When Identity Politics Stops Being Fun and Games

On Thursday, May 7, the Brits go to the polls and it looks like nearly all the Scottish seats in the Westminster Parliament will go to the Scottish National Party.

That means that the 5 million Scots will almost certainly negotiate independence from Britain and go it alone.

How did this happen? How could Scotland decide that it would do better outside the United Kingdom after 400 years of union?

There is one simple answer. This is the fruits of the left's identity politics. It started with the class politics of the 19th century, and now it's about every kind of division that can be exploited by politicians.

It's one thing to do the class warfare thing, workers against the capitalists, but it's a bit different when you start encouraging any minority to present its grievances on the street or the ballot box. Where does it stop?

The problem is that humans naturally identify more strongly with local and blood ties. The nation state, a people joined together by language that appears to us to be the most natural thing in the world, is in fact a highly artificial construct. Humans are not naturally national; they are tribal. And tribes is what the left has encouraged ever since the Frankfurt School decided in the aftermath of World War I that pure class politics wasn't as powerful as tribal politics.

It all looked so cool back then. The world was full of marginalized peoples, and the left would advocate for them, for the fringes against the center.

There was one little problem with the idea. The left assumed that these fringes would always be conformable to leftist leadership. The left would encourage separatism and particularism, but when the evil right wing had been vanquished then the fringes would all unite under the avuncular wisdom of their left-wing leaders.

Only this week the Labour Party in Britain is finding out that the fringes might not coalesce under their size leadership. They might just decide to go it alone. Because tribalism. The Scots are still receptive to left-wing leadership. But they prefer a home-grown Scottish lefty leadership to the British kind. Who could have seen that coming?

Try Godwin's Law, and the H word. That chap had it figured out almost a century ago.

There's a reason why I keep hammering on the idea that "politics is division." It's true. The art of the politician is to divide the electorate so that 51 percent votes for him. But that's not the end of the matter.

The art of the statesman is to realize that after the divisiveness of the election campaign he must re-unite the nation. In the election, he will say, we are Democrats and Republicans. But after the election we are all Americans. You must be careful with the politics and the division. You never know where it may end up.

But then there is President Obama.

President Obama has operated in the opposite direction. He started out talking about unity and ended up the most divisive president in modern times. In 2004 and even in the election campaign of 2008 he was all about unity. Said he in 2004:

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.

Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.

Pretty cool! But now it's all about "Bucket" and rolling over the opposition with executive orders and regulatory harassment, and ginning up riots in black urban ghettos.

Doesn't the president realize what he is doing with this divisiveness?

My guess is that he doesn't. Any more than the Brit Labour Party leaders realized what they were doing when they gave Scotland its own legislative assembly.

People believe what they believe. They think that their beliefs are the best beliefs going. They think they are on the side of the angels. Everyone is like that.

So nobody sees the downside; nobody sees the cracks forming in the ground; nobody feels the first tremors of an earthquake.

Then all of a sudden it's too late.

Corporal Al Sharpton, File-closer for the Regiment of Race

Those of you that have indulged in, e.g., the Napoleonic War era Richard Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwell will know about file closers.

Armies of the era used to advance across the battlefield in line rather than in column. But of course as they advanced they would suffer casualties, individual soldiers that fell and left a gap in the line. The job of the file closer was to beat soldiers in the second rank of the line into the first rank, and thus "close" the file.

The necessity of keeping a solid line in battle goes all the way back to the ancient Greek hoplite soldiers, and forms the foundation of male honor, that you don't run away from your brother soldiers in line.

The way I understand the current spate of publicized police shootings is that the Democratic colonels are desperate to keep their rank and file in line. Democrats are getting hammered in congressional and state elections, and they must, they absolutely must keep their loyal base, especially the African American base, in line.

That's the job of file closers like Cpl. Al Sharpton, to help the colonels to keep the troops from breaking rank and creating a rout.

Because if the African Americans don't vote 90 percent for Democrats in 2016, or stay home because they are demoralized after the promise of the First Black President evaporated into despair, then the Democrats are toast.

But what about the unanticipated consequences of this race politics? What might middle-class blacks be thinking when three out of the six Baltimore police officers indicted last week are black, and one is a woman? What might other Democratic supporters think: Hispanics, Asians, single white women?

That's why I think that Democrats, despite their public confidence, are actually panicking. They are looking at the numbers on their polls and they don't like what they are seeing. They are trying to amp up the rage because without it they cannot get their supporters to the polls in 2016.

But the problem is that you can't keep people angried up for ever. That's the lesson that Crane Brinton draws from the aftermath of various revolutionary reigns of terror in his The Anatomy of Revolution. The reign of terror and virtue when everyone is mobilized against the national or class enemy breaks down after a while, in exhaustion. People can't work forever as machines; they need rest, recreation, laughter. They even need to misbehave. So eventually you get the "Thermidorean reaction," named after the month in which Robespierre was guillotined and France started returning to normal after the Reign of Terror.

In our democratic culture we formalize this process. The supporters of the "out" party -- Democrats in 2006-08 -- get pissed off at the corruption and stupidity of the "in" party; they eagerly embrace the candidate that offers Hope and Change, and surge out to the polls to turn the rascals out in a frenzy of righteous enthusiasm.

But now we are at the other pole of the process. Supporters of the Republicans are getting totally pissed off by the corruption and the illegality of the Obama administration and the intolerant arrogance of its social justice warrior supporters. They scan the horizon for candidates that offer them a feeling of hope and a chance to be proud of America again, someone who will get the economy moving again, stop the illegal executive orders and harassment of conservative groups, and stick it in the eye of the juvenile social justice warriors.

Meanwhile the Democrats have Cpl. Sharpton out trying to keep the wavering troops in line, and they are desperately trying to keep the race card going by saying that calling rioters "thugs" is as racist as calling blacks by the N-word.

But what happens if it doesn't work? What happens if Cpl. Sharpton can't keep the troops in line and/or the race-baiting turns the rest of America off?

That is simple. It would mean that instead of suffering a modest defeat in 2016, as you would expect after a two-term presidency, the Democrats will get clobbered, and we'll get the first landslide election since Ronald Reagan in 1984. (Bill Clinton in 1996 doesn't hit the 10% rule: he beat Bob Dole 49.2% to 40.7% in the popular vote.)

Stay tuned. More exciting coverage after these messages.

You Won't Believe How I Lowered my WSJ Digital Subscription!

Way back in the Dark Ages, in spring 2010, my Wall Street Journal digital subscription was $140 per year. But that was a mere two years after Rupert Murdoch had bought Dow Jones, the Journal's corporate owners, from the Bancroft family. Then the rate started going up.

In spring 2011 I paid $207 for a year's digital WSJ. Yikes!

In 2012, the Journal switched me to a monthly subscription, which I hated, at $17.29 per month, or $207 per year.

Then the billing boys went into a swoon and stopped charging me for months. I finally sent a letter to their back office in Chicopee, Massachusetts, begging them to bill me, and got a very nice email back from a Victoria Chin, who was trying to untangle back-office mess.

I completely agree that our technology needs work. This year, we began a migration of our customers from an old legacy database and fulfillment system to a brand new, more robust system. In the process, there was an error with your account that resulted in your credit card not being charged and the site being locked. 

I shoulda stayed in bed. When the Journal got its act together in November 2012 the monthly payment had gone up to $21.62 a month. That's $259 per year. Writing letters can cost you!

In September 2013 the rate went up to $22.99 a month. That's $276 per year.

In 2014 the rate went up to $24.99 a month. That's $300 per year. Whoa there, Rupert baby. You've just doubled my Journal subscription in four years!

But then, yesterday, I got an email from the Journal asking me to update my credit card information. It turned out to be an error, but it reminded me that my credit card information was out of date. I got online but couldn't get onto the payment information page. So I thought: Bucket, just like President Obama, and called up the 800 number to cancel my subscription.

But then, unlike the president, I cooled off a little, and decided that I'd continue if the Journal would crawl on their knees and cut my subscription rate.

And it turned out they would! So now I'm signed up for $14.50 per month, a manageable $174 per year.

Yay! But no doubt the rate will go back up, because I suspect that the $14.50 rate is a special limited-time offer available only to disgruntled old geezers and members of the Murdoch family.

And then we'll see.

Look, I love The Wall Street Journal, and got my start as a twenty-something in the 1970s, reading for the first time about Hayek and Mises, learning for the first time about Austrian economics and roads to serfdom.

In the late 1970s the edit page under Bob Bartley was the place to be. You got chaps like Irving Kristol on the Board of Contributors and you got Bob Bartley's wild young men like Jude Wanniski, and the famous meeting at Michael 1 restaurant in New York City where Bartley and Wanniski met with Art Laffer and Bob Mundell to cook up the Laffer Curve. What fun! Bartley stayed on as edit page editor until 2002, and then died of cancer in late 2003 at age 66.

Since the death of Bob Bartley the Journal edit page has been led by Paul Gigot. Paul's a great guy, but you don't get the excitement of the old Bob Bartley days. I wonder if that's because Paul Gigot spends a lot of time on TV. You just can't be changing the world on the edit page and presiding as a talking head on PBS at the same time. And where are the consummate intellectuals like Kristol? Where are the wild men like Wanniski?

Maybe that's the way it's supposed to be. Maybe what we have instead, with a whole universe of conservative thought sparking away, is progress.

And really, you couldn't hope for a better political setup than right now.

First, you have a Democratic president that has utterly failed to deliver on the promise of ending the race problem and the partisan divide. And he's failed to fix the economy.

Second, you have no less than three top-notch young GOP presidential candidates -- Walker, Cruz, and Rubio -- vying for the crown dropped nearly 30 years ago by the sainted Reagan.

Meanwhile, I'm still a subscriber of the Wall Street Journal. Until the next time they treat me like a rack-rented Irish peasant in a Trollope novel.

Then I'll show 'em!

Obama Has Ended Race Conflict, But Not the Way You Think

Here's a prognostication. We will look back at all the race-hyping of the Obama era -- the beer summit, "cowards on race," Trayvon, Ferguson, "loosies," Baltimore -- as the straws that broke the camel's back on race.

Here we are today with two Republicans pushing back on race. First there is good old Donald Trump pushing back on the Freddie Gray episode. Then we have Ted Cruz accusing the president of enflaming race relations:

I think he has not used his role as president to bring us together. He has exacerbated racial misunderstandings, racial tensions, from back at the beer summit to a series of efforts to pit Americans against each other. And, part of the problem is the way he advocates for any given plan, is to build a straw man of the opposition and then to vilify their position.

The whole point of America's First Black President was that we would compose our racial differences and enter a post-racial era. Remember that?

But we pretty soon found out that Obama wasn't the guy to deliver on that. We now know why. First of all, Obama thinks like a lefty racist, using the identity politics invented by the Frankfurt School chappies. But the really important reason is the Democratic Party, the Coalition of the Fringes. It needs to have racial, sexual, and class divisions in order to win elections. So race politics was never going to go away as long as it worked as a club to beat white Americans.

Donald Trump is who he is, but Ted Cruz is a sharp operator. If he thinks he can work the Obama race angle to win the Republican nomination and then the presidency, then we may be entering a new era.

We'll be entering the new era not because Obama reconciled the races, but because decent Americans are sick to the back teeth of race cards and race bullying, and the "angrying up" of African Americans right before elections so they'll get out to vote.

This Baltimore thing has turned a corner. After all, it couldn't be racism because the mayor is black, the police chief is black, and the cops are majority-minority. So Obama and Hillary Clinton are out waffling about too many people in jail and programs to help.

But you know what? If the Democrats go into 2016 arguing for special programs for blacks the rest of the country is going to be asking: what about us?

In the Obama economy it's not just the usually marginalized and historically oppressed that are feeling the bad economy and the failure to thrive. It's the average American.

Now we are hearing that the economy may be in a soft patch and the Fed has decided not to come off its zero interest rate policy, not just yet. You mean to say that after all the bailouts and stimulus and special deals for special interests the economy still isn't growing? Maybe it's the bad weather. Or maybe it's global warming.

Or maybe it's the grow-government policy of the Obama administration.

This isn't that hard. All government, all of it, is a weight on the economy. The more government, the more regulation, the more subsidy, the more that the attention of Americans is diverted away from working to provide for others and the more that Americans learn to go to government to get a special carve-out. And each carve-out takes a little bit from economic growth and allocates the resources, human or natural, that might have grown the economy to some special interest on the basis of political power and force.

In 2016 the American people won't be thinking economics or spending cuts or flat taxes or roll-backs of expensive regulation like Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank. They'll just be thinking it is Time for a Change. On race, on jobs, on everything.

Because, Americans will say, under Obama things just aren't working.

And so, President Obama will be the most consequential president in modern times. He will be the Jimmy Carter of the early 21st century, the man that drove his party into a ditch: on jobs, on race, on everything.

And he will have ended race conflict because people will just say: "We Don't Care."

Liberalism is Revolution Theme Park

It's taken half a century, but I finally got to stumble over Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution. It's a comparative study of the four great European revolutions: English, American, French, and Russian.

And it's helped me understand liberals better.

Crane's analysis is that the four revolutions follow a similar script. First there's the failure of the old regime, usually involving running out of other peoples' money. Then there's the moderate phase, where the moderates take over from the old regime. Then there's the radical coup d'etat and the Terror. Finally there's the Thermidorean reaction where the new regime settles into a military dictatorship.

How do liberals fit into this? They want to play at radicals, strut around like Jacobins, acting in bold strokes in a dangerous moment when everything is up for grabs and nobody is safe.

But, of course, they are completely delusional; they are constructing a Disney World of radicalism for themselves. They are not Lenins and Robespierres pulling off a daring coup d'etat in the face of the muddlesome moderates and general confusion of a revolutionary period. They are playing at radicalism and revolution.

We see this first of all in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Alinsky's Rules for community organizing only work because the revolution is over and liberals own the culture and the legal system. Don't you try making the liberals follow their own rules.

We see it in the foolish virgins running the campus "rape culture" activism, and in this young woman who organized a diversity meeting at which whites and males were disinvited (H/T Instapundit).

I am particularly interested in looking at the gendered body in Japanese pornographic anime and horror through a Foucauldian framework in order to analyse the West’s gaze upon a world it attempts to categorize.  My politics are intersectional, queer, feminist, anti-racist . . . I am a working class, Turkish Cypriot, queer, disabled woman and activist.

You can't just be an "activist" these days; you have to amp it up.

We see it in the whole LGBT circus from gay marriage to transsexualism. I get it. Who would want to be a boring heterosexual and get married and have children? But let's not just go off into a corner and get creative about sex. Oh no. That would never do. Let us take our hunger for adventure and danger and make it into a political movement. Gays have been marginalized and oppressed for centuries! Transphobia is oppression and must be stamped out! Teach the bigoted Christian bakers a lesson they will never forget!

We see it in the pathetic "Black Lives Matter" movement, apparently funded by Soros money, that is stupidly destroying black neighborhoods in Missouri and now Baltimore. It may be dandy for liberals to shake their heads about institutional racism and think up new programs to end generational injustice. But this sort of activism has been failing to improve black lives for fifty years.

All these people are playing at Jacobins -- or, if you like, Puritans of the English revolution from 1642 to 1660. They want the purity, the excitement of revolution! A battle against evil! They want to humble the bigots and the hypocrites, and teach them a lesson! And above all, they want to be relevant.

But there's only one little problem. They are not radicals; they are not revolutionaries. They are the little darlings of the ruling class. They are doing exactly what they have been taught by their government teachers, their government professors, and government-paid activists.

And so really they are just the educated-class equivalent of Disney enthusiasts, taking the kids down to a plastic revolution theme park for some fake thrills.

Liberal Fascism: "The Worse the Better"

This morning Rush Limbaugh started out his program saying that, as a 64-year-old, he's seen it all before. He was talking about the black rioting in Baltimore. And Watts in 1965. And Los Angeles in 1992.

But how could this be happening? Didn't President Obama promise to end the decades of partisanship, red states and blue states, and stuff?

So how come blacks are rioting, six years after the election of the First Black President?

Well, the first "how come" is that politics changes nothing. This is the age of responsible individualism, bub, and you aren't a serf or a slave anymore. It's up to you to make your life work, "on your own," as the saying goes.

Of course blacks were angry in 1965 after the civil rights acts passed, and nothing changed. Of course they were angry in 1992 with the Rodney King beating. Nothing had changed. Of course blacks are angry in 2015. Here we are, fifty years after the civil rights acts and nothing has changed.

Nothing will change until the day that blacks decide to stop being the little darlings of the liberals and take responsibility for their own lives, as other oppressed peoples have done before them. Think Irish from rack-rented Ireland, Italians from the beaten-down Mezzogiorno, Jews from the pogroms in Russia.

But that's their problem. What about us? What are we going to do about the end-game Obama era where liberal fascism is in full cry?

Liberal fascism? There a book about it. You could read it or go Wiki.

You'll remember Mussolini's definition of fascism. His line was this:

Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato
(Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State)

Really, what is there about modern liberalism that goes against Il Duce's demand?

Here's the way it works in America today. Everything for liberalism, nothing outside liberalism, nothing against liberalism.

If you speak against liberalism, say on gay marriage or on "rape culture," you can lose your job.

If you act against liberalism, say by declining to provide services for a gay wedding, you can lose your business.

And anything you say or do can immediately be attacked as a racist, sexist, homophobic "microaggression" that could get you sanctioned, if you are a white male in college that offends some liberal activist-in-training.

But my feeling is that all this is good news. Like Rush Limbaugh said at the top, we've seen all this before. And ordinary middle-class Americans hate it. They hated it in the aftermath of the Sixties when the passage of civil rights meant that they, not the southern racists, had to pay for the sins of the fathers. They hated the kids rioting over the Vietnam War. They hated the race riots (which weren't race riots, but just black kids destroying their neighborhoods).

Now we have the aftermath of the First Black President. Instead of Americans getting kudos for their openness and anti-racism, we have the First Black President and the First Black Attorney General ginning up riots and protests in Florida, in Missouri, in New York, and now in Baltimore, and loosing Social Justice Warriors on all and sundry.

The thing to remember is that this is all great fun if you are a liberal "ally"of the "oppressed peoples" living far, far from the scene of the crime. But if you are a white working class family, commuting long hours because that's the only way you can buy a house you can almost afford and get decent schools for your kids, then you are looking at America and wondering if you are going to lose your job for a careless word.

It's easy for me: I'm a racist, sexist, homophobe, but I can afford to be, because I'm retired and I can't be fired from my job. But ordinary folks know that they'd better button their lips, or else.

People in the political class don't get the social and cultural fears of the working and sub-college educated middle class, because they feel safe and in control. They have the education and the culture to succeed in post-industrial America. All the fuss and feathers about gay marriage and college rape and climate change is stuff that isn't going to wreck their lives. But to the ordinary schmuck things aren't quite so copacetic.

And that's why I say: go for it liberal fascists. The worse the better.

Really, there is no better way to get a Republican elected in 2016.

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.