Liberal Warns: The End is Near

Whenever liberals get into a mess and face the likelihood of losing you start to see articles that ask "Is Democracy Unraveling" by E.J. Dionne.

Translation: It's not democracy that's unraveling, E.J.; it's the just the latest liberal meltdown.

E.J.'s particular concern this week is the upcoming election in Britain. Problem is that the two major parties, Conservative and Labour, are expected to get only about 70 percent of the vote, thus empowering minor parties.

In Scotland, long a Labour stronghold, the pro-independence Scottish National Party could take as many as 50 of the region's 59 seats, which would block British Labour leader Ed Miliband from securing a majority. 

But the Conservatives have their own problems, with the UK Independence Party taking conservative votes away from them.

And don't get E.J. started on the fractures in the United States.

Fortunately, E.J. Dionne has found a book that explains what is happening.

The title of Princeton University historian Daniel T. Rodgers' revelatory 2011 book, "Age of Fracture," captured what's happening to us. In our era, he wrote, "Identities become fluid and elective," and if the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s were a time of political and social "consolidation," the dominant tendency now is toward "disaggregation."

No kidding! The nightmare of "disaggregation!" It couldn't be, could it, that the nation is falling apart because liberals have championed identity politics that encourages voters in the Democratic Party to think of themselves not as Americans that could contribute to America but as helpless victims that deserve unlimited free stuff, because injustice?

The last big time mehltdown in liberal morale was in the 1970s when their enthusiasm for social programs and wage-and-price controls led to "stagflation" and a sense that America was ungovernable.  The best days were over, liberals said, and we just had to get used to decline.

Now we are in a similar situation. Liberals have spent the last 15 years pushing foolishness on all fronts, starting with the bureaucratization of healthcare, the annihilation of homeownership with their "affordable housing" mania, the fantasy of green energy, the superregulation of business in Sarbanes-Oxley and finance in Dodd-Frank. And that leaves out the insanity of left-wing cultural madness in everything from gay marriage to "rape culture."

On top of that, of course, the great entitlement programs, from Social Security to Medicare to education to welfare encourage people to work less and demand more. And the programs are going broke.

You'd expect, after a century of this, that people would start to become pissed off. Everyone naturally feels justified in getting the entitlements to which they are entitled, but they are not at all sure about everyone else. In the blare of identity politics, people retreat into tribal identities and demand their rights.

You can call it the Age of Fracture or anything else you want. But the whole point of politics is to divide people. The whole point of the welfare state that liberals have championed is to hive people off into tribal silos where liberals can manipulate them with promises of free stuff on the one hand and outrage over "austerity" on the other.

Yep. We are getting exactly what liberals set us up for. The trouble is that liberals can't see far enough ahead to grasp the "unanticipated consequences" of their politics. They encourage division; they subsidize dependency, and then they are amazed when everything flies apart.

I have rather a simple mind, and so I like to simplify things so I can understand them. The point about government is that it turns everything into a war. Because government is force, and war is the application of force.

But most things is this world can't be resolved by a war. You can't educate children with a political war over Common Core. You can't get economic growth when you are blaming CEOs for everything. You can't get ordinary people into affordable homes of their own by flogging the mortgage market with subsidies. You can't get a flexible, adaptable, affordable health care system if you put the government in charge and start beating up on insurance companies and drug companies.

This shouldn't be rocket science, but for liberals, power comes before everything.

And so the people suffer.

Thirty years ago and more, liberals said that American was ungovernable. Then came a political leader that showed liberals how to govern. Now liberals say that Democracy is unraveling.

Let's show them how wrong they are.

There's Always a Need for Organization and Political Discipline

I don't know where Kevin D. Williamson came from but, as my grandfather used to say, I like the cut of his jib. Writing about the California drought crisis he opines:

The Left, with the prominent advocacy of President Barack Obama, has argued that the challenge of global warming necessitates a new form of economic organization under political discipline.

Golly! What an astonishing idea, that a ginned up crisis requires a ginned up political response. The thing is, of course, that "organization" and "discipline" are two words that suggest "army" and "war." And as I say, politics and government are always looking for a war. Republicans tend to favor wars on non-Americans, as in wars on Commies and Terror. Democrats prefer wars on domestic enemies, like robber barons and conservative Christians, wars on want and accusing Republicans of wars on women. But Williamson isn't finished.

Never mind, for the moment, that the Left has been arguing for a new form of economic organization under political discipline for more than a century (the crisis changes every generation, but the identical solution endures)[.]

Yeah, it really doesn't change. Politics wants power and power wants politics: Organization! Discipline! Obey the leader! The only saving grace about our liberal friends is that they all live under the charming illusion that they are all short-sighted librarians that would never hurt a fly and just want us all to work together. For the children.

Trouble is that they are wrong. About the need for organization and political discipline.

If there is one surprising thing about the modern era it is that we seem to have discovered that many things, particularly in the economic sphere, can best be done without "economic organization under political discipline." In fact, given the record of the modern era you might be excused for feeling that economic organization under political discipline is precisely the wrong way for social humans to get economic things done. The Soviet Union, Maoist China, and even Nehru's India come to mind.

But that doesn't seem to matter to many people. Because if you have an appetite for politics, you can also smell things that need organization from a mile away. Or if you can't smell anything you'll go out and find something, dammit, that needs organization and political discipline.

Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct:

Men like power and will seize it if they can. But if they cannot rule their next preference is that no one rule over them.

If there is one thing that liberals all believe it is that they are born to be the one benevolent and beneficent Oz to rule over us. If there is one other thing that liberals believe it is that no racist, sexist, homophobe conservative should ever rule over them.

If there is one thing about the current scene that disturbs me it is that our liberal friends don't seem to be that concerned about the possibility that one day, maybe as soon as January 20, 2017, an evil Republican president, evilly assisted by a evil Republican Congress full of gap-toothed fundamentalist Christians, will be in power, hell-bent on destroying every good thing that progressives have striven for over a century to bring to the American people.

I mean, are they dumb or something?

The answer, I fear, is: Yes they are. They talk to each other in their little liberal bubble and don't appreciate that there are millions of people out there who are fit to be tied by the ethos and the actions of the Obama liberals. Liberals really don't have a clue.

The amazing thing about the modern era is that government has never been so powerful. And yet it has never been so clear that limits on government are essential to promote human welfare. Never have humans come up with more ways to justify more government. Yet never has it been more obvious that we the people should say "stuff it" to 97% of today's political projectors and their wonderful plans for organization and political discipline.

OK, Wiki says that Kevin Williamson was born in Texas. I guess that explains a lot.

Hillary Clinton the Poster Girl for Income Inequality

The liberal Hive has been buzzing louder and louder in recent years about "income inequality," and I understand why. Things aren't going too well in the US, economically speaking, and the solution, for a liberal, is obviously more government spending on Democratic clients and more taxes on "the rich."

But that runs up against a little problem. The really big bucks in government spending go for programs for seniors: Social Security, Medicare, and a big chuck of Medicaid. And seniors aren't interested in redistribution. We already got ours and we aren't about to give anything away to politicians in Washington.

Then there is the little problem of Hillary Clinton. She has been out recently descanting on "income inequality" and talking about how she has always fought for everyday Americans. She's even suggesting "toppling" the rich and dealing with hedge fund moguls. What a pity that her daughter is married to a Goldman Sachs alum, Marc Mezvinsky, who runs a hedge fund with two Goldman Sachs pals. My pal tells me that up-and-coming Goldman Sachs chappies are encouraged to marry into politics.

Then there's all the influence peddling Hillary Clinton's done that's exposed in Peter Schweizer's Clinton Cash.

Really, this almost amounts to divine intervention. Who would expect that the 2016 designated hitter for the Dems would be tied hand and foot to eevil Wall Street and the hedgies? Apparently Chelsea Clinton is now worth $15 million and doesn't care about money.

Of course the whole business about "income inequality" misses the point.

The whole point of the modern era is that it's no longer about dividing up the pie, equally or unequally. Here's what actor Terry Crews said to Adam Carolla on the subject (H/T Derek Hunter).

Everybody says they’re trying to get their piece of the pie. They don’t understand that the world is a kitchen. You can make your own pie.

Just a minute, pal. It used to be that the pie was pretty fixed. Nobody knew how to make their own pie. You either had land or you didn't; if you had land then you had pie. If not, not. But in the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, people have been amazing the world with the most astonishing pies, starting with the textile revolution that invented cheap cotton clothes for the multitude. The chaps that baked that textile pie made a ton of money; but the real benefit was cheap cotton clothes for the millions.

Fast forward to Bill Gates. He made tens of billions from Microsoft creating software for personal computers; but the real benefit was cheap computers for the millions. Or Steve Jobs. He made billions from Apple, but the real benefit was cheap iPods for the tens of millions and iPhones for the hundreds of millions.

Bill Gates's billions don't take anything from my share of the pie. Bill Gates created a staggering new pie, a complete surprise. IBM thought they'd sell a few computers with Gates's software. They had no idea that they would take over the world. Ditto Jobs. He created that staggering pie, the smartphone, that is in the hands of billions of people worldwide.

But Hillary Clinton is different. The money she makes is influence money. People give money to her in the hope of a quid pro quo from the political power of the Clinton machine. Chelsea Clinton got a $600,000 job from NBC because NBC honchos wanted to be in good with the Clintons. In the Clinton business, nobody is making an incredible new pie that creates wealth for millions or even billions. What Hillary Clinton does when she collects $300,000 for a speech is collect tribute from a tributary power.

And the bottom line is this: If the Republican candidates for president can't make hay out of the Clinton influence machine and make a laughing stock of the Hillary Clinton then they ought to go into a different business.

If we are talking about redistributing the pie then the people with political power are going to be first in line.

The best hope for the non-powerful is for them or for someone else to invent a new pie. And then what they need is to keep the cotton-picking hands of the powerful off that pie for a while. Because when the powerful do get their hands on it, as in net neutrality, then it's Pie Nazi time: no more pie for you.

Women and Careers and Children and Overpopulation

One of the standard memes of the feminist movement is the marginalization of childbearing. Educated evolved women are so much better than barefoot and pregnant: they can have careers; they can be, as with Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, "independent women."

It is without doubt a wonderful thing in our age that well-born women have choices. They are not, as they used to be, mere chattels in some "household." They are not, as they used to be, mere partners in some bourgeois household. But then we get to this, in The Atlantic's review of a collection of essays, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision not to have Kids.

Not having children isn't selfish. Not having children is a perfectly rational and reasonable response given that humans are essentially parasites on the face of a perfectly lovely and well-balanced planet, ploughing through its natural resources, eradicating its endangered species, and ruining its most wonderful landscapes. This might sound misanthropic, and it is, but it is also true.

Well, yes. If you have decided that humans are parasites, etc., then who would want to have children?

But I contest the "rational and reasonable" line. All religious and ideological notions are really rationalizations of a world view. They are not science; they are attempts to understand the mystery and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. That is why in The Faith Instinct Nicholas Wade writes that no human society we know of has ever done without religion. I would include in the notion of "religion" our modern secular religions from rationalism to socialism to feminism to environmentalism.

That's where that stuff about "parasites on the face of a perfectly lovely and well-balanced planet" comes from. It comes from the adaptation of the Christian doctrine of sin and salvation for the purposes of the salvific secular religion of environmentalism. The "rational and reasonable" line comes after you have made the religious leap of faith into the need to save the planet from its evil human "parasites." And from that it's just a small step for woman to decide that having children is a terrible thing to do.

Look, I believe in freedom. I believe that people should be allowed to make mistakes without government stepping in with law enforcement officials and their court orders or SJWs stepping in with their naming and shaming.

But to me this notion of educated women being too good for bearing and raising children is self-serving rubbish. Quite simply, if you are not having children then you are voting you and yours off the planet. How smart and educated is that?

For sure, it may be that we humans are parasites. It may be that our activities may destroy some life on the planet. Maybe. What is almost certain is that, give a couple of million years or so, humans will go the way of all other species since time began: to extinction. That is what the theory of natural selection means.

Oh and by the way: the great extinctions in the past have not extinguished all life on the planet. Some life has always survived. When we talk about saving the planet we are really talking about saving it for ourselves.

Meanwhile we are left wondering about the meaning of life and the mystery of the universe.

But back to religion. One thing that is striking about religions, prior to the modern secular religions, was how pro-natal they were. Go forth and multiply; prohibition of homosexuality. What could be going on?

How about this. Any world view or religion that does not direct humans, male and female, towards procreation may not be long for this world. One thinks immediately about the Shakers. Fabuloso religion and all that. But the Shakers died out, because they preached celibacy. says Wiki:

Shakers were celibate; procreation was forbidden after they joined the society (except for women who were already pregnant at admission).

The result, of course, is that there aren't any Shakers around these days, not so you'd notice. The Mormons, on the other hand, are strongly pro-natal, and they are growing all around the world.

Could it be that all the non-natal religions that flourished down the ages are now, so to speak, extinct? And may that happen to liberalism, environmentalism, feminism, etc.?

Let me just close with the words of liberal Christian Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. He says you gotta have both. Not just breeding, not just noble thoughts, but both. Here is how I put it in An American Manifesto.

First, we recognize the importance of ordinary human flourishing: forming families, owning property, doing it for the children. Second, we recognize that we all search for something higher and fuller.

The problem with Ayn Rand's "virtue of selfishness" is that it misses out on the higher and fuller. The problem with what Rodney Stark calls "upper-class asceticism" is that it misses out on ordinary human flourishing. You gotta have both or you are not long for this world.

The feminists at The Atlantic think that the only thing that matters is the higher and fuller bit. It's higher and fuller, on their account, to rise above mere reproduction and have a career, or do something creative, or be an activist fighting for Anita Sarkeesian's "collective liberation for all women."

And as for overpopulation, the bane of the early 20th century eugenicists and right-on liberals ever since, there is this little problem. Right now in Russia, in China, in Europe, in Japan, women are having less than 2.1 children per lifetime. That is the road to social and cultural extinction, and I, for one, want none of it.

So don't say I didn't warn you.

Tie Clintons and Dems to the Rich, Writes Jay Cost

In the good old days, writes Jay Cost, the Democrats were for the little guy and the Republicans for the fat cats.

It used to be that the Republicans were the party of big business and Democrats the party of organized labor. The GOP charged that the Democrats were a bunch of socialists, and the Democrats responded that the GOP was a pack of plutocrats. But about 40 years ago, things started to change; labor began to decline, and new campaign finance laws allowed business to subsidize politics more thoroughly. In the 1980s, the Democrats responded by courting business energetically—yet they never ditched their claim that the GOP alone is elitist.

Nobody has done this better than the Clintons and their Clinton foundation which has hoovered up money from the rich and powerful all over the world. And yet Hillary Clinton has opened her campaign with the statement that

Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion.

 The trouble is that while Republicans have argued against Big Government, Democrats have defined that as arguing against Social Security, Medicare and help for the downtrodden.

Republicans have signally failed to define Big Government as the friend of the 1%.

But what about corporate tax payouts? Or farm subsidies for the largest agribusinesses? Or regulations that effectively subsidize big companies by crowding out competitors? These issues would put Democrats in a quandary, for they would force Democratic candidates to defend the big-government programs that favor not the poor or the middle class, but the social and economic elites who have purchased seats at their party’s table.

Jefferson and Jackson built the Democratic Party on the idea that "big government inevitably favors the most powerful interests in society." Ronald Reagan ran on the same premise.

Jay Cost proposes that Hillary Clinton is offering the presidency on a platter to a Republican Party that could define her has the handmaiden of the rich and powerful.

And really why not? Big business, from Gates and Buffett to the high tech Tim Scotts and Google guys are all in the pocket of the Democrats. What's not to like about a Republican Party that scorns Big Business and the Clintons as out of touch elitists -- and their little media dogs too?

Yeah! Why not?

Because the dirty little secret is that the big programs in Big Government are in fact programs for the middle class: Social Security and Medicare. See usgovernmentspending.com for details.

Sure, there are tons of corporate welfare programs sucking billions out of the government and the economy. But the real money is in middle-class entitlements. And nobody wants to do anything about them, except crazed Republicans like small-town guy Paul Ryan that want them reformed before they run out of money.

I mean, are Republicans dumb or something? Why would anyone try to reform the entitlements before they had actually bankrupted the country and shot grandma off a cliff?

Dems' Cringe-worthy Hunt for White Working-Class Votes

One of the staples of modern political life is the cringe-worthy attempt of some Republican politician to appeal to black and/or Hispanic voters. Republicans would like to appeal to blacks and Hispanics but they don't know where to start.

The other side of the coin is the cringe-worthy attempt by the Democratic Party to appeal to the white working class, particularly the male white working class. That's what What's the Matter with Kansas was all about. How could the white working class vote for the dastardly country-club Republicans when everybody knows that the folks that really care about the white working class live in the Democratic Party. Here's liberal loyalist Doyle McManus at the LA Times faithfully reporting on the latest Democratic efforts to recapture the white working class.

Democrats were once the party of the white working man — but that was a long time ago.

In the 2012 presidential election, Barack Obama won only one-third of the votes of white working-class men, a modern-day low. Mitt Romney, who didn't seem much like a blue-collar guy, swept the votes of those working stiffs by a huge margin.

And it got worse in 2014. Apparently, "some white noncollege voters have come to view Democrats as a party that cares about women and minorities more than it cares about them." No kidding!

So what's the solution. It's Hillary Clinton. No kidding!

Sainted Hillary is, first of all, doing the populist thing by railing at Wall Street. Says she: "And there's something wrong when hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates than nurses."

But that's not all. Saint Hillary is also calling for a cleanup in government. She "called last week for outlawing campaign spending by undisclosed donors, 'even if that takes a constitutional amendment.'"

That last sound bite, of course, is about the great white whale of Democratic concerns, the outrageous idea, approved by the US Supreme Court in Citizens United, that conservatives ought to be allowed to band together in corporations and fund videos critical of Hillary Clinton.

Good luck with all that, fellas.

But let us step back and think a little. How was it that the liberals and the Democrats, staunch protectors of the working stiff in the Great Depression, came to lose their support?

Was it a conspiracy? Mere stupidity? The evil Frankfurt School? Or what?

I think that the First Cause was civil rights. For liberals ever since the 1960s, the fight for black civil rights defines who they are. Bliss it was to live in that time when liberals held off the racist, sexist, homophobic bigots in the Republican Party and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In fact, of course, Republicans also voted for the civil rights acts. It was Southern Democrats that voted against them.

Unfortunately the civil rights revolution and the notion of equal opportunity was followed by Affirmative Action and de-facto quotas in government hiring. Nobody seemed to realize that the burden of this policy would fall not on evil Southern white bigots and the sons of slaveowners but on working class whites in the North: Irish and Italian ethnics that probably arrived in the US in the 19th century after the end of slavery.

But if you were a white working-class man you'd probably notice that it suddenly became much harder to get hired on at the local police or fire department. Because Affirmative Action.

These days it's even worse for the white working class because you need academic credentials to get a police or fire department job. Sons of white professionals are lining up for those lifer government jobs.

Then there was forced busing, a gentry liberal idea to bus children across town so that schools would be properly racially integrated. The Irish in South Boston took extreme exception to this notion.

Then there was Archie Bunker. When Norman Lear adapted the British series Till Death Do Us Part from London to Queens in New York City in 1971 he probably wasn't planning to make Archie Bunker a stereotype for white bigotry and racism. But he did. And he made it seem as though the white working class was responsible for all the racial sins of the world, and so he ended up loading all the sins of the eternal white racist ruling class upon a simple union worker on a loading dock in Queens.

By the end of the 1970s, every liberal knew to sneer at the white working class, and the die was cast.

But did the Dems have to demonize the white working class? Probably not, but that's the way it turned out. Perhaps it was inevitable. If you are going to concentrate on delivering benefits to women and minorities, then you probably find that you have to demonize the old beneficiaries of your political power, the white ethnic working class.

Will the Dems be able to recover in 2016 some of the ground lost in 50 years of advancing the interests of women and minorities? Probably. But if they pander to the white working class, won't that dilute their message to the other victims?

Steve Sailer likes to describe the Democratic Party as a Coalition of the Fringes. Their problem is that each Fringe in the coalition is competing for the loot with the other Fringes. You have to get them to focus on an external enemy, or they will start to fight among themselves. Will Wall Street, greedy bankers, and the horror of conservatives banding together to commit politics really get the goat of the white working class?

I wonder.

A Presidential Campaign is for the Young and Hungry

If there is one thing that's obvious about Hillary Clinton's campaign for President of the United States and her recent trip to Iowa it is that it is old and tired.

It makes you think of a long-established corporation, headed by a CEO that's worked his way up, marketing yet another product. Or maybe a long established TV network pushing out a new sitcom on "Linear TV" in a world going Netflix.

The point is that Hillary Clinton is the head of a political machine that's at least 20 years old. The machine is full of lifers jockeying for position and backbiting and gaming the system just like the employees in any corporate or government bureaucracy. It's Clinton's job to keep the machine going, and keep the benefits going for the lifers.

That's not the way that politics works. A political campaign is more like a revolutionary movement or a business startup. A charismatic leader gathers young and energetic people around him. They work insane hours and come up with amazing new ideas and manage to achieve the impossible. Suddenly it all catches fire and takes the world by storm.

Think Barack Obama and 2008 and all the talk about Data. His campaign pushed way out in front on using the internet and Big Data to tailor its message and reach more voters. But you hear now that the GOP has caught up and reckons that one of the reasons it won the the US Senate last fall was Data.

Of course there are all kinds of other problems with the Clinton campaign. One of them is that the Democratic agenda over the last decade had been bad for the ordinary unorganized middle class. The whole Democratic and liberal politics revolves around organizing people into interest groups and servicing them as clients of the political system. If you are not an established interest, like a corporation or an interest or an approved victim group, then you don't have a seat at the table.

The whole point of politics down the ages has been to organize people into a political army to fight for political power and then reward them with the spoils of victory. The whole point of capitalism in the last 500 years has been to limit that predatory approach to human cooperation and governance and encourage and reward people to serve their fellow humans outside the force-field of government and politics.

The question is: can anyone persuade a majority of the American people to abandon the apparent safety of clientage and entitlement for the uncertainty of freedom and responsible individualism?

Who knows?