Oh No! Not Again!

I suspect that the private reaction to the Ferguson, Missouri, shooting among old white guys like me was: Oh, no, not again.

Because racist sexist homophobe guys like me just want this whole era of race politics to be over.  That's why we all voted for Barack Obama in 2008.

Then we learned that for Barack and the boys race politics is what it's all about.  They had no intention of moving on to a post-partisan, post-racial politics.

But still, it's discouraging: nearly 50 years after Watts, over 20 years after the Rodney King riots, here we are again with riots after a questionable arrest of a black man.

In retrospect it's not surprising, according to Megan McArdle.  Ferguson is a suburb of St. Louis that just flipped to majority black, and the city council and the police department are still white.

But now we learn that the dead 18-year-old might have been involved in a robbery immediately before his fatal encounter with the police.

Here was my takeaway from Ferguson: black folks booing Reverend Al Sharpton.

That's the thing about putting your faith in princes and politicians.  You find out eventually that it's like enlisting in the army.  First of all, you find out pretty quickly that you can't leave: desertion is what the army chiefs call it.  Then you realize that you are just cannon fodder.  The leaders aren't leading you to a promised land.  They are just using you in their cunning political power plays.  And when you are no longer useful, they will leave you by the side of the road.

That's why it's discouraging to me that blacks are still rioting, 50 years after Watts.  Back in 1992 Pat Buchanan coined the idea of "peasants with pitchforks" rebelling against the GOP establishment.  It's an apt notion because peasant uprisings never succeed.  Why?  Because the peasants are no match for the army.  And working-class or minority rioters are no match for the government and the middle class.

And that's the point.  The middle class doesn't riot.  Why not?  Because the middle class doesn't just sit there in a deteriorating situation, blaming the world for its problems, and finally exploding in rage.  Peasants do that, whether rural or urban.  But the middle class is different, because the middle class is composed of People of the Responsible Self.  The middle class believes that it is up to each individual to fix their problems, and waiting around for the government to fix things is likely to be a long wait.

And that's why I'm discouraged.  The riots in Ferguson, Missouri, tell us that African Americans still haven't climbed up into the middle class. And that's a crying shame.

On the other hand, they are starting to boo Barack and Al. That is what I call progress.

What are Police For?

Another white policeman has shot and killed another black teenager, this time in Ferguson, Missouri, and all the usual suspects are telling the same old story: racism.

Or, if you are a conservative, you write: yes, it's racism, but.

Let's put all this in perspective.  The reason that the Brits created a London police force back in the 19th century was to control under-class males.  They called the new policeman "bobbies" or "peelers" after the Home Secretary, Robert Peel, that pushed the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829.

That is what urban police forces are for: to control under-class young males.

The problem then and the problem now is that when people migrate to the city they typically experience severe social dislocation.  Men abandon their wives, boys grow up without fathers, young women support their children "on their backs."  And above all, young men do what comes naturally; they join a criminal gang and make war on other gangs and loot the poor.

We should not look down on this.  Politicians do the same: they join a political party, make war on other political parties, and loot the taxpayer.

In the United States this situation began not later than the arrival of the Irish on the coffin ships in the hungry 1840s.  In the 1850s in Manhattan they talked about 50,000 "nymphs of the pave."  And Irish lads were well represented in the draft riots of the 1860s.

By the end of the 19th century people were starting to talk about "lace curtain" Irish rather than "shanty" Irish.  And the menace of Irish criminality and barbarism had been replaced by the menace of Italian and Jewish gangs.

The point is, of course, that the police didn't like the immigrant kids and the kids didn't like the police. Fast forward to today, and it is black teenagers in gangs, not to mention the growing menace of Salvadorean gangs.  The police are involved in a daily battle with these young gang-bangers and vice versa.

There is an additional factor to consider.  The urban gang is very like a proto-government. It defends territory and it taxes the people in its territory with what used to be called "protection money," as in "nice little business you got here, pity if something should happen to it."  So the urban gang is, in a real sense, a mild rebellion or uprising: urban guerrillas, if you like.  Thus the urban gang is an intolerable affront to the official government.  It ought to winkle it out and destroy it, but instead often coexists with it in an uneasy unofficial truce.  See Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, Mayor.

In the end, each wave of young lower-class men get socialized into the life of the city; they become workers and husbands and citizens, and they are replaced by new immigrants and new gangs.

But the welfare state throws up its peculiar barriers to this process.  First of all, the welfare state taxes work. If you hire someone to work you can't just pay them; you have to pay taxes: payroll, unemployment, workers comp., which raises the cost of labor.  Maybe you choose to hire those teenage kids "off the books."  And then welfare makes it possible for lower-class women to raise children without the assistance of lower-class men.  So we get the situation illuminated by Charles Murray in Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. The women don't marry and the men don't work.  That's a pity because the top indicator of child welfare is that children live with their biological, married parents.

So what's the solution?  Liberals and blacks yell about racism, and everybody else mutters in their beards about fathers and welfare and work.

I will tell you what I think will happen.  I think that black women will turn to marriage, and that will put black men to work.  Why do I say this?  Because for the lower-class woman struggling in the chaotic underclass world the hope, the vision, of middle-class respectability is a constant ache that never goes away.  And it won't go away until black lower-class women get themselves into the middle class.

There's no mystery about how you get to middle-class respectability.  You marry the father of your children and he goes to work to support them.

Is there anything we can do?  Well, we can make welfare more difficult and we can make work more easy.  Other than that, I don't have a clue what to do.

Meanwhile the police will be left on the front line, trying to keep order in the constant battle with gang-socialized young men.

Is the Corruption Finally Catching Up with Liberals?

Remember back in 2006?  Liberals and the media were all wigged out about Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.  You can get the flavor from Wikipedia:

The federal investigations into Jack Abramoff and his political and business dealings are among the broadest and most extensive in American political history, involving well over a dozen offices of the FBI and over 100 FBI agents tasked exclusively to the investigation.

And what had Abramoff done?  Well, among other things he was lobbying for Indian casinos.  And so the voters properly wiped out the Republicans in the 2006 midterms.

But what about Democratic corruption?  Well, never mind that the media tend to tag Republican corruptocrats with and "R" but leave off the party affiliation where Democratic corruption is concerned.  The fact is that the media don't tag normal pay-for-play influence peddling as corruption, so long as it advances the liberal agenda. Medicare and Medicaid and welfare programs are rotted with corruption; nobody cares.  Solar power and wind turbines are drenched in subsidy, paid for by taxpayers and ordinary electric utility customers.  And the winners are politically connected individuals and corporations.  Then we have well-connected liberal billionaires like Tom Steyer.  He's putting money into politics to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, but wouldn't you know he "has long had a stake in a rival pipeline called Kinder Morgan."  Actually Kinder Morgan is a massive pipeline/terminal corporation.  Tom's invested in San Francisco's Mission District and wouldn't you know Nancy Pelosi has pushed transit and infrastructure improvements to help.

The point is that if you are a liberal lady and you read The New York Times and listen to NPR it would be really hard for you to get the idea that fracking is safe, that Tom Steyer made lots of money building coal plants in Indonesia, that the 800-pound gorilla in the room on global warming is not Big Oil money but billions in government grants to go-along-to-get-along scientists.  Nice liberal ladies know nothing except top-down benevolent programs from credentialed experts and government bureaucracies advocated by social-justice non-profits.

The problem is that government is force.  All government programs are attempts to replace the velvet glove of voluntary cooperation with the mailed fist of force.  And force ain't pretty. When you look beneath the propaganda and the PR you get to see incompetence and corruption.  You can usually keep the lid on, especially if you have a mainstream media that believes that liberals and progressives have their hearts in the right place.

But eventually, the lid blows off.

Over the next two years we'll see a lot of lids blow off, and the nice liberal ladies are going to be confused and demoralized.  Nobody told them, you see; they had no idea.

Welcome to the world, liberal ladies.  We conservatives do not propose limited government because we are mean-spirited bigots.  We believe in limited government because all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Yeah, power even corrupts liberals.  We believe in limited government because we believe that force is very seldom needed in day-to-day human affairs, except in the defense against enemies foreign and domestic.

It's a shame, really.  In January 2017 the US will wake up with a Republican president and a Republican Congress, and liberal ladies will be asking each other how it could have happened.  After all, they will say to each other, nobody I know voted for the Republican.

It will have happened because nice liberal ladies believed what they were told, and didn't think to ask questions, didn't think to step outside their liberal bubbles so that they might accidentally encounter non-liberal reality.

But for the rest of us, the next two years will be a bracing experience.  Maybe we can actually hope for change.  Not just any old change, but change for the better.

But one thing is for sure.  It ain't gonna be easy.

Is It World War? Or Not?

With the turmoil in the Middle East, there are two possibilities.  Either this is the end of the world as we know it, or it is not.  Either the ISIS fighters will take over Iraq, or they won't.  Either it's the end of the Pax Americana or it isn't.  Either Islam is going to take over the world, or it isn't.

It's the difference between the Mongols, that spread westwards across the Asian steppe to the borders of Europe, and the Boxer Rebellion in China that was defeated by western forces at the turn of the 20th century.

The Boxer Rebellion was an anti-western movement in China that rose up in 1898.  Of course, they didn't call themselves "Boxers;" they called themselves the "Righteous and Harmonious Fists."  It was a movement of young men driven to desperation by the dominance of the western powers in China at the end of the 19th century.  The Boxers thought that they were invulnerable to western cannons and rifles.

Then there were the Ghost Shirt dancers of the North American plains, also in the late 19th century.  The dancers, driven to desperation by the western migration of the white man, thought that their shirts had magical properties that would protect the wearer from western bullets.

There are some -- I am thinking of chaps like David Goldman -- that interpret the upsurge in Muslim terrorism as a movement of desperation, similar to the Boxers and the Ghost Shirters.  On this view the suicide bombers and ISIS fighters are fighting a desperate rearguard action against western culture and dominance.

Of course, it also happens that backward but aggressive fighters overwhelm a more powerful empire that has gone soft.  The Mongols defeated the Chinese in the 13th century (admittedly during a time of troubles).  The British barbarians came to India in about 1700 and dominated that vast and populous subcontinent for the next two centuries.  The Germans rose up in Europe during the 19th century, lost two world wars, and still ended up dominating the continent. Anything can happen.

Everybody is worried about Vladimir Putin's Russia.  But Russia's economy runs on selling hydrocarbons.  Everybody is worried about the Middle East.  But without oil, the Middle East would be a poverty-stricken desert.  Everybody is worried about China, but China is about to enter a demographic death spiral, courtesy of the One Child policy.  Nobody is worried about India, but then they never are.

The point is that we don't have a clue what is going to happen.  We don't know if the US will descend into entitlement program chaos, or a war between the races or a war between the religions, or a war between the classes.

In all this chaos fear there is probably only one thing that Americans can agree upon.  President Obama is probably the worst president ever.

But he sure has succeeded in getting Americans' attention.  That might be the best thing ever.

Is There Blood in the Water?

Here we are coming off a weekend when Hillary Clinton criticized President Obama on foreign policy. The president's former Secretary of State said that "Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle." Oh yeah.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) criticized the president on harsh interrogation techniques at the CIA. She's "An institutionalist who has repeatedly sought to defend congressional power."  Oh yeah.

So now a few Democrats that want to establish centrist cred are joining those obstructive and mean-spirited wascally Wepublicans who have been cynically creating gridlock and opposing our Lightworker president for the last four years.

And there are faint, oh so faint, indications that the folks in the liberal media, the storied "Democratic operatives with bylines" are starting to stir.

What could be going on?

I will tell you what is going on.  The Democrats are looking around the next bend in the river and they are seeing and hearing a wave election that will deliver the U.S. Senate to the Republicans.

In other words, there is blood in the water, and when there is blood in the water the normally docile domestic sharks that can be disciplined by a sharp blow on the nose, according to sources in the US Special Forces, are starting to thrash into a feeding frenzy.

Yeah.  Where were they when it mattered, when lies were being told about Obamacare, stupid stuff was going down on climate change, when "soft power" was all the rage in foreign policy?

I'll tell you where they were.  They were going along to get along.  They were responding like little puppy-dogs when a White House aide started shouting at them on the phone when they made a teensy-weensy criticism of the president.

Hey, but let's not be angry.  Let's not be despondent.  It probably had to be this way.  The American people don't know nuttin' about economics, about politics, about limited government, about the best way to grow the economy.  And in normal times there really isn't any bandwidth for a conservative message to balance the lefty cheerleading from the Democratic operatives with bylines.  The facts and reality may be conservative, but politics and religion are all about an ideal and perfect world.  So people aren't going to listen to a conservative message until democracy has given them what they want, good and hard.

So now the Blessed Moment of Hope and Change is over.  Now President Obama has a 40% approval rating.  Now voters are angry, even to the extent of disliking their own congressman.  "Everything is terrible" and "for the first time in 25 years, [pollsters find] that a majority of people disapprove of the job their own Congress member is doing."

Golly.  How could that have happened?  It couldn't be a failure of the ruling class from Obama to dogcatcher, could it?

Because, as everybody knows, anyone that opposes President Obama must be a racist, sexist homophobe.  By definition.

Until there is blood in the water.

Let's Have a Right-on Production of Verdi's Aida

Yesterday I was driving south through Oregon to visit with my daughter and family at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.

Started by a high-school teacher in the 1930s the Shakespeare festival has become reliably liberal over the years, and why not: that's what its audience of 50-something liberal women wants.  So we've had a woman CEO as Julius Caesar and a succession of predictably liberal contemporary plays. Recently the festival developed an American Revolutions project.  But nobody ever submitted a play with a "conservative perspective."

As I drove south I started thinking.  First I thought about how beautiful this country is, how breathtakingly beautiful and how I love it.  Then I thought about Aida.

That's because I was listening to Aida on my smartphone.

And I thought: Imagine a super-trendy production of Aida!  No, it wouldn't be some predictable liberal thing with Aida as a man, or the Pharoah dressed up as the Koch Brothers.  No, this one would be Speaking Truth to Power, the only real power in America: liberal power.

Now the plot in Aida goes something like this: Young Radames is sent off to battle with the Ethiopians, and the Pharaoh's daughter Amneris is in love with him.  Unfortunately, Radames is in love with a pretty little Ethiopian slave Aida.  Wait!  From what I have seen of young East African women they are tall and stuningly beautiful.  Anyway, Amneris suspects something is going on and, when she finds out that the slave Aida is her rival, plots to deal with her rival.  Wouldn't you know it turns out that Aida is also the daughter of a king, the captured Amonasro, king of the Ethiopians, and when Amonasro sees his daughter he gets her to deliver intelligence on the Egyptian army from Radames.  Amneris gets wind of this so it's curtains for Aida and Radames.  Except for the fact that Amneris gets to execute the love of her life, and then she's sorry.

Here's my right-on version of Aida that is set up for telling truth to liberal power.  The Pharaoh is the President of Egypt University and the Chief Priest that sends everyone off to war is the Chief Diversity Officer.  Amneris, of course, is the Dean of Women's Studies and Radames is a young professor about to get tenure.  Aida is a young graduate student that's really a closet Christian, daughter of Amonasro, president of the awful Christian college across town.

Well, you can imagine what the feminist Amneris, Dean of Women's Studies, is going to do, especially with her power over graduate student Aida and with Radames' application up before the tenure committee.

Just saying.  But it's my conceit that the good folks at Ashland couldn't even conceive of a right-on adaptation like this, let alone actually dare to do it, let alone dare to "challenge" their audience of 50-year-old liberal women.

Why not?  Because the whole speaking truth to power was always bullshit.  It was not about speaking truth to power, it was about delegitimizing and marginalizing and "challenging" mainstream bourgeois culture and replacing it with liberal activist culture.  It was about smashing the patriarchy and destabilizing capitalism.  It was about reining in the culture of freedom and teaching people that they'd better bow to the liberal gods or they would never get tenure.

Oh well, it's good to have fantasies.  Imagine a world where Americans were allowed to make fun of their rulers.  Like, oh, back in the Bush era.

Now it's time to go have lunch with my daughter.  This evening we'll go to a production of The Tempest. 

Oh brave new world that has such people in it.

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.