the youth, grade point averages are declining towards the norm, and social problems are on the rise.

Next: The Blacks

Sowell's Ethnic America: Jews, Italians

After learning about the Irish and the Germans from Thomas Sowell in Ethnic America, it's time for the Jews.

The Jews

Three kinds of Jews migrated to the US. First the Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal; then the German Jews; then the Eastern European Jews after 1880.

Sephardic Jews were doing OK in Spain/Portugal until they were expelled in 1492. Many arrived penniless in colonial North America but soon recovered their wealth. There were about 2,000 Jews in the colonies at the time of the Revolution. But they looked down on the Ashkenazi Jews.

Ashkenazi Jews from Germany began as a trickle but ended up at half a million by 1880. They spread out throughout the nation, "working as small tradesmen and professionals". Many started out as peddlers on foot, then graduated to horse and buggy and finally opening local stores. The Guggenheims and Gimbels started out as peddlers. By 1880 40 percent of German Jewish families had at least one servant. Less than one percent were still peddlers or laborers.

Eastern European Jews came from the Russian Pale of Settlement that suffered pogroms after the assassination of the Tsar in 1881. These Jews had settled in Eastern Europe with the encouragement of Polish royalty in the 13th and 14th centuries. But then Catherine the Great confined them in the Pale of Settlement in eastern Poland and western Russia.  Fleeing from persecutions over one third of he Jews in eastern Europe fled to the United States in the four decades after 1880.

The eastern European Jews arrived penniless, but about 50 percent were literate. The "uptown"German Jews in New York looked down upon them, the "downtown" Jews, that worked in the needle trades in the Lower East Side. But the uptowners still gave the newcomers the benefit of the dense network of Jewish philanthropic institutions.

Because of their distinctive appearance and limited language skills and strict religious rules, the eastern European Jews could not spread out, but had to work among Jews. So they worked in the "sweatshops" of the garment trade of the Lower East Side in incredibly crowded tenements using Isaac Singer's new sewing machines. The garment factories were mostly owned by German Jews; a generation later eastern European Jews owned the factories and Italians were the workers.

The sweatshop today is a scandal, but they enabled women to work in the home without leaving children unattended. But the workers managed to save from their earnings to help the rise of themselves and their children. The children worked in the sweatshops, but seldom full-time, because their parents wanted them to go to school. But they didn't all go to college. Not in the first generation.

The spectacular rise of the Jews -- to top of the income rankings by 1980 -- is a testament to the experience of Jews over the centuries. They knew about barriers but knew how to circumvent them. And they largely created the clothing production industry and the movie industry. Plus many of them already had centuries of experience with urban life and commercial activity.

The Italians

Immigrants from Italy are primarily from southern Italy, mostly peasants and agricultural laborers. The culture they brought to the US reflects the culture of their homeland. Southern Italy is all wrong for prosperous agriculture. The growing season is dry; the rain comes in torrents; the agricultural land is malarial; people live in the hills; the landowners are beasts. So southern Italians trusted no-one except direct family; they did not experience a culture of law and policing. They have learned that individual initiative is dangerous, and right wrongs with the old system of vengeance. They opposed the education system imposed on them from the north, and weren't that keen on the Catholic Church.

There is a big difference between northern and southern Italian immigrants. Around 1900 12 percent of northerners were illiterate, but 54 percent of southerner. The northerners liked to pass for Americans and separate from the embarrassing southerners.

Italian immigrants from the same village tended to cluster near each other, and didn't trust people from other villages. They interacted fairly peaceably with the Jews, but not the Irish. They were dependable on the job, but lacked initiative and thus required close supervision. Typically they worked for an intermediary, a padrone, rather than an employer.

The employer paid the padrone, and the padrone paid the workers -- after deducting his fees, expenses, advances, rent, and credit charge.

Social reformers hated the padrone system and it eventually died out, as Italians became better adjusted to American life. 

Immigrant culture focused on the family, and the church did not earn their loyalty. In Italy they had not attended church much, and in America they didn't get on with the Irish that ran the church and the Catholic schools. They created mutual-aid societies, but they were fragmented according to village or provincial origins. Italian immigrants were active in labor unions, but created few organizations themselves. They had lower crime rates than other immigrant groups, but because they immediately responded to an insult or an attack with a knife people learned not to provoke them. The famous Italian Mafia didn't take off until Prohibition.

Italians were anti-education, and took a while to change their minds. This meant that the experts regarded Italians as mentally inferior. Even in 1980, college attendance by Italian Americans was below average. Still, the Italians did rise. In 1910 in Boston, two-thirds were manual laborers, but only 38 percent at the end of their working life.

Italian Americans caught up with the Irish occupationally. Even in 1909, 22 percent of Italians in Boston were in business compared to 5 percent of the Irish. But they made their way in ways that did not require formal education. They did not just work; they saved.

When they first arrived Italians had less hostility to blacks than other immigrant groups. But later the groups grew apart. Partly that is because Italians are less inclined to participate in "white flight" from lower-income neighborhoods. Italians get on much better with Chinese than with the Irish.

Next: Chinese, Japanese

Sowell's Ethnic America: Irish, Germans

I was reading a piece by Charles Murray on "The Immortal Sowell" and he mentioned Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America.

Sowell sees his books on race and ethnicity as the product of his obligation as a black scholar confronted with destructive racial policies.

Hmm, I thought. Did I ever read Ethnic America? So I went downstairs and found Ethnic America on my bookshelf. But I had never read it.

Wow. What a book. Right away, it answered a couple of questions I had about the Jews. As in, how did they get to be in Eastern Europe? And how does Yiddish appear?

But first. The key thing to understand about immigration is that before steamships, the migrants came in sailing ships that were really designed for cargo. For instance,

[T]he Irish came to America in vessels that carried lumber [to Ireland] from the northeastern United States, so that is where they landed when the ships returned.

Naturally, the living conditions in these sailing ships was vile, "without adequate ventilation, toilet facilities, or enough food or water." The migrants slept on shelves -- except that made women rather vulnerable, so many preferred to sleep on the floor in a sitting position.

The Irish

In Ireland, the Irish lived as a conquered people. Under the Penal Laws, Catholic Irish could not be educated nor could Catholic churches operate legally. The result was that 

Clandestine, grass-roots organizations of all sorts developed among the Irish to serve their religious, educational, and political needs... Not only did the Irish develop considerable organizing skills from having to provide themselves with a range of institutions normally provided by government; they developed skills to circumventing governmental institutions that they regarded as illegitimate oppressions.

So when the Irish came to the US in the 1840s potato famine in the holds of sailing ships they arrived in Boston and New York basically prostrate and without urban skills or money. So most of them worked as servants or day laborers. But they had experience in underground politics. That plus their charm and blarney got them into US urban politics. 

The Germans

German Americans are the largest group after those of British origin. They started coming in the 17th century as "Pennsylvania Dutch" that were actually deutsch. Many started as indentured servants, and went out to the frontier to farm because that was the cheapest land.

[T]he early German settlers quickly established a reputation for hard work, thoroughness, and thriftiness.

They tended to live in isolated German-speaking communities in a single religious denomination, but gradually learned English and contributed scrapple, chocolate cake, cole slaw, and sauerkraut to American cooking. On the frontier they often lived in communities next to the Protestant Scotch-Irish. The Germans were quiet, frugal and friendly to the Indians. The Scotch-Irish were quick-tempered, hard-drinking, and often in feuds with each other or the Indians.

Early German immigrants were predominantly farmers, but during the 19th century more and more had urban skills. For instance in 1849 there was a German optician named Bausch and a German businessman named Lomb: both immigrants. Then there was Roebling, the suspension bridge guy, plus Steinway, Weyerhauser, and Heinz. Not to mention Studebaker, Chrysler, Wanamaker, Rockefeller.

Much "innocent public family entertainment... music, picnics, dancing, card playing, swimming, bowling" was introduced to America by Germans.

Prior to Hitler, most German Jews identified as Germans rather than Jews, and some American-Jewish newspapers were prosecuted in World War I for being too pro-German.

Next: Jews and Italians.

Ukraine and Carl Schmitt's Enemy Thing

I was reading a frightening piece today, "The Architects of Our Present Disaster" by Benjamin Braddock, about how we coulda shoulda made peace with Russia after the Cold War. On 9/11, for instance, Condoleezza Rice spoke with Vladimir Putin:

[S]he called President Putin and told him our military would be going on high alert. He told her that he knew and that he had ordered his forces to stand down. Then he asked if there was anything he could do to help. Rice recounted that she had a moment of reflection: “The Cold War really is over.”

Wat! Vlady baby asked if he could do anything to help?

Only Rice and her successors didn't make peace; they didn't write a new Treaty of Westphalia. In fact, it is clear that, all along, Russia has been an opponent. And pretty clearly, Russia right now is an enemy. I've been reading articles in places like Quillette -- "Ukraine and the pro-Putin Right" -- that clearly show that the global ruling class regards conservatives that don't go full-on anti-Putin as traitors. 

Braddock goes on to detail all of the meddling we've been up to in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the post Cold War era. And what good has it done?

I would say the same about the domestic politics in the US since the end of the Cold War: what good has it done?

Let's make the problem bigger. What good has politics ever done?

Because politics is always about an enemy. Says Nazi Carl Schmitt. If there isn't an enemy, there isn't any politics.

So if you are a ruling class, what's the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" if you don't have an enemy?

You can see the enemy thing in the COVID experience. The Dem governors were all in on the war against COVID, ordering people around with mask mandates and vaccination mandates.

(I was to a vegetarian restaurant over the weekend -- after WA Gov. Inslee ended his mask mandate -- and the dears at the restaurant still had a mask mandate and still required proof of vaccination. It's funny, isn't it, how our liberal friends, who believe in Peace and all that, just love to be in charge and issuing orders. And following orders.) 

I don't think that the Dem Governors were consciously wanting to be little Hitlers. It's just that if you are a liberal you think that politics is the royal road to justice. And so you always think, like the generals in World War I, that one more Big Push should do it. Because once you have made an issue political, you have required that you have an enemy to fight. And once you have an enemy you have to continue the fight until the enemy is defeated. If there wasn't an enemy then you wouldn't need government force and a political life-or-death narrative.

That's why liberals are so into the pejorative thing, calling people racists, sexists, homophobes. If you make an issue political it is because you need to fight for it, and that means you need an enemy. And what is the first thing you so with an enemy? You call them a nasty name. By the way, what's with the liberal thing on Trump's Mean Tweets? Isn't that what you liberals are doing every day of the week? Isn't the slogan on every protest sign the peaceful protest equivalent of a Mean Tweet? You tell me.

Back to Ukraine. I don't like Putin. I don't like his invasion of Ukraine. I don't like all the NATO and EU saber rattling. I don't like the proposed NATO summit.

Why not? Because I think that all the players are fools and knaves, and whatever they do, chances are they will Make Things Worse.

Why do I think that? I've come to this notion gradually over the years, as my reading has given me what I consider to be a greater depth of understanding of human affairs than you get by ingesting the usual narrative.

Maybe it's all just a conceit on my part. But one thing that reading books does for you. It gives you a means of judging the world from a different position than the ruling-class narrative. If you only consume regular media then you will be signed onto one or another of the received wisdoms of the day.

And that's not good.

Do the Dems Think Strategically?

Paul Gottfried thinks that the Dems are thinking strategically with their Green Energy and their open borders. Both policies are designed to grow the base of Democratic voters.

[T]he administration is successfully catering to its base. Biden is doing exactly what his voters want, and he and his handlers have no intention of changing course. There is also the possibility of processing the millions of illegal aliens Democrats have shepherded into the country to full citizenship.

Says he:

Biden’s party is always thinking ahead, particularly when it cheats and/or acts destructively. 

But is he right? After all, he writes, "Democrats are not necessarily holding a bad hand if they can pull in more independents to help bring their numbers back up."

Let's start with independents. The point about independents, I think, is that they are not that engaged with politics. So, if the Dems show them helpless immigrants being whipped at the border, they are appalled. If Dems do non-stop propaganda on green energy and how we are going to fry the world unless we act now, they have to agree.

But when independents note that there seem to be a lot of Hispanic roofers taking all the roofing jobs away from good old American workers, then they wonder. If gasoline prices start exploding then they are angry and afraid.

So, the ruling class gets to set the agenda and make its narrative the default narrative. But when things go wrong, it all falls apart.

I've been reading a biography of Andrew Mellon, banker and financier, who was Treasury Secretary in the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. In the 1920s the Republicans were the ruling party. But when the Crash of 1929 hit, and the Republicans didn't manage to right the economy, for three straight years from 1929 to 1932, well then the American people voted for the other guys.

The GOP lost 53 seats in the House in the 1930 midterms and 100 seats in the 1932 presidential election. Thy deserved to lose. Reading about Andrew Mellon in David Cannadine's Mellon: An American Life, it is clear that, for Mellon, the thousands of banks failing every year in 1930, 1931, 1932 were just the way things were. 

He and the GOP hadn't learned the lesson taught by Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street that the central bank is the lender of last resort, and its job is to keep the credit system from crashing on the rocks. If there was one thing that the New Dealers got right it was to stop the bank failures and restore the credit system in 1933.

But the New Dealers screwed up just about everything else.

The GOP lost another 29 seats in the 1934 and 1936 elections. And then gained 81 seats in the 1938 midterms. So, in 1938, the media was still all-in on FDR and the New Deal, but the voters had had enough.

Did the New Dealers have a strategy to rule forever? They thought they had, with all their National Industrial Recovery Acts and Civilian Conservation Corps and so on, but they were wrong. Those glorious policies, that my liberal friends still recall with a warm nostalgic glow, didn't work. Of course, the Dems went on to win the biggest war in human history against the most evil enemy in human history: gold stars for that!

When you start losing, on the battlefield or in the economy, then the soldiers and/or the voters start to desert the colors. It doesn't matter what glorious narrative you have, or how many voters you are bringing over the border, or how much money Mark Zuckerberg is putting into election offices in Democrat districts, when things turn South then people start to pay attention and they start to lose faith in the narrative and in the current leaders.

Now, of course, people react to bad news in different ways. Using my Three Peoples theory, we can say that for Subordinates they start to lose faith when their lord isn't sending the checks regularly. We can say that the Responsibles start to lose faith when they cannot go about their business every day without being harassed by government regulations or crazy price increases. We can say that the Creatives get antsy when the glorious vision of the prophet -- say, to save the world from CO2 pollution -- starts to crumble.

Right now, I'd say that all three of the Three Peoples are experiencing distress. For the Subordinates, their checks aren't covering their bills; for the Responsibles, the crazy mandates and restrictions are screwing up their lives; for the Creatives the glitch in the Matrix on climate change is raising questions -- even though they haven't yet even begun to think of questioning the divine prophecy of the climate gods.

Politics needs an enemy, and I'd say that right now, most Americans think that their rulers are the enemy.

And my feeling is that the Democrats really don't know what to do, except keep on keeping on.

And I say that when people start to cheat, it is a "tell" that they know they are losing.

Inflation is a Government Program

Oh well, another month of 10 percent inflation in the Consumer Price Index. And here's the point. The Fed hasn't started raising interest rates yet. Not until next week. And that means...

We've had a nice liberal guest around here, who keeps mentioning the availability of "affordable housing.," meaning, of course, government financed and assigned housing for approved poor people.

I just haven't had the heart to mention that the reason housing is so expensive -- and that housing prices here in Seattle are going through the roof -- is government.

Back in the day, before the Great Depression, all you could get was a 50 percent mortgage. And you had to refinance it after ten years. Do you see how that might keep house prices down? Because, you see, before you can borrow any money you have to pony up 50 percent of the home's value. In cash, in savings.

The federal government has been subsidizing mortgages since the invention of Fannie Mae in 1938. That set up government-backed 30-year fixed mortgages for homes. But, of course, no private lender can offer 30-year fixed rate loans. Not at 3 percent. Not with 2 percent inflation -- in a good year. So the gubmint does it. In the years since the total of such government-backed mortgages have gone to about 40 percent of GDP. So that's really an additional 40 percent on top of the existing federal government debt of over 100 percent of GDP.

By the way, why in the world does anyone buy 30-year bonds from the US government, knowing that it can inflate the value away any time it likes?

On top of that, government encourages low-down-payment loans, sometimes pretty close to 100 percent of the home's value. Which isn't too smart around 2006 at the peak of the last real-estate bubble. And, of course, the more that people can bid for a house with borrowed money the higher the prices go.

On top of that, ever since the 70s, because feminism, mortgage sellers have to count both man and wife income in evaluating creditworthiness. Since a lot of people believe in borrowing the full amount that the lender will allow, that means that more people are competing for more homes with more borrowed money in their pockets. And that means higher prices, and that means less affordable housing.

Because you see, a healthy credit system relies on two things: faithful payment of loan payments by the borrower; and proper collaterization of loans, so that if the borrower defaults the lender can get his money back. If either or both go south -- as they did in the 2008 credit crisis -- then you got trouble, right here in River City.

That's not the whole of it, of course. There are building codes, which make houses more expensive. There are environmental regulations, that limit the land available for housing. Oh no, we can build any more houses because there might be a landslide. Oh no, we can't build any more houses because there might not be enough water.

All of these wise and educated policies subsidizing mortgages means that more people compete for loans, and the more people that compete, the higher go the prices.

And then nice liberal ladies think the answer is government "affordable housing."

And that's just houses. Then there is everything else that's going up in price because the government is printing money and is stopping the fossil-fuel industry in its tracks and is still not backing modular nuclear plants, and and and.

And the tragedy is that it is all going to cause untold suffering to ordinary people and especially to poor people in the lower classes.

Because the more you muck around with the economy, with wars and lockdowns, and money printing and Fannies and Freddies and subsidies and handouts and regulations and programs, the more you jerk the ordinary person around. And end up Making Things Worse.

Politics and Enemies

I was reading a piece on Britain's far Left when I came to this:

I sensed the anti-democratic tendencies of the far Left when I first met Corbyn’s Labour Party in 2015. It was obvious in the way they spoke about their enemies, which they define as anyone who has ever disagreed with them... The violence of their language offered a creeping kind of dehumanisation of the enemy who is also — crucially — a voter: someone to be seduced by a serious politician is, for them, only someone to be despised.

And so, of course, violence against the enemy is no problem.

Violence was always acceptable if it was against your enemy: the rhetoric itself made it necessary. I heard many far Left cheerleaders call the throwing of milkshakes and eggs acceptable if they landed on the wrong kind of politician, and what comes after that? Quite recently a far Left journalist celebrated a policewoman being knocked off her horse. I saw a journalist attacked at a far Left meeting last autumn; they applauded when the victim left the room. At the last campaign rally in 2019, a Jew was physically attacked for carrying an anti-Corbyn banner.

Did I mention that Nazi Carl Schmitt wrote that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy? And that Curtis Yarvin writes that "there is no politics without an enemy?"

I am also around a liberal for a couple of days listening to ordinary by-the-ways about "affordable housing" and thinking to myself that, yeah, we have an affordable housing problem Because Liberals.

But the funny thing is that such people Have No Idea of the malevolence and the chaos that their Hundred Year reign has caused.

Because all problems are caused by the Other Guy, the racist-sexist-homophobes of which you've heard tell. We are the Good Guys.

Anyway, in the middle of the night I came up with two new maxims:

If you want more politics, you are really saying you want more enemies.

The more politics, the more enemies.

Am I right, or am I right? And that brings me back to Mircea Eliade:

[S]uffering proceeds from the magical action of an enemy, from the breaking a taboo, from entering a baneful zone, from the anger of a god -- and when all other hypotheses have proven insufficient -- from the will or the wroth of the Supreme Being. (p.97) The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

And that is exactly how our lefty friends think of suffering. If the homeless are homeless or there is a shortage of affordable housing, then there must be a fault. And chances are the fault is the malevolence of racist-sexist-homophobes.

UPDATE: Here's some more on the enemies front. Reporting on the Battle of the Bouncy Castle up in Canada, Giles Hoffman notes how the Canadian regime needed enemies.

Every conflict now is largely an information war and a public relations battle. The regime has a well-oiled propaganda machine, and they curated footage with spurious themes. For the regime, it was insufficient to have opponents; they needed enemies, which is why so much effort was expended to portray the demonstrators as dangerous ultra-nationalists and racists. 

Hey, no problem. There is no politics without an enemy. 

A Supreme Court with Three Liberal Women

Today Steve Sailer is analyzing the question of black woman Kentanji Jackson Brown on the Supreme Court. And it's all about whether she is really up to snuff, because Bell Curves by race.

Sailer argues that to be a top-flight lawyer you need to be absolutely out on the edge of the Bell Curve for intelligence.

The race disparity in talent is particularly glaring in the practice of law because much of it is so dependent on raw brainpower... But the meat and potatoes of lawyering—writing contracts—is basically a medieval form of coding. Your job is to anticipate what could go wrong in a deal and write if-then-else statements to protect your client from those eventualities.

So, if Brown isn't up to snuff on the medieval coding, what then?

Well, I think that if Brown gets on the court and joins the other two liberal women, Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, what you get is three rather below-average judges. But not necessarily because Bell Curve.

For sure Justices Breyer and RBG is that they were pretty smart. Wrong on everything? Sure. Crazycakes? Got it. But they were up to the challenge of writing cunning liberal Supreme Court opinions that further the agenda and the hegemony and the domination of the liberal ruling class.

How do you get to do that? Well, I'd say you need quite a bit of appeals-court experience, knowing, from experience, how to push your political agenda.

But what about the three liberal girls? I think that they won't be so smart as their predecessors. But I don't think that their raw intelligence is the big issue. 

I think that the big problem for the three liberal girls is that, having been elevated because racism-sexism-homophobia they don't have the political and collegial smarts to make a difference on the Court. That means they won't be as good at persuading their conservative brethren and sistren into compromise decisions that protect the liberal monuments of civil rights, women's rights and LGBT rights.

Of course, for you and me those liberal monuments are monuments of monstrous injustice, but that is another story.

The point is, to me, that to argue in conference, and gather majorities on the court, and write monumental Supreme Court decisions you need to have a strategic mind, and a collegial personality. Much more than a mind that is good at medieval coding.

I'd say you need that more than pure intellectual horsepower.

So I think that having three liberal girls on the Supreme Court who basically got there because they were the right race and gender is not good strategy.

In my view liberals are going to need the best lawyers and committeemen and persuaders in the world to protect their glorious liberal legal monuments in the Autumn of the Liberal Ages.

Instead they are putting average personalities on the Court that really don't have the chops to defend their achievements and conduct a defense in depth that slows the conservative advance until the glorious new liberal era dawns.

From Changing the Future to Changing Next Week

Last week I wrote generally about "How Do You Change the Future?" 

How? Well, you wait for disaster. You wait for climate change policies to wreck the economy, for the entitlement programs to fail even worse. For the racist-sexist-homophobe pejoratives to make people angry.

But that is all pie in the sky.

Now we are going to see how it works "on the ground."

Because right now we are seeing the collapse of the climate change narrative because the Russian invasion of Ukraine is upending the global energy market and causing gas and oil prices in the US to double. Yes, climatistas, no doubt the world will come to an end with a 1.5 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures in a century or so. Meanwhile, what about the contractor using gasoline for his truck that he uses in his construction business?

Because right now we are seeing general inflation in the economy because of the Federal Reserve's money printing and the government's COVID handouts.

Because right now ordinary Americans get to see how lefty peaceful protesters and lower-class criminals get released on bond -- or even no bond -- prior to trial, but January 6 protesters are held in solitary confinement for months.

And today I was reading that Democratic donors are shifting from contributing to congressional races in 2022 to contributing to Democratic governor races. They figure that Congress in 2022 is a lost cause, but they have to hang onto some governorships.

“My entire donating life has always been centered around Congress, but I really think that if you care about democracy, you need to worry about these governors’ races,” said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic donor and lobbyist. “This is critical for us to win in 2024.”

Oh no! Democracy! I wonder what "democracy" means to a lobbyist.

I was re-reading about how in 1934 -- just in time for the mid-terms -- the FDR administration went after businessmen. They sicced the Justice Department on businessman and electric utility magnate Samuel Insull. And kept going after former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon on federal income tax avoidance charges: again and again, even after he was dead. Gosh, those New Dealers sure were nice guys. And by frightening all the businessmen, I'm sure they really helped get the economy back on its feet.

I wonder if the next GOP president will go after the Dem grifters and cancel culturists and wokeys and teach them a lesson?

Actually, I hope not. Because if the ordinary middle class is going to be setting the political agenda in the future, I hope that the ordinary middle class is not interested in revenge and retribution. The ordinary middle class is not that interested in power. Unlike our liberal friends, for whom politics is life.

But it is interesting to wonder how the leaders of the ordinary middle class will treat the rest of America, if they get the power. I hope that they behave better than our liberal friends have behaved over the last century.

But maybe not. Because there is no politics without an enemy: that's what Nazi Carl Schmitt says, and I believe him. And, really, what do you do to an enemy? At the very least, you teach them a lesson. If you are a Democrat, you sue them and impeach them and harass their aides and supporters. If you are a Commie you send them to the camps.

I hope that we can be better than that.

Best of Times, Worst of Times

 If you are a racist, sexist, homophobe, climate denier like me you realize that nothing can change until it gets worse. "The worse the better," said Lenin.

Because nothing changes until it's broken. And that is as it should be. We may have the stupidest rulers in the world, but as long as things seem copacetic to the average bear, things ain't gonna change.

Obviously, the Biden administration is changing that. And so is Vladimir Putin in Russia and Ukraine.

The Biden administration, in its agenda that presumably was hammered out when Biden was handed the Democratic nomination in March 2020, has pushed major handouts to "oppressed peoples" and pedal to the metal climate change and termination of fossil fuels.

My guess is that this will turn out to be the great political and economic mistake of the ages.

And just to prove that the world is gonna change we have the Ukraine crisis, which has forced Europe to face up to its stupidities on the climate front.

God knows, of course, what stupidities the politicians will commit on the Russia-Ukraine front.

Victor Davis Hanson pulls out the "irredentist" card to explain Russia's adventure in Ukraine. After the end of a glorious empire, politicians are always trying to get back to the glory. Whether Greeks trying to get back the Byzantine Empire, or Mussolini trying to get back the Roman Empire. Or Putin trying to get back the Soviet Empire. Irredentism usually fails, but not before the rest of us pay a pretty big butcher's bill.

The problem is, of course, that just because the hard left of the Democrat party and the climateers get given their walking papers it doesn't mean that we now decide to do the right thing: get the welfare state down to size and frack baby frack and start to build modular nuclear plants.

Oh and rework the debt economy so that people and corporations can't load themselves up with low down payment loans. Because a highly leveraged society is a very fragile society.

In the past few years I have also paid a lot of attention to what women input into the public square. As in going 100 percent for the COVID lockdown and in sending money to Ukraine to help the refugees.

Really, after a century of the educated elite in power it's time for a change. Not because the educated elite is a particularly bad or foolish ruling class, but because any ruling class tends to look after itself and its supporters and not pay too much attention to how the rest of the world is making out.

Hey, why be surprised? The whole point of the rule of the educated elite is over / under politics, where the rulers mobilize the lower class against the middle class. It works politically when the under class is a majority of the voters. But when the ordinary middle class becomes a majority of the voters, maybe not so much.

I was reading Dominic Cummings on his Substack this morning and he is suggesting parallels with 1914. Only, for him, our rulers and leaders are worse than the rulers and leaders of 1914.