Yes, But Suppose It's the Democrats in Trouble

Everyone who is anyone likes to pontificate about the divisions of the Republicans and their narrow demographics. Why, pretty soon only dead white males will be voting for Republicans!

Of course, that's silly ruling-class groupthink, and mind-numbed robots believing their own talking points. The truth is that the Republican Party is not the party of the rich: billionaires like Gates and Buffett and Cook make it perfectly clear that they are liberals. The Republican Party is not the party of the whites; it is simply the party of people that think of themselves as typical Americans, people that don't put a hyphen in front of their American identity, as in African- Jewish- Latino- Gay- Evolved-American. And that's leaving out the people that scorn the hyphen and think themselves as just, e.g., feminists.

Steve Sailer cunningly calls the Democratic Party the Coalition of the Fringes.

As long as Democrats keeps assuming that 2016 is of course Hillary’s Turn, both personally and as the Designated First Woman President, that kicks a lot of cans down the road for the Democrats in keeping their Coalition of the Fringes from turning to full circular firing squad mode on each other quite yet.

Now Richard Fernandez has weighed in. He quotes  Jamelle Boule of Slate who thinks that liberals need Hillary to win in 2016 and nail down the "gains" from the Obama years.

Hillary alone has a chance of winning and she must win in order to preserve the gains of the Obama era and second, only Hillary the figurehead can hold together a Democratic party seriously split by Obama’s shift to the Left.

Then, Fernandez reminds us, there are the pardons that will be needed, and Hillary is probably the only candidate that can bring the Jews back to the fold.

She must function like a monarch, a unifying figurehead who will keep all the Big Tent’s identity groups from ripping each other’s guts out over the last remaining piles of other people’s money.

Hello Chicago where the money has already run out; they just haven't hit the wall yet.

In my view it is better to think of the Democrat coalition as the Coalition of the Demented. Here we are, after two hundred years of Deirdre McCloskey's "Great Enrichment" founded on capitalism, limited government, and responsible individualism, and every group in the Coalition of the Demented insists that the whole thing has been a great mistake, or at least desperately flawed and needing radical change.

Ruling-class liberals say that it will all go to ruin unless they are there on the ramparts holding out against the barbarian Robber Barons. Feminists say that we need to defeat the patriarchy and liberate women from marriage and children or we will all go to ruin. Workers say that we need to hog-tie employers or we will all go to ruin. Minority race-baiters say we must privilege minorities or we will all go to ruin. Environmentalists say we must stop using fossil fuels or we will all go to ruin.

How is it possible that these demented souls are not laughed out of court? And how come that Hispanics and blacks don't get that environmentalism is taking money directly out of their pockets in high electricity rates and fewer jobs? How long before they get that the anti-natalism of the feminists goes against everything they instinctively feel about family?

The answer is: not until they stop thinking of themselves as hyphenated Americans and start thinking of themselves as typical Americans. Obviously our liberal friends will fight hand-to-hand to keep all these people on the fringes, experiencing themselves as victims and Fringe-Americans.

Here's the thing. We conservatives and Republicans have got to get our story out. That this Great Enrichment is the most amazing miracle ever. That capitalism is the best thing since sliced bread. That the responsible individual of the modern era is an astonishing person that has pacified the world. That big government is a rolling disaster that screws up everything. That government is a temptation for bullies to bully. And so on.

My point is this. How in the world have we got to a point where the people that deny the marvel of the Great Enrichment are the dominant influence on the culture? How could they ever have persuaded us?

Never mind. Let us not think about what has gone wrong. Let us think of what to do next.

It is our job and our destiny to push back against the madness of the Coalition of the Demented and persuade good people to accept what is right in front of their eyes: that this world is a wonderful world, and we should do all we can to preserve its wonders and stop wrecking it.

Like I keep saying: Obama and his left turn are the biggest gift to typical Americans that believe in responsible individualism. Because Americans have, right in front of their eyes, that liberalism doesn't work, and that liberals don't care about people like them.

Hiding from the Truth on: Government is Force

If you haven't got that I have a real thing about "Government is force" then now is the time to get it.

Many liberals don't get it, and I understand why. If you read The New York Times and listen to NPR you'd easily get the impression that government is a matter of nice librarians trying to help our kids.

Ruling classes tend to do this sort of thing. They don't like to look at the dirtier side of political power, and they don't want you to do that either. They'd rather concentrate on telling you about the wonderful things their kindly librarians are doing for the people.

Now comes a delicious article from Robert Tracinski at The Federalist: "The Party of Coercion Doesn't Understand It." Says he:

[Y]ou would think they would have highly developed thoughts about what a law is and how laws are actually enforced.

But you would be wrong.

Sally Kohn recently argued, bizarrely [at Talking Points Memo], that law as such is not coercive.

But, of course, it serves the liberal purpose not to think too deeply about the subject. If they ever thought about how government is force and law is coercive they would find it more difficult to justify new government programs and coercions.

I'm slowly reading Jürgen Habermas' Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy at the gym. And he has the same problem as Sally Kohn.

Habermas developed a beautiful idea in The Theory of Communicative Action that, in a world of big business and big government with their dominatory systems, we need a place free of domination where people can communicate by exchanging truth values with sincerity and free of the threat of force.

But when he starts to write about his discourse ethic in the context of law and democracy he seems to forget that law and democratic politics are about coercion and domination. He talks, on page 314, about the long struggle to bring issues such as "the question of spousal abuse or the question of day-care facilities for the children of working parents" to public notice and then finally "worked into legislative proposals and binding decisions."

In fact, such issues are never discussed according to Habermas' ideas about discourse ethics.  Great public issues are always promoted as monstrous public scandals and injustices. The opposition is always treated as beneath contempt. And, of course, the "binding decision" is a majority vote that always involves log-rolling as explained in Buchanan and Tullock's The Calculus of Consent where the majority is created by buying the votes of the legislators on the fence, and then rolls over the minority and forces the majority decision on the minority.

Suits at law also have the color of coercion. You go to law when you feel you have been damaged by another person, and you are trying to persuade the government's law courts to agree with you and force your opponent to compensate you for the tort you believe he has committed.

After criticizing liberal cluelessness on coercion for a few hundred words, Robert Tracinski comes to this:

This is precisely why we need a principle that helps us figure out what really is coercion, who is the aggressor and who isn’t, and when force is permitted to protect us against an aggressor. If only there were some principle to determine when government force is legitimate and when it is not, a principle long recognized in common law and extensively examined by political philosophers. If only someone were to write this down in a document. Something like, “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”

Liberals don't want to do this, because pretty obviously it would go against them. Does the government have the right to force you to send your kid to school? Does it have the right to harass you if you let your kid play in the park unsupervised? Does the government have the right to force everyone to pay for day-care for working parents?

When you look at political issues in that way it puts a different color on them. And liberals would rather not have any non-liberal view of political issues freely and openly discussed in America. 

Ted Cruz's Talking Points at the NRA Convention

If you are running for president there are two sides to the campaign. There is detailed development of granular policy analysts and policies. Then there is the sound-bite campaign, the carefully prepared talking points, the tape that the candidate rolls when he's asked a question.

So here's Ted Cruz, delighted to be at the NRA Convention in Nashville, TN, answering questions from a friendly reporter, PJTV's Amber Smith. Of course, he's inspired by the energy and the passion of the people at the NRA Convention, and millions of Americans across the country.

We've gotta get back to the commonsense principles the country was built on, the free market principles and constitutional liberties that made America great...

Here's what Cruz has to say to a softball question about "trust."

At the end of the day trust comes from two things: Do you tell the truth and do you do what you say you're gonna do?

Then he lays out his three point program:

1. Bring back jobs, growth, opportunity.
2. Defend constitutional liberties.
3. Restore American leadership in the world.

Here's how he actually laid it out.

I think the central challenge in this next election is to reignite the promise of America, turn that around, and I think there are three broad principles that, if we follow, will do exactly that: #1 we gotta bring back jobs and growth and opportunity, get back to small businesses growing, robust opp[ortunities], so that young people, when they come out of school, aren't up to their eyeballs in debt, scared if they're gonna get a job, worried if they'll be a barista at Starbucks, and not gaining skills for their career. We gotta get back to where young people come out of school and they got three, four, five job opportunities. And the way you do that is tax reform and regulatory reform. I'm running on a simple flat tax, so that every American can fill out his or her taxes on a postcard, and we can abolish the IRS. And regulatory reform: getting the federal regulators off the back of small businesses. The most important regulatory reform? We need to repeal every word of Obamacare. 

That's step #1. Step #2 is defending our constitutional liberties which the federal government has been assaulting in an unprecedented manner.

And then step #3 is we need to restore America's leadership in the world. Get back to [an] America where our friends trust us and our enemies fear us.

 Interesting. He seems to be pitching to small business moms and dads that are worried about their businesses, the regulatory nightmare, the strangulation of Obamacare, and the future of their college-bound children. Really, he's not even beginning to make a pitch for the great unwashed middle. Not yet.

And that makes sense, because at this stage of the campaign you are looking to hook up with voters that are fit to be tied by the Obama years.

And yet somewhere in the campaign are the policy guys that are working up the granular details of a future Cruz administration. What are they going to do about the financial system and the financial repression since the Crash of 2008? What are they going to do about labor law and the out of control NLRB? What about the FCC and internet regulation? What about the FEC and election regulation? What are they going to do about the environment and climate change and what are they going to do about the use of the federal government to steam-roller the social justice agenda of the left-liberal feminist and gay groups? What about immigration, and restoring the rule of law in the treatment of illegal immigrants. What about race relations? Do they have the balls to roll back the racist "diversity" agenda? To be continued...

In the days to come we'll take a look at the talking points of the other Republican candidates.

Liberals Know They're in a Box Canyon

I got directed over to a New York Times editorial "A New Phase in Anti-Obama Attacks" yesterday. It blamed the Republicans for everything. And the commenters agreed.

What's not to like? If I were a liberal who'd climbed aboard the Obama Airtours excursion back in 2008, I'd be getting cranky too. I'd be looking at the canyon walls and wondering how the plane was going to be able to turn and get out of the narrowing canyon. I'd be blaming the Republicans for forcing the Airtours plane into that box canyon. Because it couldn't be my fault for believing all that hope and change rubbish.

Now here comes Salon into the conversation. Salon, in the person of Clintonite Bill Curry in "Hillary Clinton just doesn't get it...," is underwhelmed by Hillary Clinton's campaign. Here's the money quote:

Like Bill Clinton’s 1992 race, this election is about the economy. But this one’s about how to reform the economy, not just jumpstart it. Our political system isn’t set up to debate whether or not our economic system needs real reform. It will take a very different kind of politics, and leader, to spark that debate. 

This just shows the limitation of liberal politics and what a mess the Democrats have got themselves (and us) into.

The problem is that, for Democrats ever since whenever, "reform" has always meant giving more free stuff to their voters. That's what Obamacare is all about: Subsidies for Democratic voters squeezed out of the hide of that voter over there behind the tree.

Democrat-led "reform" isn't so much reforming as recasting, in concrete. Instead of a flexible, adaptable non-system of working people saving for their retirement, we have a rigid government-enforced Social Security system that takes 12 percent of wage income right out of the pockets of wage earners and gives it to politicians. What could go wrong? Instead of a flexible education non-system we have a rigid system of child incarceration and lifer educrats with $1 trillion a year spent by politicians.

The real meaning of reform is to break up the structures of privilege, discredit the dogs-in-a-manger defending their lifetime sinecures, and get everyone to earn a living by offering their labor and ideas to the world without the government getting in the middle and screwing things up. For that job the Democratic Party and everything it stands for is peculiarly unfit for purpose.

The way that Democrats have conducted their politics over the past century has been based on the assumption that "we" know what to do: Education for children to make them ready for the industrial workforce; Social protections for workers from the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism; Pensions for ageing workers; Health care so nobody dies because they can't afford a doctor.

Yes. But what do we do now, when Social Security and Medicare have promised trillions in dollars of benefits more than the taxes to pay for them? What to do about the marginal workers that have been bounced out of the post-crash economy? What to do about the broken families in the inner city?

Democrats are proposing mindless retread policies: like raising the minimum wage; Universal pre-school; Free community college. All familiar administrative state solutions.

But what if the solution is to switch to a non-governmental approach: returning to apprenticeships and on-the-job training? Freeing children from the schools and putting them to work in offices at computers? Reducing the weight of payroll taxes on working people? Putting Fidelity and Vanguard in charge of retirement instead of the Social Security Administration?

What New York Times commenter could ever imagine such a demolition of everything she holds dear?

Let's imagine that high up there in the councils of the meritocracy there are people thinking thoughts like that? How could any Democratic politician listen to them? Because the first and most obvious result of a restructuring of the liberal welfare state would be less jobs for elite liberals.

So it stands to reason that only a party without support from the elite bureaucracies could ever dare to "reform the economy."

The reason that "Our political system isn’t set up to debate whether or not our economic system needs real reform" is that Democrats shout down anyone that tries. So it's bootless to talk about a "different kind of politics, and leader, to spark that debate" when it is the Democrats that have been preventing the debate from starting, let along "sparking," from at least the time that Democrats decided to anathematize Reagan's supply-side economic policies as "Reaganomics" and "trickle-down economics."

The only solution to our problem is for Democrats to get trounced in 2016 by the first landslide election since Reagan, and face in addition the first solid Republican President & Congress since the 1920s. And again in 2020. Then they'll be ready by 2024 to put forward a new Clinton talking about another "Third Way" or "New Democrats" whatever they call it then.

But you'll remember that the Third Way was a deceit. As soon as he got into the White House Clinton raised taxes and proposed HillaryCare. And the voters elected the first Republican Congress since right after World War II.

How Do You Tell Voters That Everything They Know is Wrong?

Donald Lambro is out complaining that, while Gallup tells us that while their polls show that Americans are overwhelmingly concerned about the "economy and jobs," the Republican candidates are merely descanting on abstract principles.

Talking about "liberty," "freedom" and the Constitution are fine and deserve their rightful place in the conversation about where are country is headed. But it doesn't address the bread-and-butter issues that Americans are worrying most about.

Yay! And all that. But there's a problem. Most Americans, while they want more jobs and a better economy, don't want the means that science tells us will achieve that end.

Most Americans and Democrats think it is a good idea to raise the minimum wage. Science and Republicans say that minimum wages shut young, inexperienced, minority workers out of the job market. So what candidate is going to school the American people on that?

Most Americans and Democrats blame "greedy bankers" and Wall Street for the Crash of 2008. Science and Republicans say that it was the government policy that funneled mortgages to people that couldn't afford them. So who is going to buck the mainstream media and set the American people right on that?

Let's look at the lousy Obama jobs record. Mike Shedlock writes that if you want to drive people out of the work force here's what you'd do.

1. Raise the minimum wage.
2. Hand out lots of welfare benefits.
3. Look the other way on disability fraud.

So who will be the first to call for lowering the minimum wage, cutting welfare, and cracking down on disability fraud? Democrats and a lot of the American people say that we need to be compassionate to the marginalized. So who will bell the cat on this?

The fact is that political candidates cannot reeducate the American people. Rule One in politics is that you cannot tell the American people they are wrong on anything. If you wonder why politicians never answer a question straight, that is the reason. Voters will punish you for questioning their beliefs.

The problem for the candidates running for the Republican nomination for president in 2016 is that they really cannot go into detail much beyond "time for a change" and "let's get this country moving." Once you get into specifics then many voters will start to realize that their ox is getting gored. That was the problem that Mitt Romney faced with his "47 percent" moment. How do you reform the welfare state when 47 percent of the voters are already getting checks from the government?

Then there's the media problem. The "Democratic operatives with bylines" tend to "white knight" the Democrats' proposals. They don't ask how the Democrat can possibly promise to expand health insurance coverage to the uninsured while still lowering average premiums. But when Republicans are running, the media fight each other to see who can ask the toughest questions. We saw this earlier this week when Rand Paul got into trouble when he pushed back at reporterette Savannah Guthrie on NBC's venerable Today Show. Guthrie was all worried about his flip-flops on the issues. Already!

Yeah, like when has any mainstream media personality like asked President Obama about his flip-flops. Whatever.

There's another, even bigger problem. It comes out of my line that every government is an armed minority that remains in power by offering loot to its supporters. This is what the Democrats do, every day in every way. All the great government programs are some form of loot, from Social Security to Medicare, to "free" education to welfare. And don't forget subsidies for crony capitalists.

The average Republican voter doesn't want much in the way of loot. He or she just wants to be left alone to go to work, follow the rules, and obey the law. How can you get elected when you aren't offering much in the way of loot? Oh, by the way. Don't even think of touching the average Republican voter's Social Security benefits.

Rather than sneer at the Republican candidates for their rhetoric about liberty and the constitution, we should appreciate just how hard it is to do politics that wants to get government out of our lives.

We should instead look for an opportunity to cheer when our politicians, against all the odds, find a way to make liberty and the constitution appealing to ordinary folks, and actually take a step or two, for a moment, against the hurricane of liberal shibboleths.

Voting Yourself Off the Planet

My mother always used to worry about "overpopulation." Still, she had two children that each had two children. And I'm afraid that towards the end of her life I used to tease her a little about the birth dearth in Europe.

But why torment her? She picked up the zeitgeist of her youth, which was heavily into eugenics and the problem of the "unfit." Darwin, Spencer, Margaret Sanger and all. My mother was human; she believed what others believed.

But I have come to wonder about the population-control folks. What are they thinking? Don't they realize that, when they decide not to breed, they are voting themselves off the planet? Poster boy #1 is China, with their mad Mao-inspired One Child policy that only now is getting quietly shelved too late to prevent a massive collapse in China's population.

Now, according to James Lileks, there's a fashionable Manhattan trend celebrating childlessness. OK, there's a fashionable New York Times boomlet with a ton of articles and books celebrating childlessness. Here's a quote from Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids.

According to the NYT review, it “concludes with Tim Kreider’s rousing defense of the child-free as ‘an experiment unprecedented in human history . . . A kind of existential vanguard, forced by our own choices to face the naked question of existence with fewer illusions, or at least fewer consolations, than the rest of humanity, forced to prove ourselves anew every day that extinction does not negate meaning.’”

Here's an idea, Tim old boy. Extinction does negate meaning.

The guy I like on this is "Spengler," David Goldman. Here he is defending his book How Civilizations Die from the liberals at Ha'aretz.

Iran has an apocalyptic regime with a great deal to be apocalyptic about. As I have argued in these pages since 2005, no poor country in the entire troubled history of the world has seen its fertility rate plunge from 7 children per female just one generation ago to only 1.6 children per female today. There is no explanation for mass rejection of a nation’s demographic future except for deep cultural pessimism... Its unsuccessful engagement with modernity has left a childless country plagued by social pathologies, including some of the world’s highest rates of opium addiction, venereal disease, and prostitution.

 OK. Let's do a jump from here to gay marriage. As everyone knows, the traditional Axial Age religions all take a rather firm line on homosexuality. You could say that they are homophobic in the strict sense of being afraid of homosexuality. It's interesting to wonder why.

My take is that religion is the social lubricant that keeps the human project from seizing up. It is not just about scaring people straight with the threat of divine punishment. I think that the Axial Age religions are anti-gay because any religion that supports (or even celebrates gayness, as modern secular religious liberals do) is not long for this world. Because pretty soon there won't be any people in this world.

Every society must celebrate work, marriage, children, raising the next generation, and it needs to channel not just the economic incentives but the zeitgeist towards the pro-work, pro-natal culture. Otherwise people are going to decide that work is just too hard; they would rather follow their bliss. They will decide that marriage is too much of a risk and just tag along with the odd "relationship." They will agree with some of James Lileks' commenters:

Given the direction the world, especially America, is clearly takng, why would you have any children? Who is more selfish, vain or entirely oblivious: those who consign their offspring to less prosperous, less free futures, or those who eschew the blessings of replicating themselves?

 Of course that is why religions are also into hope, big time. They need to stop that sort of attitude right now.

Childlessness is a bit like fat. A century ago the rich were fat and the poor were thin. Now the opposite is true.

Two centuries ago, childlessness was the fate of the poor. If you were a poor woman without a dowry nobody would marry you and if you were a man without land, ditto. The rich had all the children, because they could afford it, and their abundant children crowded out the middling and the poor. But ever since the Industrial Revolution the poor have mostly been able to afford children, and those children have mostly survived. And so the rich, darling, have decided to be different.

Think about it: if you've inherited enough to support yourself as a writer or an artist, why wouldn't you stay single and develop your creativity rather than get down and dirty by creating children and putting your inheritance at risk?

Rodney Stark calls this "upper class asceticism," and he says it started with Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, who dumped his wife and kids for the spiritual life.

None of this is rocket science. If you like your civilization, you can keep your civilization. But first you must have children.

Why Nobody is Getting Fired over UVA Rape Hoax

Now that the official word from the Columbia Journalism School has been handed down on the UVA Rape Hoax, the Rolling Stone article on the rape of "Jackie" by seven frat boys at the University of Virginia, the world wonders: why is nobody getting fired?

Why is the writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, still writing for Rolling Stone? Why does UVA President Teresa Sullivan still have a job? Why is "Jackie" not in the coils of the law?

The New York Times takes a philosophical view of the whole matter. It quotes Rolling Stone  managing editor Will Dana:

Mr. Dana said that the report was punishment enough for those involved, and that they did not deserve to lose their jobs because the article “was not the result of patterns in the work of these people.”

So that's all right. Nothing to see here.

Jonah Goldberg ain't too happy either. This is not just about a rogue journalist and fabulist, he writes, like the good old days of Stephen Glass at The New Republic and Janet Cooke at the Washington Post. Everyone at Rolling Stone was in on it. But he knows why the liberals can't quite get it together and punish the wrongdoers. It's because they don't think anyone really did anything wrong.

Why? Because in their hearts they’re sure they were right, and that’s all that matters.

The narrative is right, and that's all that matters. There is a problem with sexual harassment on campus, and liberals need to teach America about it and cure the sick racist sexist homophobic culture that condones it.

But Ben Shapiro takes the notion of the all-important "narrative" to a new insight. He reckons that it's actually beneficial for the "narrative" when activists use a lie to advance it. The point is that a "narrative can only be forwarded if there is controversy over the facts." If "everyone agreed that Jackie had been gang raped" then no controversy. We send the guilty off to jail. End of Story.

But the leftist narrative requires an opposition, a group of evil haters who take rape less than seriously...

So the left specifically chooses to feature situations in which facts are under dispute. Then leftists claim that no one could reasonably dispute the facts; the only people who would dispute facts about the occurrence of an evil are those who sympathize with the evil.

On this view the tendentious claim, from a survey of two colleges that one in five women experience harassment during their time is college, is much better than the official Department of Justice numbers that the rate is more like 0.03 in five. Then you can claim that anyone opposing your narrative is a potential rapist, and not taking the issue seriously.

Hello climate change, where the skeptics of catastrophic global warming are associated with Holocaust "deniers."

You can see that this strategy goes all the way back to Marx and his argument about the bourgeoisie and the working class. Having waved his hands and declared that the working class was being grievously exploited by the capitalists, then any objector to his program could be dismissed as merely the bribed apologist of the bourgeoisie.

The truth is that after 170 years of this, we responsible individuals of the middle class still haven't come up with a way to neutralize it.

And that is the real scandal.