Hispanics Joining the Middle Class and GOP

Back in the day, you'll remember, the Democrats were going to own the future, The Emerging Democratic Majority, courtesy of Judis and Teixeira. It would be composed of the educated, women, the young, and minorities.

I have a different theory, my reductive Three Peoples theory, that says that the upper class of creatives and the credentialed tends to vote its interest with the Democrats, the middle class of responsibles that go to work and obey the law tends to vote Republican because its interest is a growing and stable economy, and the lower class of subordinates tends to vote Democrat because that's who is offering loot to the lower class.

If you walk around my überliberal neighborhood in north Seattle, the heartland of Rep. Pramila Jayapal's congressional district where she won 83 percent of the vote in 2020, you notice that there are a ton of Hispanic roofers and construction workers and yard-maintenance workers slaving away all day, every day. No blacks to be seen. OK, a couple.

In my racist-sexist-homophobic way, I interpret this to mean that Hispanics are working their way up into the middle class. And blacks are not.

Therefore I would say that we should expect Hispanics to be moving in the the Republican Party in battalion strength. But blacks, not so much.

Hey, I was writing about this eight years ago when the Republicans won Congress back from the Dems in Obama's second midterm. And what I said was that the Democrats were turning the Democratic Party into the Black Party. And that would alienate Hispanics and Asians (except for high-caste South Asians like Chair of the Progressive Caucus Jayapal). And there was this:

Hispanics think blacks are lazy. That's when they are not actually expelling blacks from their neighborhood.

Not to mention, I wrote, that liberals would not do themselves a favor with anti-police rhetoric. Because the middle class expects the police to protect them from lower class thugs, from the days of Dickens' Bill Sikes to today's gangbangers shooting into a crowd when they've been dissed. 

Now comes Andrew Abbott at AMAC writing about "The Vanishing Permanent Democratic Majority" and the "precipitous decline" in Biden support.

Nowhere is this clearer than with Hispanic Americans, who now disapprove of the job that Joe Biden is doing as President by a whopping 60%-26% margin.

And even black support is down from 85 percent to 63 percent.

The reason for this, of course, is that liberals have persuaded themselves that the Republican Party is a "white" party.

The belief among liberal elites is that the Republican Party exists explicitly to service and promote the policies and principles of “white America” and that, since the 1960s, the party has been rooted in white isolationism, nativism, and resentment of minorities. Thus, as the country becomes more diverse, the white Republican vote will gradually be destroyed via diversity, or so the theory goes.

As opposed to my theory that the Repuiblican Party is now the party of the ordinary middle class. Actully, I"d say that the Republican Party is the party of ordinary people whereas the Democratic Party is the party of "special people," special because of education, credentials, or victimhood.

And most of those victim are "fake" victims, dontcha know, from LGBT to corporate snowflakes to Muslims. They are either members of the ruling class in good standing or the pets, the Little Darlings, of the ruling class.

And, of course, if you are an ordinary middle class person you might get "resentment of minorities" that get the special care and feeding of the ruling class. But that would be wrong.

And let me tell you: if you have been noticed by the ruling class and declared to be a victim, and richly rewarded for voting Democrat, You Are Not A Victim, cupcake.

And then Trump. Liberals knew that Trump could never get minotiry votes. But he did, and then in 2020

Not only had Trump held onto his minority support, but he actually won a more significant share of black male and Hispanic voters than he did the first time. 

As I say, there is no mystery or conspiracy theory needed to explain this. The Republican Party is the party of the ordinary middle class. And it looks like Hispanics are rapidly ascending, by hard work and enterprise, into the middle class. Ergo, they are voting Republican.

 And, I suspect, Hispanics and to a lesser extent, blacks, are being royally screwed by the Biden inflation.

But don't tell Rep. Jayapal.

Great Replacement? How About Great Realignment

Everybody knows that the Great Replacement Theory is a racist-sexist-homophobic conspiracy theory of white supremacist Republican monsters.

Properly, Steve Sailer ridicules the idea of a Great Replacement. As he writes:

The Emerging Democratic Majority is a purely natural phenomenon, like the swallows returning to Capistrano.

Yes, back in the day Judis and Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority could confidently predict, in 2002, the coming age of Democratic Party political dominance because of immigration -- and the educated, women and young people.

But, the most significant political move in recent years is the movement of Hispanics from the Democratic to the Republican column. Quinnipac has Biden approval among Hispanics at 26 percent compared to 55 percent last year. And there's this:

Biden is less popular among Hispanics than any other demographic, including age and gender, the poll found. 

Even Ruy Teixeira is jumping the sinking ship. Why is this?

Could it have something to do with the fact that my Hispanic immigrant mailman, who works on his brother's nursery business on weekends, and whose children are the first in the family to go to college, is all work? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the guys that delivered our new freezer were Hispanic? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the Hispanic area of southern Texas along the Mexico border are all switching to the Republican Party?

And by the way, why weren't the guys delivering the freezer weren't black? How come it's always Hispanic roofers not black roofers, Hispanic gardeners not black gardeners?

Could it have something to do with the notion that you don't appeal to Hispanics with identity politics and woke trans ideology but with jobs, jobs, jobs?

It's hard to tell, because as Steve Sailer points out, what everybody knows, that

Republicans are too low IQ to understand sophisticated Democratic concepts like We’re Good, You’re Bad.

The answer to all this is pretty obvious if you have made a comprehensive and mandatory study of my reductive Three Peoples theory -- or have grasped the idea of Three Layers theory. 

The People of the Subordinate Self vote Democrat. They don't feel that they are in control of their lives; they need a powerful lord to be their patron. But the People of the Responsible Self figure that if they live by the rules and work hard then they will get their reward. They don't need no stinkin' federales to help them get ahead.

It seems to me that the Hispanic migration that began, shall we say, with the 1965 immigration act, has been proceeding at battle speed from subordination to responsibility.

And why not? It's the American Way.

Maybe the problem is that Hispanics are too low IQ to understand the truth that Democrats Good, Republicans Bad.

Meanwhile it sure does look like the purely accidental Great Replacement of white oppressors with oppressed peoples is turning into a Great Realignment of ordinary Commoners from Democratic to Republican.

Whither the Good Old USA?

There is really only one narrative out there about the long-term future of US politics. It is the one proposed by Judis and Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority back in 2004. Their thesis is that the future belongs to Democrats because of women, minorities, young people, and the professionals.

Well, it's obvious isn't it? Even Pat Buchanan darkly foresees the end of the Trump era, as in:

1. Demography: the white fraction of the population is going down
2. Free stuff: Democrats are the party of government
3. Blue wall: "carrying every state that touches the Atlantic from Maine to North Carolina."

But. Here's Powerline with some post-election numbers. and a concerned analysis from The Guardian.

Biden’s win depended on suburbanites tired of Trump, who voted Republican down ballot and will certainly vote Republican in future elections... 

Most concerningly, Democrats hemorrhaged votes among non-white working-class voters. . . Even in the crucial states Biden was able to flip, Trump reduced Democratic margins in Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. These results should be setting off alarm bells among Democrats.

I guess my analysis -- which of course expresses my hopes -- is that race is not as important as we are carefully taught to believe, Black Lives Matter. My belief is that national origin matters for a generation or two, but then class takes over.

Class in the sense of my reductive Three Peoples theory and Curtis Yarvin's Three Layers theory. In this theory the electorate divides up:

1. Educated Gentry: Democrat, because we are qualified to direct traffic (we want power)
2. Commoners: Republican, because we want to live our own lives (not that interested in power)
3. Clients: Democrat, because we want the powerful to protect us

Obviously, the genius of Trump was to create a class consciousness among ordinary Commoner Americans and it seems, from the Guardian, that he is making headway among non-white Commoners as well as white Commoners.

However, let us not forget Michael Barone's theory:

The Republican Party appeals to “typical Americans” as understood at a given time, and the Democratic Party represents a coalition of “out-groups.” 

Now do you see why Dems are still playing the race card? They want everyone to think of themselves as an "oppressed" out-group. But Deplorables are not an out-group. They are "white oppressors."

Nor should we think of the parties as hopelessly out of touch.

[B]oth parties have adapted, swiftly or haltingly, to shifting opinion and emerging issues, to economic change and cultural currents, to demographic flux.

Then there is the actual party history in the US House of Representatives over the last century:

Well. So if you figure that Judis and Teixeira made their predictions back in 2000, I'd say that so far, nothing has happened. Indeed, you might say that the House of Representatives has been going slowly GOP ever since 1937. Or you might say that there was a Dem wave that lasted from 1900 to the 1960s and ever since the opposite has been true.

OK. Here is my fearless prediction. I think that we have in our future a battle royal between the educated Gentry and the Commoners:

The educated Gentry wants the climate change grift because it means tons of power and jobs for educated experts and administrators and it wants continued intersectional politics because it encourages Americans to think of themselves as members of "out groups."

 The Commoners want ordinary economic growth because they want to wive and thrive. But don't touch their Medicare and Social Security, you Green New Dealers.

The point about Donald Trump is that he found the way to energize the ordinary Commoners with the notion of appealing to them directly as typical Americans and boosting economic growth -- for Americans. No professional Republican had figured out how to do that before, except maybe Ronald Reagan.

I think the place to look is the white professional elite. Do they really want to keep with the Woke movement and its cancel culture and its flirtation with socialism that might easily turn on them as a privileged and exploitative upper-class, bearded @jack?

Also, I would say, in the short range, the Democrats seem to be divided between the moderate Democrats that represent swing districts and the ideologues that represent safe districts. Just sayin'.

I don't think that Republicans are similarly divided right now.

My only problem is that if Trump wins the cheating wars, and continues in office till 2025, the country will be so fed up with Trump that Dems will win it all decisively in 2024, White House and Senate and House. 

And then you ain't seen nuttin´ yet.

The Emerging Majority - Contents

Reflections on The Emerging Democratic Majority by Judis and Teixeira

1. Waiting for the Emerging Majority
   
   
2. Guess What? Lefties Need More Campus Speakers
   
   
3. Political Center: Open for Lease or Buy
   
   
4. Democrats Betray Creative Class
   
   
5. The Emergent Democratic Minority
   
   
6. Diversity? What Diversity?
   
   
7. Whose Emerging Majority?
   
   
8. Don't Panic on Demography!
   
   
9. How to Do Division
   
   
10. President Obama's Accidental Achievement
    
    
11. What "Emerging Democratic Majority?"
    
    
12. Government Always Screws the Powerless
    
    
13. The Problem with Movements
    
    
14. President Obama is Leading Dems into the Wilderness
    
    
15. It will take Religion to end political polarization
    
    
16. Post Cantor: Why are Dems So Negative About Tea Party?
    
    
17. The Seeds of Destruction
    
    
18. Watch Democrats Break Apart
    
    
19. Forging the New GOP Majority
    
    
20. The Judis Enlightenment
    
    
21. Obama Leads Dems into the Wilderness
    
    
22. Reading Hillary Between the Lines
    
    
23. Are Republicans "Needlessly Alienating Large Chunks of the Electorate?"
    
    
24. Playing Out Obama's String
    
    
25. Obama's Phone-and-Pen Politics is a Weakness, not a Strength
    
    
26. Yes, But How Bad Is It?
    
    
27. Maybe the US Will Always Have a "White" Majority
    
    
28. Now It's the Emerging Republican Majority
    
    
29. Thoughts on the Culture War
    
    
30. Suppose Blacks are Now Becoming "Commoners"
    
    
31. Whither the Good Old USA?
    
    
32. Great Replacement? How About Great Realignment
    

Suppose Blacks are Now Becoming "Commoners"

Everyone has been shocked, shocked, in recent days by three polls that indicate about 33% support for President Trump among blacks.

What is going on here?

If you are a believer in the Emerging Democratic Majority faith prophesied by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, that America is going Democrat because blacks, Hispanics, women, young people, educated people, it doesn't make sense.

But suppose, despite what your earnest woke college professors taught you, you are open to other explanations of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

Suppose, indeed, like Marx, you explain everything by class. You might try my reductive Three Peoples theory and the notion in my Road to the Middle Class that people move out of the peasant-and-worker class along the four cultural roads of faith, education, mutual aid, and law. My point in Road is that people become middle-class responsibles as they practice enthusiastic Christianity, as they get educated, as they practice mutual aid in fraternal societies, and as they learn to adjudicate disputes through law rather than revenge culture.

But just in the past week I have encountered Curtis Yarvin's theory enunciated in his "Clear Pill" series. Yarvin proposes a three people world, as I do. He calls the three classes: gentry, commoners, and clients.

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

Usually, there is a class war, and "The natural conflict pits commoners against gentry plus clients." Now, pretty obviously, blacks have been "clients" in recent times, and our liberal gentry have bribed blacks with loot and plunder through its racist policies of affirmative action, quotas, and now diversity and inclusion. And the gentry class has anathematized the commoners as deplorable racist-sexist-homophobes.

But that would work only so long as blacks experienced themselves as dependent victims.

Now the story I like to tell about the modern era is that, in successive waves, the old peasant class has slowly worked its way up from being "clients" of the gentry to being "commoners." The quintessential commoners, for me, are George Eliot's Adam Bede and his incandescent love interest, the Methodist lay preacher Dinah Morris.

And really, why not? Is not the responsible independence of the ordinary middle class a shining star to the dependent and irresponsible serfs, peasants, and workers?

So, it may be that what we are seeing right now is blacks starting to move seriously out of the "client" class into the "commoner" class. It obviously can't hurt that black unemployment is the lowest ever, and that rapper Kanye West is pushing Christianity and Trumpish #MAGAness.

If indeed blacks are moving into the "commoner" class we can expect a lot less interest in voted 90-10 for Democrats.

The basic rule about electoral politics is that people vote for the politician "that cares about people like me."

The reason that Republican voters moved away from Bush-Romney politicians is that they stopped believing that Bush-Romneys cared about people like them. The reason that gentry liberals vote for Obamas and Warrens and Buttigiegs is that Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg are people like them: educated and holding their opinions and believing in their beliefs. The reason that blacks and Latinos and single women have voted Democratic is that they are subordinate people that look to a strong lord to plunder the Other and hand out the necessary loot to them.

The reason that the educated suburbans have moved away from the Republican Party is that they see the Democratic Party and its big state and its millions of jobs for educated bureaucrats as their kind of party for their kind of people. And I think they are right.

But what our educated gentry are happily unaware of is the verdict of Charles Murray's Coming Apart about white America. That today the top 25%, the educated elite, is doing fine with great careers and merger marriages. That the middle 40% is doing so-so, and in the bottom 35% the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. Imagine what that looks like in non-white America.

Do I have to spell it out? America works great for the educated gentry. For everyone else, not so good. So you would expect that, slowly and in fits and starts, the fundamental injustice suffered by the non-gentry classes would start to emerge into public consciousness and that enterprising politicians would start to notice at put themselves at the head of the crowd.

Obvioulsy, President Trump is appealing to America's commoners. And he is making a clear push to appeal to non-white commoners too. Of course he is. That's where the votes are for him: persuading black and Latino "clients" that they are really "commoners" and that he cares about people like them.

Thoughts on the Culture War

In the current culture war we cannot expect "the other" to understand our point of view. That is because, as Christopher DeGroot writes, all living things live by prejudice. He quotes anthropologist Mary Douglas, who points out that we all need to evaluate new experiences in the light of what we already know and believe.

In other words, it is a waste of time to start from the beginning whenever something new shows up. Life goes on, and we use our experience and our knowledge, and our cultural inheritance, to navigate past each new event in our world.

So it is not surprising that our Democratic friends are fit to be tied by the Trump phenomenon. Remember, from back in the 2000s, Democrats have believed, with John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority, that they owned the future, with minorities, the educated, and women all coalescing in a glorious new political hegemony.

Their notion, their ideology -- prejudice if you like -- saw them ruling wisely and well over a populace of diminished ability, partly of prejudice and superstition in the religious middle class, and partly of ignorance and marginalization in the lower orders. No problem, because our educated rulers were notably free of prejudice and superstition and also notably full of care and compassion for the marginalized.

But here comes Trump with "tropes" from another era: nationalism instead of cosmopolitanism; protectionism instead of free trade; insult instead of urbanity. Our Democratic friends thought all that was well and truly buried with Hitler and the disaster of Smoot-Hawley.

Of course, in the comfort of their ideology -- their prejudice if you like -- they cannot see how they have replaced the us-and-them of nationalism with the us-and-them of identity politics. They cannot see that they practice their own form of protectionism with the help-our-friends activities of the administrative and regulatory state. And they cannot see how their activism culture licenses them and their clients to insult anyone they please while criminalizing their opponents for "hate speech."

Thus, for DeGroot, "winning the culture war" will not involve what our liberal friends like to call "a conversation" but the usual incidents of war: "strategy, manipulation, and, perhaps, sheer force."

After all, that is what the whole Russian collusion operation of the last two years has been about: the current ruling class trying to overcome the cognitive dissonance of the Trump presidency by combining to undermine President Trump and demoralize his supporters.

As DeGroot writes: "all moral systems and all political systems require some concept of an enemy". It could be the Devil; it could be the Jews. It could be the "robber barons." It could be illegal aliens; it could be white nationalists.

But in a world of enemies, there must be friends, the bonds of trust that we call social capital.
According to sociologist Robert Putnam there are two types of social capital:

bridging capital refers to trust between groups, between people who have different values and identities, while bonding capital refers to trust within groups.

And, according to Putnam, "diversity" tends to reduce both "bridging capital" and "bonding capital." In other words, people need to be secure in like-living-with-like communities if they are to start building social structures of trust, both within their community and without.

But, of course, the whole point of identity politics and political correctness is to create distrust in the national community.

The only good thing about our ruling class is that they are idiots. Imagine if they really knew what they were doing!

Now It's the Emerging Republican Majority

I just did a Google search to check the name of the Judis and Teixeira Emerging Democratic Majority, the book that told Democrats back in 2004 that they were going to own the future with minorities, women, the educated and young people.

But a funny thing happened with the auto-complete when I typed in "judis ". It auto-completed to "judis emerging republican majority." OK, now it doesn't. Not any more. Not after I forced it to "emerging democratic majority."

Because now any fool can see that there is a real good chance that Republicans will own the future, by appealing to a middle-middle constituency of the ordinary American middle class: people without fancy educations, but that have worked to rise above the subordinate working class and that have started to identify as Americans rather than hyphenated-Americans. The people I call the People of the Responsible Self.

And that is why all the human props that President Trump called out in his first State of the Union speech were demonstrably middle-middle kinds of people. And they noticed. The parents of the two murdered girls were noticeably affected. One mother observed how moving it was for the president to notice a nobody like her, and how he kissed her on the forehead. Well, yeah. There's one born every minute. The president was using all the folks in the gallery as human props, and they better understand that. But he was also sending a message to all the middle-middle people in America: I care about people like you.

Earth to Democrats. If you are a middle-middle American then for the last decade you have probably been starting to think that the Democrats don't care about people like you. In the olden days, Democrats used to win the "cares about people like me" question hands down. But now Democrats care about people that put out #WeBelieve yardsigns and the identity politics victims. Not the middle-middle people that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the law.

Notice that, if you are a liberal then you don't have to follow the rules, you either don't work or your work is special, and your clients don't have to obey the law, as in the homeless and illegal aliens in sanctuary cities and "peaceful protesters." People notice this. Middle-middle people notice this. They noticed it fifty years ago when The Kids were tearing it up in the Sixties. That's why President Richard Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew were able to mobilize the Silent Majority into a 60-40 blowout in the 1972 election. In those days, of course, the Democrats owned the Congress, so they were able to kick President Nixon out of office for shenanigans that would be regarded just as boys-will-be-boys when the Obama administration did it. But I don't think today's Republicans will be the pushovers that the 1970s Republicans were.

The astonishing thing about Donald Trump, for me, is that he has run as a populist nationalist, but governed as a conservative libertarian. Nobody could have expected, when Charles Murray published By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission in 2015, that the next president of the United States would spend his first year sending a wrecking crew to dismantle the regulations of the administrative state. That's why Murray's book proposed a kind of guerrilla war on the administrative state. He didn't expect to see a president in the near future that would execute on his anti-administrative state agenda; he thought it would take a bottom-up insurgency dedicated to making life difficult for the bureaucrats that just wanted to get through to their pensions.

But here is the thing. No Republican since Ronald Reagan has been able the play the populist card and also bring the ordinary middle class and the white working class with him. But in Trump the white working class trusts. Strictly speaking, the white working class is supposed to be suspicious of the big corporations. But here Trump has cut the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. OK, the middle-middle started out thinking that the tax cut wouldn't benefit them, as taught by the mainstream media. But now we seem to be seeing an economic breakout on the corporate front. Corporations seem to think that the future is so bright they gotta wear shades. And the middle-middle is noticing.

Who knew? Well, we green eye-shade guys kinda hoped. Because we muttered to ourselves about marginal tax rates and blah-blah-blah. But we didn't really expect the staggering response of the corporations to the tax rate cut. Yeah. Remember back in 2012 or 2013? Obama said that he would go for a corporate tax rate cut. So he coulda been a contender, and perked up the economy and got Hillary Clinton elected. Much better than siccing the FBI on the opposition.

OK, I know. All this talk of emerging permanent majorities is pure folly, partly because people start to believe it. Sean Trende is right. Party strength tends to fluctuate about the middle, and when parties lose badly they course-correct. And it is rare for a party to win more than two presidential elections in a row.

But I dare say that the Democrats are facing a reappraisal in the next few years, rather like the awful experience from 1972 to 1988 when they lost four out of five presidential elections. I wonder how long it will take them to get the message.

Maybe the US Will Always Have a "White" Majority

The reason liberals are Borking Bannon and Sessions and anyone that dares to normalize the alt-right is that the alt-right is threatening to ruin the left's filibuster on race.

That's because the alt-right is playing with the idea that whites ought to get into the identity politics business, just like blacks and Latinos, and that, down the road, as immigration continues, whites will become a minority in the United States unless they act now.

Don't think that this idea is just the whine of a coven of KKK enthusiasts. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira proposed it in The Emerging Democratic Majority. Democrats would rule forever, they prophesied, with a coalition of minorities, women, youth and the educated.

Only suppose the immigrant minorities never quite coalesce into a racial majority?

Steve Sailer in his review of alt-right Jared Taylor's White Identity proposes a notion of "solidarity among American citizens" rather than white identity politics. Right now, according to Sailer, white identity politics would fail because Jews wouldn't buy in. But later on, when whites and Jews feel embattled? Stay tuned.

But here is a John O'Sullivan piece in National Review discussing the fact that in 2016 the Latino vote again failed to explode. It was 11 percent of the total vote, about the same as in 2012.

But wait! Aren't Hispanics supposed to be surging as a percent of the population? So what has happened to their vote? O'Sullivan uses a Latino professor, Roberto Suro, as his foil. Suro argues that the placidity of Latinos would turn to anger in 2016.

Suro believed or hoped that would change as the election became more exciting and as issues such as multiculturalism and immigration became matters of ethnic loyalty. Hispanic citizens would then get angry, organize, register, and vote in larger numbers.

We got a test of this theory with Donald Trump who campaigned against political correctness and immigration. And the Latino voters didn't get angry, didn't organize, didn't register, and didn't vote in larger numbers. What gives?

The answer is that, as they integrate into middle-class American life, the descendants of immigrants tend to identify as white. But the government's statistical mill aggressively tries to classify people as anything but white. So the children of a Hispanic married to a white are classified as Hispanic until they grow up and can identify themselves. A child that the government classified as non-white ends up calling itself white when it grows up.

In other words, ordinary middle-class Americans working and living in ordinary suburban America tend to merge towards a kind of "mainstream" identity, and as they do so the definition of "white" tends to expand to fit them.

Here is how I would explain the situation. Politicians and ideologues are always trying to divide people and enlist them in their ideological armies. But the economy is always pushing in the opposite direction. Capitalism wants everyone to get on so they can make more products and consume them and be nice to each other and trust each other and make lots of lovely wages and profits.

And capitalism is always making people rub up against strangers and work with them and find out that the fearful strangers are people just like them.

Maybe what's really emerging is the great emerging middle-class majority. We word-peddlers that take our middle-class prosperity for granted, but we forget that for immigrants the effortless middle-class lifestyle -- with its college and careers and homes and SUVs and children that get a real childhood -- is a incandescent dream.  It is the city on a hill, and the immigrant wants to get there, or at least make sure her children get there.

On my view the left has been a 200 year reactionary movement that has been making it as hard as possible for the immigrants to the city to climb up from the dusty plain of agricultural idiocy to the broad sunlit uplands of bourgeois life.

Maybe the reluctance of Hispanic voters to validate the emerging Democratic Majority model is a sign that the whole leftist secular religion is a crock, and is going to end up on the scrap heap of history.

Yes, But How Bad Is It?

Yesterday the jauntily optimistic Rush Limbaugh had a field day with a piece in The Claremont Review of Books on the 2016 election as "The Flight 93 Election." The piece argued that, if conservatives are right about our issues, then conservatism -- its gradualism, its respect for the rules -- must be wrong. It's time to say "let's roll," and accept that we have to crash the airplane, even if we die in the process.

We are getting to the point, writes the anonymous author, where the left doesn't think it needs us any more.

Among the many things the “Right” still doesn’t understand is that the Left has concluded that this particular show need no longer go on. They don’t think they need a foil anymore and would rather dispense with the whole bother of staging these phony contests in which each side ostensibly has a shot.

 Actually, I think it is better to compare this time with the Soviet Great Purge of 1936-38, and I just happen to be reading a book about it, Child of the Revolution by Wolfgang Leonhard. Leonard was a red-diaper baby whose lefty mother took him to the Soviet Union in the mid 1930s when Germany became too hot for her after Hitler came to power.

To illustrate my point, let us compare two texts. The first is from Portuguese-born SF writer Sarah Hoyt. She is writing about an American instructor at her Portuguese university giving a lecture in American literature.

Until in the middle of a lecture he said something like “When any writer sets out to do x, he–” And stopped, growing pale, and started apologizing profusely.

Apparently looking on that sea of female faces, he thought he was about to be crucified. When we got it through his head that we were not offended, he said “Oh, wow. American women would be. I’d have to say he or she.”

OK. Now let's switch to Leonhard in a class in Moscow in 1937. The teacher was reading "a passage out of a book by the anti-fascist author Georg Born." But a whisper ran around the class and then a kid stood up.

"Comrade teacher, my father told me that Georg Born was arrested a few days ago as an enemy of the people."

Our teacher went pale as ashes.

Now, my theory is that a revolution transitions into its Reign of Terror phase when it is clear that the millennium is not here, and ain't gonna be any time soon. That is when the party leader needs to start dealing with the "enemies of the people" before they start up a head of rebellion.

And really, why be surprised that liberals are amping up the terror? Things aren't going too well for them right now. Their high-handed assumption that the economy would bounce back with a quick kick in the stimulus has proved wrong, and so the introduction of Obamacare created double-trouble by weighing down the already deflating economy with the lead weight of regulation.

And the point is that, like lefties everywhere since the French Revolution, their religion is politics; they think that the way to solve the problems of the world is through politics. That means, to deploy my catch-phrases, they always think that a bit of government force is needed, a bit of political divisiveness is needed, and a few more of the bad people need to be crushed by government injustice.

The point is that, as we have seen with every lefty regime since the French Revolution, this is not going to end well. As in revolutionary France, as in fascist Germany, as in the Soviet Union, as in Castro's Cuba, as in Pol Pot's Cambodia, as in prostrate Venezuela.

Let us give Wolfgang Leonard another word. He is talking about the four types of members in the Komsomol, the Soviet youth movement, in the 1930s.

There were first the enthusiasts--young people bursting with activity and initiative[.]

[There were also members, like Leonhard, who] joined the organization from political conviction and found themselves principally attracted by questions of the organisation's programme and political discussions.

[There were "careerists,"] principally among the sons and daughters of officials of the Party, state, and economic organisations.

[Then there were young people who] had joined it because that was what everybody else did... because it was the thing to do. I found this type mostly among the girls in the Komsomol[.]

Nothing changes, does it.

Personally, I think that the Obama PC push has been a strategic error for the liberals. The future outlined in The Emerging Democratic Majority by Judis and Teixeira was that the new majority of women, minorities, the educated, and young people would rule for the next thirty years.

And so the new majority might have done if Obama & Co. hadn't pressed the pedal to the metal, and inspired the Republican base to rebel against leaders that weren't leading, and provoked the dying-of-despair white working class to get angry and follow the populist Trump.

Now the whole conservative movement is in ruins and nobody knows what comes next. Or, if you use Mencius Moldbug's formulation, the good old days of the Cathedral and the Inner Party ruling the nation and the folks in the Outer Party touching their forelocks are over.

Now of course, it's possible that the bishops of the Cathedral may turn into Jacobin monsters, mobilize their Black Lives Matter shock troops and wipe white middle-class Americans off the map.

Or not.

What is certain is that the politics of the last 30 years, since 1988 and the end of the Reagan era, is over. Something else is going to take its place.

And one thing more. However crazed the crazies may be, there is a moderating factor. It is that for a modern ruling class to rule successfully it must make capitalism work. The reason that 2016 is the end of an era is that the economy has not been doing well, and the people are restless.

Get the economy right, and all things are possible.

But that is a very hard lesson for religious enthusiasts, particularly our modern secular religious enthusiasts, to learn. Because, after all, when the question is saving souls, or saving the planet, who cares about stupid things like profit and loss and economic growth?

Obama's Phone-and-Pen Politics is a Weakness, not a Strength

The standard conservative line on President Obama is that he is a lawless president that has wantonly expanded presidential power where no previous president dared to go.

I get this. And I get that no Republican president could ever get away with the extra-legal executive actions that have characterized Obama's presidency.

Now we have President Obama returning from his Hawaiian Christmas vacation determined to enact "common-sense gun laws" by executive action. (Which I expect to be very small beer, when we actually get a look at it.)

But I think that all the extra-legal stuff in the Obama era reflects not a liberal president demolishing our cherished freedoms so much as a liberal movement out of ideas, out of energy, and out of sync with America.

Because if you are a movement at the height of its power you don't have to play bureaucratic games to get your agenda passed.  You sit astride the political process like a colossus and everyone is eager to get with the program. But that is not the way things work in the Obama era. Everything, but everything that liberals push through the political process has to be pushed through by some sort of procedural shenanigans. If I were a liberal, I would be very concerned.

Forget Obamacare, which was advertised with a lie, that you could keep your doctor, etc. That was born of the failure of Hillarycare in 1994 and the iconic Harry and Louise TV ads. But the Democrats learned the wrong lesson from Harry and Louise. They didn't learn the obvious truth that average people opposed Hillarycare and would oppose Obamacare because they already had decent health insurance. They learned the lesson that they had to lie to the American people to get Obamacare passed.

I am talking about the shenanigans with the National Labor Relations Board, where the New-Deal-era agency was used to bully Boeing into keeping most of its manufacturing in unionized Washington State. Where the Democratic majority is making franchise outfits like McDonalds treat the employees of their franchisees as if they were employees of McDonalds. Then there is the effort to impose "net neutrality" on the internet by a decision of the Federal Communications Commission rather than by express legislation. And the effort to use the Environmental Protection Agency to kill coal-fired electric generation without benefit of Congress.

Put it this way. Republicans already hate all these regulatory agencies that seem to be wholly-owned subsidiaries of the liberal ruling class. We have all learned about the settled science of "regulatory capture" that makes regulatory agencies the creature of the people they are supposed to regulate. But up to now, Republicans have hesitated to reform these agencies because they didn't want to have to spend political capital on sideshows when more important things were on the agenda.

But you have to believe that in 2017, with a Republican president and Congress, Republicans will be loaded for bear. And if they have any sense they are already planning the public relations battle and how to marginalize the usual suspects in the MSM when they rise to oppose what we might call common-sense reforms of corrupted and unjust regulatory agencies.

In football, teams will occasionally use "Hail Mary" plays, long-shot pass plays that have a low chance of succeeding, but you never know. That's how I see a lot of today's Democratic politics. As Walter Russell Mead writes, the "blue model" of big government programs is breaking down, most particularly in blue states and blue cities where government worker unions have cleaned out the kitty. So why not put the ball up in the opponent's end zone and hope for a miracle?

The problem with Hail Mary plays is that quite often they make things a lot worse, as in interceptions returned for a touchdown. That's also the problem with the president's phone-and-pen presidency. By ignoring the old rules about getting some apology of a bipartisan consensus before enacting legislation in Congress the president is riling up the opposition.

My biggest fear a decade ago, in the wake of the Judis and Teixeira prophecy of The Emerging Democratic Majority, was that President Obama would carefully advance the liberal agenda with cunning bipartisan legislation that had just enough support from squishy GOP centrists to make a reality out of the Judis and Teixeira prophecy and set the Democratic majority of 2008 in concrete. Instead, Obama punched the moderates in the eye from Day One, forcing them to throw in their lot with the conservatives. Everything he has done is Democrat-only. Since most government is a disaster, that makes the job of Republican candidates very easy, because nobody can say: well, you voted for it.

My prophecy is that we will look back at the Obama era as the last great effort of the supporters of the administrative regulatory state. It was the last effort of the policy analysts to devise cunning administrative and regulatory ploys to advance the liberal agenda by any means necessary. That's how I judge Jonathan Gruber's Obamacare, Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, and all the cunningly wrought abuses of the old-line regulatory agencies. It will all crumble into dust, and for a good reason. That reason is that these policy ideas could never have passed Congress because they could never persuade a majority of the American people that the ideas would improve their lives.

I've been reading a number of Marxists in recent years, and one thing has struck me. Marxists don't acknowledge any economics later than the classical economics on which Marx built his theory of surplus value. They can't because if they did the whole edifice of Marxian economics would collapse. For instance, here is Theodor Adorno making a swipe at the exchange economy in ¨Progress," an essay in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords.

Exchange is the rational form of mythical ever-sameness. In the like-for-like of every act of exchange, the one act revokes the other; the balance of accounts is null. If the exchange was just, then nothing should really have happened, and everything stays the same. (p159)

No, Ted. No. You miss the point completely. Exchange is not "like-for-like" or a double-entry bookkeeping transaction that balances out. Exchange only takes place when both parties prefer the exchange to the status quo. I go out and buy Adorno's Critical Models because I value having and reading the book and deepening my understanding about the mind of a Frankfurt School Marxist more than the $16.50 the book cost me. And I am glad to pay the bookseller for the effort of finding and stocking this hard-to-find item. Exchange is not about like-for-like. It is about win-win.

So much for the Marxists. With administrative state liberals we have a similar settled-science problem. Liberals believe in society by administration, but the science has showed that administrative government is a very weak reed to lean on. Mises pointed out that socialism couldn't work because it couldn't compute prices. Hayek sharpened the analysis by pointing out that the man in Whitehall (or Washington DC) couldn't outperform a million consumers and producers interacting through the price system. He called it an information problem. Today we would probably call it a bandwidth problem. Administration and bureaucracy just cannot get the job done, because they don't have the information and they don't have the bandwidth to compete with the information and the knowledge and the experience of the consumers and the producers. Yet liberals keep coming up with new Hail Marys hoping that that this time they will thread the needle with their administrative plan to centralize and homogenize education or healthcare or consumer finance.

One day, I hope to understand Hegel, and his notion that progress is not a straight line but a to-and-fro of ideas and counter ideas. It's an irony that the left, which bases its ideas on Marx's take on Hegel, always wants a one-size-fits-once-for-all solution to every problem. As though everything shouldn't be reworked every few years or every generation.

The wonder of the market is that it institutionalizes the to-and-fro in a process that responds to everyone's input and bends the world to peoples' needs expressed through their buying and selling. The problem of government is that it does not respond to individuals, only to power plays big enough to register on the political radar.

President Obama's faith in his phone and his pen, and in the efficacy of the administrative state is going to cost his party plenty. And you ain't seen nothing yet.

Playing Out Obama's String

When an NFL team at the end of the season has no chance left to get into the playoffs, sportswriters write about "playing out the string." There's no death or glory in it, but the team is still expected to come out on game day ready to play.

That's the situation the US is in with nearly sixteen months to go in the Obama Era. There is almost nothing to be done until President Obama leaves office on January 20, 2017.

So perhaps we just have to sit by while the president makes a mess of the Middle East and the economy continues to sputter.

For many it is too frustrating, and that's why the Republicans in the House just showed Speaker John Boehner the door. And that's probably why three people without experience of elected office are leading the Republican race for the president.

The problem is not that Obama is unteachable, as the Wall Street Journal recently opined. The problem, as I've written, is that liberals are unteachable.

There is not necessarily anything shameful in that. We all have our world views, our belief systems, and we stick to them no matter what. The liberal world view is that foreign wars and carrying the big stick solves nothing. In fact it is worse than nothing; it is imperialism and colonialism. We should concentrate instead on solving problems at home, fighting racism and inequality and homelessness.

So that's why the Democrats determined to retreat from the US world empire built up since World War II. We can't solve the world's problems; in fact we often make them worse. For instance we took Iraq and broke it. Every culture is different; we should let people determine their own political arrangements rather than impose our own.

Domestically, of course, Democrats believe in fundamental transformation. They believe in detailed political and administrative supervision of race relations; they believe in political and economic interventions to correct historical inequality. And they believe in detailed political and administrative supervision of the workplace and the market economy. Even left-wing writers like Jürgen Habermas have admitted that such a politics amounts to "internal colonization."

My world view says that all politics and government is colonization. Because government is force. And my world view says that, if you are going to choose, it's better for the US government to carry a big stick outside the US rather than inside. In other words the job of the United States government to protect our external trade from tin-pot dictators and pirates, and force and projection of force are the only ways to do that. Within the US the efficacy of force is more limited, and morally questionable. Because what is the government doing when it puts the hammer down on, e.g., Uber drivers?

Over the years liberals have convinced themselves that their world view for external retreat and internal conquest is the right and proper thing to do. My judgement is that they are wrong, and the Obama experiment is a pedal-to-the-metal effort that will prove it.

Remember back in the 2000s? Judis and Teixeira prophesied that Democrats would own the future with The Emerging Democratic Majority of minorities, women, educated and young people. Well, minorities got to be hardest hit by the real-estate crash, young people are living in their parents' basement. So how's that emerging majority doing, Barack?

Back in 2008 I voted for Barack Obama because I wanted Democrats to own foreign policy and show what they really believed in beyond attacking President Bush and everything to do with him.

But I can see now that I only saw half the picture. We needed Democrats to take the bull by the horns and implement their entire world view and prove to the world that it was all rubbish and delusion.

So that's where we are today. Americans instinctively understand that something is wrong with the way the government works. They understand that it is Time for a Change. Hey maybe we could have Hope and Change. For a change.

The only question, after we play out the string, is what change?

Are Republicans "Needlessly Alienating Large Chunks of the Electorate?"

Here comes Charles Krauthammer rounding up the usual suspects. Ben Carson is needlessly insulting Muslims and Donald Trump is needlessly insulting Mexican Americans.

Really?

And what about Hillary Clinton who is determined to run on the "rape culture" platform. Is not the rape culture campaign needlessly alienating large chunks of the electorate, namely men?

So let's get real, chaps.

First of all there is Chantrill's Second Law: Politics is Division.

Alienating chunks of people is what politicians do. They do it in order to rally the folks on their own side. The idea is not, of course, to alienate, so much as to divide the electorate down the middle with 51 percent or more voting for your side. The time-honored strategy is to call out some minority, within the borders or without, and suggest that they are a threat to the nation.

Ideally, of course, your enemy should be what H.L. Mencken called a "hobgoblin" that doesn't get to vote. Liberals are the experts in this, with their hate campaigns against "greedy bankers" and job-killing CEOs. How many people are turned off by that? Just a few libertarians like me.

But, of course, liberals don't stop at alienating bankers and CEOs. They are positively ferocious about alienating racists, which could include all white people. They are ruthless about hunting down sexists, which could expand to the set of all males. They are fanatic about stamping out homophobia, which could include all heterosexuals.

Talk about large chunks of the electorate!

David Brooks is harping on a similar theme.

Let's step back a bit. This whole frou-frah goes back to what we will stipulate was a good liberal sentiment of the 1960s and the civil rights movement. The idea was to stop the automatic racism and marginalization of black people. Let us give liberals a gold star for that.

But there is a dark side to this. Conservatives have recently got all hot and bothered about it. It is the conscious leftist strategy, invented by the Frankfurt School, to rile up and separate minority groups from the general population and stigmatize anyone that says a discouraging word against these clients of the liberals. We have seen this political strategy expressed as the future of the Democratic Party in the iconic The Emerging Democratic Majority by Judis and Teixeira in which the future in America belongs to a coalition of minorities, women, the educated and the young.

Hello Krauthammer and Brooks. Do you not see that this Frankfurt School strategy and its culture of political correctness amounts to nothing less than "needlessly alienating large chunks of the electorate," specifically the great honest mass of people that think of themselves as "typical Americans" in the service of a cynical political strategy that aims to fundamentally transform America from a middle-class society of live and let live into a politically mobilized activist state of warring identity groups led by liberals.

Over the last 20 years liberals have successfully divided America by cowing large chunks of Americans into submission through their culture of political correctness that they learned from Frankfurt Schoolman Herbert Marcuse. Their politics was cynically divisive but it worked because the people that they "needlessly alienated" were at the same time cowed into submission.

But suppose these large chunks of alienated people started fighting back? What would it look like? 

I suggest it would look like USA 2015.

Let us give liberals their due, on minority rights and immigration.

It's a good thing to restrain the natural instinct of the majority to marginalize the minority.  But when you amp this up to intimidating the majority and using minorities as cat's paws to humiliate the majority then you are sowing the wind and about to reap the whirlwind.

It is a good thing to leaven the national dough with immigration, but the ruling class first of all owes the native population a chance at a decent life and upward mobility before it lets one immigrant (like me) in the door. Immigration increases the labor supply and that drives down wages. Period. And it impacts the low-skilled native population most keenly. Anyone that argues against this is denying settled science. To coin a phrase.

At some point the voters are going to push back against a ruling class that favors the minority over the majority and refuses to defend the border against illegal immigrants.

Now I think that President Obama has been the trigger that has fired off the push-back. To understand why you could start with this piece about "Bully's Pulpit" by Jay D. Homnick. Jay talks about how Obama bullies his opponents and disrespects them. Talk about alienating large chunks of Americans.

I have written several times that it is one thing to demonstrate and protest and fling insulting words around when you and your party are the Out party. It is quite another thing when you do this as president of the In party.

Liberals have been playing this game of cultural bullying for so long that it just seems to them the natural order of things. They are right and the racists, sexists, homophobes are wrong. It is their historic destiny to curb and correct the atavisms of the American people. They have made the "protest" into a holy religious ceremony and the "activist" into an eternal hero fighting for the powerless against the powerful.

You see, it is one thing to protest if you are truly the helpless and the powerless. But it is rather a different matter, as in Ferguson, Missouri, when the protesters are celebrated by the President of the United States and the ruling class.

Hey liberals! Whose job is it to curb the atavisms of liberals?

I think this liberal culture of bullying is in the early stages of experiencing its moment of truth. It has worked thus far because its targets have been the middle class. Now the middle class, cultural product of the great global exchange economy, are what I call the People of the Responsible Self. They live by working and relating responsibly in the global exchange economy where the watchword is Trust. You trust anyone and everyone unless they demonstrate untrustworthiness. So when liberals descend on the great American middle class and accuse it of racism, sexism, and homophobia, the average middle-class person assumes liberal good faith and looks at himself and sees he is not perfect. That is the culture of the exchange economy's trust culture.

But what happens when the liberals have demonstrated their bad faith, when they have shown that the idea of their politics is merely to cow the great American middle class into submission for the greater glory of liberal politics? What happens when they put up a candidate for president that's the worst liar in US history? That is the question we are now facing. We will have the answer in November 2016.

Because the truth, contra Charles Krauthammer, is that Muslims are a problem for the peaceful development of the global exchange economy. The truth, contra the Beltway ruling class, is that immigration on the scale of the last 50 years is a problem for the harmonious development of the American nation.

And if we don't face facts now we will have to face facts later.

Reading Hillary Between the Lines

The great question in life is how much to believe your own bullshit. I am talking of everything from religion to politics to economics.

What I mean is, how much should you blindly conduct your life on faith, and how much with a skeptical eye on things, knowing that everything you believe might turn out to be wrong?

My answer is straight forward, for I am a Kantian, believing that we can never know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances.

How much should you believe your religion's creation myth, from God creating the world in seven days to the magical Big Bang of today's speculative scientists?

How much should you believe the eternal growth myth of modern economics, and how much the "immiseration" myth of Marxist economics?

And how much, if you are a Democrat, should you believe in the The Emerging Democratic Majority of women, minorities, the educated and the young prophesied in the 2000s by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira?

Probably the answer is the same as it has been for every loyal foot soldier down the ages. You believe until you find yourself dying of hunger and disease on the side of the road as your army disintegrates in defeat. But then it's too late.

I think that's where we stand in the Democratic ascendancy of the last ten years. It comes through rather clearly in Rich Lowry's piece on "The End of the Clinton Coalition." He writes:

Bill Clinton got elected by peeling off working-class whites and suburbanites from the Republican party, while holding traditional Democratic voters.

 But Barack Obama won with the Emerging Democratic Majority of "minorities, liberals, and upper-class suburbanites."

Elsewhere in the former Clinton coalition, though, his support collapsed, with older and blue-collar whites continuing to flee the Democrats.

That worked pretty well for Obama because of the peculiar enthusiasm of blacks and the educated and youth for his promise of Hope and Change. And when Obama ran for reelection he did a good job turning the white working class off Mitt Romney with his Joe Soptic ad.

But now the white working class is probably gone for good.

Even if Hillary wanted to try to recapture those kinds of voters, it’s not clear that she could, and the effort would risk alienating the Obama supporters she needs if she’s going to win a national election.

So Hillary Clinton is faced with flogging the Obama coalition into one more Big Push.

But let's look at the numbers at uspresidentelection.us. In 2008 Barack Obama won with 69.5 million votes to McCain's 59.9 million. In 2012 Obama won with 63.5 million to Romney's 59.7 million.

Leaving out the natural expansion of the electorate, you think that Hillary is going to beat Obama's turnout in 2012 after eight years of disappointment for the Democratic faithful? And you think that the new generation of GOP operatives haven't been thinking 24-7 about how to bounce the GOP vote up over 70 million?

The big hit against Hillary Clinton is that people can't name a single achievement from her 25 year time on the national stage.

But I think there is another, bigger problem with Hillary Clinton. She is an utterly conventional thinker; she has never vouchsafed a single thought that wasn't liberal conventional wisdom. So how can she possibly inspire Americans with hope and change?

The conventional wisdom about presidential elections is that it is always Four More Years vs. Time for a Change. After eight years of government by one party the instinct for a change is almost irresistible.

And after eight years of Obama there must be a still small voice in the mind of many Democratic voters asking: "What difference did it make?"

Obama Leads Dems into the Wilderness

The original narrative for the Obama years came from Judis and Teixeira and The Emerging Democratic Majority back in 2002.  The idea was that the Dems were forming a majority coalition of minorities, women, youth and the educated, and that they'd rule for ever after.

I feared it, but not after the Obama administration got started. I feared that the Dems would incrementally move the country in a liberal direction by finding bipartisan majorities on issues the Republicans couldn't refuse. Kinda like Medicare Part D which Bush passed in part to defuse a Dem "issue."

But Obama turned out to be the wrong president to consolidate and extend the Emerging Democratic Majority, because he pursued a divisive and partisan strategy to implement as much as possible of the liberal agenda by any means possible as soon as possible. So we have the Obamacare cramdown, the endless executive orders, the revising of statute law by fiat.

He violated the Moynihan Rule, that you want a 70-30 vote in the US Senate to pass big items like Medicare.

The result of Obama has been the most Republican Congress since before the Great Depression. And huge gains for Republicans in the states.

Now comes John Kraushaar in the National Journal to argue that "Obama Changed His Party, Not the Country." He's gotten remarkable support from his base and from the Democrats in Congress. But what does it matter if he hasn't brought the country with him too?

By ignoring the electorate and steering the country in an unmistakably progressive direction his final two years in office, he's ensuring that his presidency will be more of an eight-year mirage for liberals, rather than one known for winning lasting support for policies that would move the country in a leftward direction.

And so now John B. Judis is writing about an Emerging Republican Advantage.

Back in 2012 Chief Justice Roberts was the deciding vote to allow Obamacare to proceed. You can see why he did that and angered Republicans and conservatives. He knew that for the Supreme Court to roll back Obamacare in 2012 would be dangerously divisive, and would be viciously attacked by liberals and Obama. But not any more. Obama's a lame duck and Obamacare is unpopular. My nickel goes to say that the current Obamacare issue before the Supreme Court, the question of whether subsidies can be applied in states that didn't set up their own health exchanges, Chief Justice Roberts will be on the side of those that cut Obamacare down.

And the problem with all those executive orders is that they can be reversed by the next president.

It is said that Abraham Lincoln advised us to fight only one war at a time. We might revise and extend his remarks to say that all governments look for a war to fight. But they'd better not get caught in a two-front war. Now it is clear that the war Obama is fighting is the war against conservatives and Republicans. For his and his liberal base, the real enemy is racism, sexism, homophobia. So for them the problem with Islam, or the aggression of Putin's Russia are distractions from the real war.

But conservatives and Republicans are different. We don't really want to crush our domestic political opponents; we just wish they weren't so determined to wreck America and all it stands for. Enemies, if any, can be found beyond the borders of the United States and North America. The enemy used to be the Soviet Union; now it is radical Islam.

So, from my conservative perspective, the idea that Obama has led his party into the wilderness without getting the rest of the nation to follow him is a beacon of hope. It will be much easier for the next Republican president to lead the nation to sunny uplands of economic growth and social peace if President Obama has flown the Democratic Party up a box canyon and wrecked it on the canyon wall.

But, as I have already written, I expect the Democrats to break and run before they get too far up the box canyon. Politicians are not fools; they can see the writing on the canyon walls.

But usually the rank and file in an army wait to desert until it is too late. They are only human, after all.

The Judis Enlightenment

Way back when, in 2002, Democrats thought that they were going to own the future, and so John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote a book about it: The Emerging Democratic Majority.

It was simple, they said. A new coalition of minorities, women, the educated, and the young was forming and they were going to be Democrats.

But now, with the Republicans in the best position they've held in Congress since the 1920s, John B Judis has changed his mind in "The Emerging Republican Advantage."

What has happened to change Judis' mind, other than the facts on the ground: a Republican Senate joining the Republican House to make up the most Republican Congress in 80 years.  It's the thesis of the emerging middle:

[There are] two trends that have emerged in the past few elections—one surprising, the other less so. The less surprising trend is that Democrats have continued to hemorrhage support among white working-class voters—a group that generally works in blue-collar and lower-income service jobs and that is roughly identifiable in exit polls as those whites who have not graduated from a four-year college...

The more surprising trend is that Republicans are gaining dramatically among... middle-class Americans. These are voters who generally work in what economist Stephen Rose has called "the office economy." In exit polling, they can roughly be identified as those who have college—but not postgraduate—degrees and those whose household incomes are between $50,000 and $100,000.

Golly!  You think that maybe the Republican Party is not the party of the rich, as the Democrats keep telling us, but really the party of the middling sort of person, neither rich nor poor, neither uneducated or super-educated, not exactly brainy, but certainly not stupid? Who could have figured that out?

Of course, that's what conservative brainiacs have been saying for years. The Democratic Party is an over-under coalition, of the rich and the credentialed in an unholy alliance with the poor. The Republican Party is the party of the responsible middle class.

OK. So John B. Judis has seen the light on party alignment. But he is still as dumb as bricks when it comes to the economy.

After the 2008 election, I thought Obama could create an enduring Democratic majority by responding aggressively to the Great Recession in the same way that Franklin Roosevelt had responded in 1933 to the Great Depression. Obama, I believed, would finally bury the Reagan Republican majority of 1980 and inaugurate a new period of Democratic domination.

See how he got it completely wrong? That's because he doesn't care about science and hasn't cracked a book to get beyond the straight liberal narrative on the Great Depression. First of all, President Bush was already "responding aggressively" to the Great Recession. He let Nancy Pelosi have whatever stupid Keynesian stimulus she wanted, and then he had Hank Paulson in at Treasury to make sure that "this sucker" didn't go down in the Fall of 2008. All the heavy lifting had been done before Obama was inaugurated, and if John B. Judis knew a thing beyond the usual liberal shibboleths about the Crusades he'd know that.

In retrospect, that analogy was clearly flawed. Roosevelt took power after four years of the Great Depression, with Republicans and business thoroughly discredited, and with the public (who lacked any safety net) ready to try virtually anything to revive the economy. Obama's situation was very different. Business was still powerful enough to threaten him if he went too far in trying to tame it. Much of the middle class and working class were still employed, and they saw Obama's stimulus program—which was utterly necessary to stem the Great Recession—as an expansion of government at their expense.

Oh really. Business powerful enough to threaten him? Obama's stimulus "utterly necessary?" You mean the one that kept teachers' salaries going? For God's sake, John B. Judis, get out of your liberal hidey-hole and get out more.  Obama's economic policy has been a failure because it tried to emulate the glory days of FDR, which some commentators think deepened and extended the Great Depression.

The Obama problem is that the natural reaction of all politicians at all times is to throw money at their supporters, and he's too cloistered to know that there is another way. The way the economy works is that when you lose your job you must get on your bike and go find a job. The more people are sitting around on a government check (I am talking about both workers and crony capitalists) the slower the economy will rebound. The real job of a government in a financial crisis is to supply endless liquidity until the panic is over, and then clear the decks of regulations and onerous taxes to grease a swift recovery.

As a coda to John B. Judis' partial emergence from the ignorance and superstition of the liberal Dark Ages, there is Henry Olsen's "Submerging Democratic Majority." He points out that, if the Democratic majority idea is flawed, so is the counter idea of a "natural Republican majority," because "simplistic proponents of the “natural Republican majority” counter-thesis also overlook the elements of white-working-class and middle-class psychology that makes them quintessential swing voters." For Olsen, you can explain every election since 2008 on the idea that the "white-working-class and middle-class" voters are up for grabs. Writes Olsen:

Judis basically gets them right when he notes that they are suspicious of, but not hostile to, government. They no longer trust government to automatically act in their interest, but neither do they think that all government is evil — especially those aspects of government they can feel most directly in their lives: police, public schools, and mass entitlement programs.

Too true. The problem for right-wingnuts like me is to persuade the white working class and the non-credentialed middle class that reform of public schools and entitlement is really just what the doctor ordered for them. And the problem starts with the fact that even though public education and the entitlements stink they still make the white working class and the middle middle class feel safe.

Forging the New GOP Majority

The last Big Idea to come along in politics was The Emerging Democratic Majority proposed by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira. Democrats were looking at a generational majority based on minorities, women, the youth and the educated, they wrote.

Well that was ten years ago and now the Congress of the United States is as Republican as it's been since the onset of the Great Depression 85 years ago.

So what went wrong? Let us introduce the idea of Steve Sailer. As far back as 2009 he was calling for rebranding the Democratic Party as the Black Party.

You see, ten years ago the Democrats were the party of the rainbow coalition while everyone knew that the Republican Party was the White Party. So Uncool. Why would Hispanics and Asians want to belong to the Uncool Party?

But suppose, Sailer suggested, that we start to rebrand the Democrats as the Black Party. Then, perhaps, the Hispanics and Asians wouldn't be quite as enthusiastic about voting Democratic. It shouldn't be that hard, starting with the fact that Hispanics think blacks are lazy. That's when they are not actually expelling blacks from their neighborhood.

So it shouldn't be that hard for cunning GOP politicians to turn Hispanics against African Americans with artfully designed dog whistles that inflame already existing prejudice against blacks.

The only question is: Who will bell the cat? Which GOPer would ever have the cojones to do such a thing?

No need! Our post-partisan post-racial President Obama, assisted by Attorney General "Cowards" Holder and Mayor de Blasio are willingly doing the job that no Republican dares to do.

When Obama & Co. decided to amp up their base over the Trayvon Martin killing it turned out that the target of their rage was not a geniune white racist but a "White Hispanic."

When Obama & Co. decided to amp up their base over the police killing of a black gentle giant, it turned out that the gentle giant had just held up a convenience store and menaced an Asian shop assistant.

When Obama & Co. decided to continue their days of rage and organize demonstrations and riots all over the country, the first thing a deranged black activist did was kill two NYPD cops. Yay! But the silly fool didn't kill a couple of white cops. Instead he emptied his gun on two non-white cops, an Asian and a Hispanic, as they sat in their patrol car.

And who are the chaps organizing continuing demonstrations and riots in New York City? It's a coalition of black and Muslim organizations.

In other words, it is the left that is rebranding the Democratic Party as the Black and Muslim Party.

The point is that when the Democrats are in the ascendant, you can call them the majority party of minorities, women, youth, and the educated. But when you blow away the fluff and you put a lefty Obama administration in charge for six years what you get is a party of blacks, feminists, young "activists" and gentry liberals. And that doesn't add up to a majority.

I keep saying that the Republican Party is clueless. It doesn't know how to build a majority. That's because it's not the white party, not the rich party, not the corporate party. It is just the party of the responsible middle class.

You'd think that the clueless party would not be long for this world.  But it has a recruiter that keeps replenishing its ranks. From time the time the Democratic Party throws off part of its coalition and that rejected limb hobbles its way over to the Republican Party. Thirty-five years ago the Dems threw off the Reagan Democrats. Thirty years ago the Dems threw off the fundamentalist Christians. Most recently they threw off the white working class. And maybe next they'll throw off the striver Hispanics and Asians.

A word to the wise among my liberal friends. You guys should really cool the anti-police rhetoric. The whole point of urban policing, starting in London with Sir Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police, is to keep the young single lower-class males under control. That's what the middle class wants, and that what it gets. It got it in 1830 when the threat was Bill Sikes and the Artful Dodger. It got it in New York in the mid 1800s when the threat was the shanty Irish. It got it in the 1990s when the threat was black teenagers.

When you liberals go after the cops you just remind the middle class what the police are for. The police in the modern city are there to protect the middle class from the under-class thugs.

But don't mind me. I'm just an old white guy.

Watch Democrats Break Apart

Every political party is a coalition of interests, and some of those interests conflict.

That's why political analysts tell us that a political coalition usually forms from interests out of power. They are united by their separated grievances. But once the coalition gets into power then the conflicts start to surface.

For ten years now, we have all agreed with Judis and Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority that Democrats owned the future with the whammo coalition of minorities, women, educated and youth.

That was then; this is now.

Let's take immigration.  There is a gaping hole of interest between African American and recent-immigrant Hispanics.  It is encapsulated by this pithy remark from Instapundit Glenn Reynolds on a complaint that comprehensive immigration reform would be "disastrous" for blacks, particularly low-skilled African American men.  Says Reynolds:

When we had a (very modest) crackdown on businesses hiring illegals here in Knoxville, businesses quickly replaced Mexican workers with black workers.

 There's a double problem here for Democrats.  In the first place Hispanics are souring rapidly on Obama because of the economy; no doubt that's why Obama is dangling immigration before them.  But African Americans are also feeling betrayed, even if they can't or won't admit it.  They thought that America's First Black President would change everything.

Don't forget that the "yoof" is buried in student debt and in Colorodo Democrats seem to need to terrify women that Republicans want to take away their birth control pills. Well, you never know with those Wascally Wepublicans!

There may be a lesson here.  When you break America up into activist-led silos, each of them curdling with some activist-stirred grievance, then you shouldn't be surprised that you end up breaking America up into warring activist-led factions.

Let's get back to first principles. The whole point of the single-language nation state is that it scrambles the warring tribes together into a single nation of people.  People come out of their collective tribes and live as responsible individuals; they leave their tribal grievances behind and live under the faith that if they get a skill and offer it to the market and work hard then they will find some kind of decent prosperity and their children will reap the reward of their efforts.

I get the point of left-wing activism.  There are some people left behind; there are many people just trying to catch up.  There is injustice in the world.  It may be OK to take people that are not yet ready to become responsible individuals and fold them into collective organizations like labor unions, where they submerge their individual self in a collective. But that's a temporary fix; the modern world works on responsible individualism, and will keep doing so until we come up with something better.  If you lower your sights and join a collective then you are giving up your birthright in freedom.  You have taken the by-road into neo-serfdom, and the people that led you into that have led you into a diminished life.

I give our liberal friends the benefit of the doubt; it's a noble thing to fight for the oppressed.  But when you give the government extraordinary powers to fight injustice you'd better understand what you are doing.  You are saying that voluntary cooperation between social animals has failed and now the only resort is force. It's hard to understand this, because the corpus of left-wing thought is so huge and so tangled that few people really get what it all adds up to.

In my view, one of the few lefties that has really worked to face the truth is the grand old man of German thinking, Jürgen Habermas.  He recognizes that the great modern systems, from science to business to government, are inherently dominatory.  He wants to balance the power of the systems with the countervailing power of a peer-to-peer "discourse ethics." In other words, you can't just roll over your political opponent with name-calling and street power; you have to engage your opponents as peers with a legitimate opposing view.

Brave words!  But note the gorilla in the room.  Discourse ethics cannot work until the Alinsky-believing left-wing activist gets to be named and shamed every time he unleashes the all-purpose pejoratives like racist, sexist, homophobe.

Meanwhile, watch the Democrats try to keep their coalition together as its members start to wake up to their irreconcilable differences.

The Seeds of Destruction

For conservatives there is much in Obama's America that doesn't make sense.  Why is Obama so terminally divisive? Why would gays, on the cusp of winning their "marriage equality" want to rub out a techie like Brendan Eich?  Why would feminists, after a half century of feminist progress, now be subjecting college boys to the witch hunt of the "rape culture?"  Don't these people understand that they've won?

Jim Goad describes what is going on here.

Howard Bloom’s book The Lucifer Principle goes into great detail describing how social movements that initially claim to merely seek “equality” morph into insatiably power-hungry predatory super-organisms once their alleged oppressors are willing to grant them equal treatment. While those making the concessions may think they’re doing so in the name of “fairness,” groups who are on the ascent tend to smell blood instead. Once even a semblance of “equality” is achieved, the mask falls off and it becomes a naked drive for power. They never seem sated by equality and keep moving the goalposts, ultimately becoming every bit as oppressive and intolerant as their former masters.

The point is that any political movement is about politics.  It starts, no doubt, with a sharp experience of injustice.  That is not hard to do because all government dispense injustice, because they write their laws based on their ruling-class interpretation of justice. Others find their so-called justice the acme of injustice.

Very well. But politics is politics, and involves mobilizing people into a political army that is trained and inspired to fight, whatever the cost, for truth and justice.

What happens to the political army once it has achieved its goal?  Nothing.  So it looks for new fields to conquer, and that is the moment that the political movement transforms itself from a movement for justice into a cruel agent of injustice.  We've seen that happen to the civil-rights movement, to the environmental movement, to the feminist movement, and now the gay movement.

But why is Barack Obama so insistent on dividing America?

I've been reading a piece by Harry Stein on his father, Joseph Stein, who wrote the book for Fiddler on the Roof.  Joe was a lefty-liberal all his life, and couldn't understand his son's journey to the right.

My father simply couldn’t fathom how any thinking person, let alone someone who’d imbibed politics at his knee, could have ended up a . . . well, he never actually used the word, at least not directly. 

The word, of course, is Fascist.

The point is that Barack Obama has lived his entire life in a left-liberal bubble.  He is part of a political movement that is dedicated to "fundamentally transforming" America.  The point about such a political movement is that, by its nature, it doesn't know when to stop.

Back in the 2000s I was worried by books like The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira.  They projected that a new majority of blacks, Latinos, women, the educated, and the young would form a new majority that would rule for decades.

But the problem is that Obama has rained hardship on this new majority. Blacks have lost the homes that the real-estate bubble got them into, and are devastated that the the new dawn promised by the election of a black president has turned into a mirage.  Hispanics want jobs and they don't see them. The educated are confused, and the young are totally screwed.  College educated youth is buried in student debt, and the rest of the youth are buried in the slow recovery.

The most telling thing is that inequality has got worse on Obama's watch.

Yeah, well, say conservatives and libertarians.  What do you expect when you boost welfare and food stamps, and you implement Keynesian cheap money?

The point is that Obama and his acolytes in the liberal bubble don't get it.  They think that cheap money "stimulates" the economy.  They think that their programs to help the poor alleviate inequality.  But somehow it's all gone wrong.  That's why they are looking for scapegoats and reckon that some dastardly Republican plot masterminded by the Koch Brothers has destroyed the president's agenda. They are like Harry Stein's father. They can't wrap their brains around the notion that they could be wrong, and that it is the president's policies that have caused the present malaise.

That brings us to the good news.  The polls say that the American people are coming to the notion that we need different policies to attack America's problems.  There's wisdom in that poll question and in the response of the voters.  Americans don't know the first thing about economics and how to promote prosperity.  In fact they believe a bunch of contradictory things about the economy.  Think of their ideas as a muddy precipitate of all the sound bites that are flung at them every day.

There's one thing that the voters can decide for us.  When they sense that things are on the wrong track, they can vote for a change.  That's what happened in 1980 when voters repudiated the McGovernite Sixties generation.  It took nearly a generation after the debacle of the Sixties New Left before Americans could vote for an unapologetic leftist, and even then the media hid Obama's leftism from the voters.

But now the voters sense that things aren't working.  Probably they'll surprise us in November with a wave election that unseats a couple of Democratic senators that nobody thought were in trouble.  And then it will be on to 2016 when Republicans will have at least three bright and energetic young candidates -- Cruz, Rubio, Paul, Ryan: your list is as good as mine -- that will be telling the American people that it is time for a change.

Oh yeah.  The Democrats will be flogging their base with wars on women and gays and finding racism in every living room, board room, locker room, and classroom.  But there comes a moment in flogging a cart horse when the light goes out of its eyes.  It just doesn't have the strength or the will to shove its weight against the harness.  It just stands there, under a rain of blows, and does nothing.

Because politics is about power, government is about force, and human society is about something better than power games and brute force.