Amtrak: Liberals Just Don’t Get It

After the tragic Amtrak rail crash on Tuesday May 12, liberals were first out of the gate blaming Republicans for the crash. You see, Republicans are proposing to cut about $200 million from Amtrak’s budget for 2016. QED.

The Wall Street Journal has a sensible editorial on how this makes no sense. And points out that, if the well-traveled northeast corridor weren’t subsidizing the rest of Amtrak then maybe there would be money for upgrading the signaling, etc.

Oh and by the way, the Journal reports, “Amtrak fares average about 34 cents per mile, versus 15 cents for domestic flights and about a quarter for cars.” Oh, and Amtrak has fares average about 34 cents per mile, versus 15 cents for domestic flights and about a quarter for cars.” Oh, and Amtrak has “so many legislatively mandated tasks and responsibilities” that it doesn’t know which end was up.

Hey, here’s an idea. How about we spin off the northeast corridor from the rest of Amtrak and let the northeast states make what they want of it?

This sort of thing, to me, just illustrates the problem with government. It all ends up as a fight for loot. It all comes down to who gets the government loot to, e.g., feed little children, fix crumbling infrastructure, or install positive train control, or fight racism, sexism and homophobia?

What liberals cannot get through their skulls is that almost everything is simply a paying proposition: “will it pay” to e.g., build a fast and safe northeast rail corridor? If it is then profit-oriented businessmen will build it and run it and make a profit. If not, then why waste the resources on this fragile planet just to appease some powerful special interest.

Oh yes, you say. But passenger rail in a crowded urban corridor is different. It can never pay for itself. The only way is by government subsidy.

But if the only way is government subsidy then we are talking about politics and government where the majority wins and the most powerful interest gets the money. I’d say that this is not a good time for liberals to argue this line because chances are that we’ll have Republicans running Congress for the next decade and they won’t be wanting to spend money on liberals.

If you want government to do it, then you are saying, let’s resolve this by force. And if you end up on the losing side, too bad for you.

That is what capitalism is born to do. It is here to allow change to happen without the say-so of the ruling class. It does not depend on the support of the powerful; it does not pretend to be helping the oppressed. It merely asks “will it pay?” and acts accordingly. It does not require that you get a majority of the votes in Congress before you can do anything. It just says: if you think you can make money on this, go for it.

And if it turns out that it doesn’t pay, then too bad for the stockholders and the bondholders. The taxpayer gets off scot free. That is, unless well-connected liberals come along and demand that the failing corporation gets bailed out “in the national interest.”

I like to say that the only thing that government can do is declare war: on fascism, on ignorance, on want, on bigotry, on the dangerous state run by the thug dictator next door.

What government cannot do is run a business, delivering consumers a service, responding to their individual needs as creatively and flexibly as possible. It’s not the fault of individual government leaders or individual bureaucrats when government fails to do that; it’s just that government is force, and it can’t do things that don’t require force.

But that is what liberals refuse to learn. But why should they care; it's not their money.

The Baffling, Progressive Democrats

Today in his weekly column Karl Rove writes that he's baffled by the Democrats. You've got Bill Clinton's crazy comments about the corrupt Clinton foundation; there's Hillary Clinton hidden away from the world in still silence; there's President Obama's crazy insult to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). And why is nobody running against Hillary Clinton?

But I'm baffled by the Progressive Agenda, a 13 point plan for wrecking America and the poor, advanced by people like NY Mayor Bill de Blasio and others. What are they thinking? Don't they realize that it's time for progressives to go and hide after the disaster of the Obama administration?

But no. Here's uber-progressive Joan Walsh of Salon and she's all hopped up about of the rollout of the Progressive Agenda at the US Capitol where "progressive leaders endorsed an agenda to tackle income inequality."

Oh dear, Joan Walsh. Don't you understand that progressive economics and politics increases inequality as it encourages people not to submit to the market economy but to live as serfs on the liberal plantation? Let's take item #1 to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour as the poster boy for progressive folly. Let's think of a few objections to a higher minimum wage:

• It's superstitious and pre-rational. The science is settled. Minumum wages create unemployment.
• It's racist. Minimum wages create unemployment especially for unskilled black males.
• It's dominatory. It puts politicians in charge of the economy. But politicians know nothing about making and selling things. They only know how to divide and conquer.
• It shoves workers off-the-books and makes workers and employers skirt the law to earn a living.

Here's an idea to help workers. Why not abolish the payroll taxes? What with FICA and unemployment and workers comp. and all, the average working stiff pays about 25 percent of his wages in payroll tax. Then workers could keep their own money as they put aside a little money against a layoff; they could save their own money for a down payment on a house, or starting a business, or sending the kids to college or saving for retirement. What a concept.

The whole Progressive Agenda is like that. It thinks that the only way for the unskilled to get a break is by force. There is not thought at all to enhancing the labor market and the demand for labor so that the employers of the United States would be competing to hire workers and bidding up their wages.

That's the problem with people that believe in politics like a religion. It means they have a remarkable faith in the potential for force: marching for justice; burning down drug stores; putting the screws on business; taxing hard-working entrepreneurs.

But I suspect that the enthusiastic progressives have got it all wrong. I suspect that the average American voter is not riled up about minimum wages and "Black Lives Matter." The average American voter is frustrated that nobody seems to care about ordinary middle-class concerns: good jobs, good schools, and a better world for our children. What do Obamacare, immigration amnesty, and gay marriage have to do with that?

Remember ten years ago? Democrats, under the leadership of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), recruited a bunch of moderate candidates to run for Congress and won 35 House seats in the 2006 midterms, and 30 House seats in 2008. But all that got blown away in the 2010 midterms as Americans revolted against the left-wing Obama agenda.

Do the Democrats really think they are going to get traction on an even more left-wing agenda in 2016?

You never know, not until the votes are counted.

But count me just as baffled as Karl Rove.

See What We Mean, Democrats?

Yesterday the Senate Democrats halted President Obama's free trade initiative in the US Senate. And he insulted Sen. Elizabeth Warran (D-MA). Oh and by the way, the contents of the bill are as secret as an intelligence bill: nobody is allowed a copy of the bill. So once again, we have to pass it to find out what's in it. Way to go, Barry!

Do you Democrats see, finally, that we have a problem, Houston? That it really isn't a good idea to have a president that acts like a playground bully? A president that sees no problem in insulting the good faith of his opponents? Like this?

The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else. And you know, she’s got a voice that she wants to get out there. And I understand that[.]

Generally, Mr. President, we try to avoid sophomoric comments like that. Even if it's true. Why? Because every elected official has the negative power to put a wrench in the works, especially if someone has "dissed" him. Or her.

Now we learn that the problem with the president's remarks are... exactly, they are sexist, because the subtext of the president's remarks are that the little lady from Massachusetts doesn't know what she is talking about.

Actually, I agree with that. But not because Sen. Warren is a woman. Not at all. It's because she is a lawyer and a liberal.

But how can the president be sexist? He's African American: he doesn't have the power!

Seriously, do you Democrats now see what a total mess this president is, now that your liberal ox is getting gored by his incompetence and his petulance? As I understand it the President of the United States is supposed to get on the phone and stitch up the support for his program before we get to votes in the Senate. The whole idea is to do all the horse-trading in smoke-filled rooms out of sight of the public so that the swing votes are bought and paid for just like it says in Buchanan and Tullocks' The Calculus of Consent.

But let's get back to this whole secrecy thing. Not to mention the whole 1,000 page bill thing.

You know and I know what is going on here. Democrats can't publicly vote for free trade because they have been campaigning against free trade since... since the Republican Party crashed and burned as the protectionist party on or about 1930.

Yep, opposition to free trade is bubba bait. Because the science is settled. It's called the Law of Comparative Advantage, but free trade still hurts established interests that have had privileges legislated into law in the past. Because free trade makes a mockery of all stitch-up deals to special interests. What a shame!

So the best way to pass free trade is to pass a black box with unknown contents, so moderate Democratic legislators can't get primaried by extremists. That is call legislative sausage-making.

But all the bubba bait in the world doesn't change the science: Regulation, protection, taxing, spending: all these things make the nation poorer. Period.

I was just watching the PBS documentary "The Commanding Heights" yesterday and they had airline deregulator Alfred E. Kahn as a talking head. The point is that regulation always ends up as a stitch-up for the special interests. In the case of airlines, it kept them all cosily in business for 40 years. And prices high.

Now Sen. Warren is the champion of the post-crash financial regulation, including her own baby, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that is all stitched up into special funding from the Federal Reserve System. So she hates anything that might take power away from her pet project.

I get that.

Personally, I shudder to think what kind of train-wreck will come of Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation act. Because my guess is that these regulatory monsters will empower the government to behave badly and screw up the financial system. Until it's too late and we have a financial Armageddon like 2008.

But not to worry. We can still blame the greedy bankers.

The Liberals' "Hate Speech" Problem

I decided yesterday that I was going to write today about "hate speech." And today I find that everybody is doing the same.

I suppose it all started when various pundits, from left to right, criticized Pam Geller for her Draw Muhammed art show in Garland, Texas, at which two amateur terrorists were gunned down by police. It had the effect of concentrating the minds of all those that love freedom.

Because freedom begins and ends with the right to be wrong.

Here's Breitbart London descanting on the evil North London bias of the BBC. Here's Victor Davis Hanson writing on the erosion of the First Amendment. Here's Kirsten Powers writing about colleges silencing dissent. Here are college fraternity members suspended for texting "sexual comments about women and girls." Here's a report about SJW entryism in open source software. And then there is the strategic Obama crackdown on the political opposition.

Everywhere you look you see liberals working to silence the opposition or try to take over institutions using the Gramscian tactic of the "march through the institutions."

I want to say that this is a real problem, not for conservatives and libertarians. It is a problem for liberals.

Because of what it says about liberals and liberal ideas.

Do you mean to say, liberals, that you need to suppress evil thoughts and speech in order for your ideas to have the proper environment to grow? Do you mean to say that your ideas are so weak that they do not speak for themselves and cannot differentiate themselves from the dross of the opposing bigotry and superstition?

We've seen this before, of course. There's always a temptation for a ruling orthodoxy to decide that the time for debate is over. Now it's time for dissident voices to shut up; the matter is settled. It always seems much easier to say that the argument is over rather than keep up the hard work of advancing your ideas and continuing a dialog with the opposition.

But I'd say that anyone that starts muttering about heresy or denial has a problem. They are saying that they want an end to discourse; from now on, only force will rule.

I have the same attitude towards the Gramscian "march through the institutions." As soon as you develop a strategy for anything, you are saying that you want force to rule. You are saying: never mind about discussion, about exchange of deeply felt ideas and sentiments; our ideas are the right ones, and we will fight to make them prevail.

Here's what I think about "hate speech" and "entryism."

First: If you deny other people the right to speak then you are saying that your own ideas aren't good enough to prevail in an open outcry. You are closing off a genuine process of intersubjectivity, of putting yourself in the place of the other, of analyzing the other person's viewpoint from their own point of view. You are saying: let the strong rule.

Second: If you need an entryist strategy to advance your cause, you are saying that it will never capture hearts and minds without first capturing the commanding heights of the culture and politics by stealth. You are saying: the only way we can win is with subterfuge.

Third: You are saying that  political power is the only reality.

The great contest of the last 500 years is the question of the limits of power: political, economic, and religious. Some people want to concentrate power, to make politics, economics, and faith work together for the betterment of humankind. Other people want to separate powers, to make the power seekers, in government, in the economy, in belief systems fight with each other, and prevent one single power from lording it over the others.

I'd say that the question is pretty well settled. Concentrating power leads to totalitarianism; Separating power leads to human flourishing. But humans will never agree on this.

As soon as you say: well those people are bigots, and we should shut them up, you are saying that we already know it all. We don't need to give space to people that have different ideas.

As soon as you say: we must staff the institutions with our own people, to make them resonate to the right ideas, you are saying that you have the one final answer.

But the experience of the remarkable last 500 years is that we never have the final answer to anything. As soon as you close down opposing ideas you are announcing the death of your own ideas. As soon as you place "your people" in strategic institutions you are setting those institutions up for decline and death.

In my view the whole apparatus of "political correctness" and marches through the institutions might as well be a public declaration of intellectual bankruptcy. The progressives are saying that their ideas are rubbish, but they are going to force them on us anyway.

One thing is for sure. When you start bullying and ordering people around they have two options. They can shut up and take it, or they can start to form a head of rebellion. Or both.

And that is why the liberal war on "hate speech" is a real problem. For liberals. Because it will order up a cultural and political movement that will destroy liberalism.

The Wages of Division

Everyone is tut-tutting about the breakup of national politics in Britain, particularly with the triumph of the Scottish National Party in Scotland. The Labour Party was pretty well eliminated in Scotland in the UK General Election of May 2015.

But really, this is the wages of identity politics. The average grubbing practical politician may not realize it but identity politics, getting people to vote according to class and race and gender, is going to break up the nation state.

The idea of the nation state is really rather new, a few hundred years old at the max. And I suspect that it developed not because all of a sudden people started to believe in nations, but because the logic of interstate politics demanded a bigger military and political unit than the feudal king, the temporary winner in the game of baronial politics and strategic marriage. The political unit had to be large enough to support a significant standing army; it had to be supported and funded by a thriving commercial economy. And it helped to have a single language. In fact, the emerging nation state imposed a common language on its subjects.

In the 18th century you can see that the national politics in Britain was simple faction: one faction of the landed magnates against another. Disraeli fires the last shot in this war in Sybil when he spends a chapter or two drawing up a bill of indictment against the evil and corrupt Whigs; they got their wealth in the plunder of the monasteries in the 16th century, in case you didn't know.

In the 19th century politics in Britain started to show the influence of class. The Reform Bill of 1832 was about extending the franchise lower into the middle class. Later reform bills extended the franchise into the working class. So politicians learned how to make class appeals, and the factional politics of Whig vs. Tory morphed into the class politics of Liberal/Labour vs. Conservative.

The genius of this class politics, we can now see in retrospect, was that it didn't disturb the nation state idea. That was tested in World War I when the working classes of the world identified with their nations rather than with their class.

Responding to this fact after World War I the Frankfurt School came up with a new twist on class politics: what we now call identity politics. The Frankfurt School taught politicians how to divide people not just by class but by any kind of identity that worked politically. The point was to seize the commanding heights of compassion and identify yourself with an historically oppressed group.

In our day this idea has turned into stupidity and the left's support is always for the identified marginalized group: blacks in the US or South Africa; women; gays, Muslims in the West; Hispanics in the US; Catholics in Northern Ireland; Palestinians in the Middle East; Catalonians in Spain.

In Britain, this played out as validating the irredentist yearnings of the Celtic fringes in Scotland and Wales so that the Blair Labour government legislated regional assemblies for the Scots and the Welsh.

Well, golly gee. Now that brilliant plan has developed into full-on Scottish nationalism and a movement for Scottish independence. Be careful what you wish for.

So what did the Frankfurt School geniuses think they were doing? I imagine they thought they were building a global over/under coalition between the enlightened educated and Marxist avant-garde and the global under-privileged whoever and wherever they were. And this wave of the future would throttle the evil and oppressive rule of the international bourgeoisie.

Allow me to propose my own view against the world view of the educated ruling class of gentry liberals.

The global gentry liberal elite establishes and maintains its power by a cynical revival of pre-modern instincts in its "under" supporters, and it obstructs the "unders" from taking their rightful place in the middle class. Of course it does. When the working class worked its way up into the middle class it stopped voting for the parties of the left.

The whole panoply of administrative welfare state politics and government encourages people to identify as subordinate subjects, clients to a political patronage machine, grubbing for free stuff from a great lord. The subordinate subjects, in the limit case of the African Americans in the United States, end up as a dysfunctional under-class in some declining city where the women don't marry and the men don't work.

The science ought to be settled by now. The way to a meaningful life in the modern world is to climb out of the underclass by getting an education and getting a job. Then you abandon the culture of subordination and take on the armor of responsibility. You shuck off the culture of the people of the subordinate self and you join the people of the responsible self.

Now people of the responsible self are natural citizens of the nation state. They want to work and thrive in the market economy and they want to marry and have children and they want the state to protect them from enemies foreign and domestic that might interfere with their day-to-day work of wiving and thriving. They take pride in taking care of their own and they also extend their circle of caring to other people that need help because that's who they are.

The gentry liberal ruling class is at war with the people of the responsible self because the people of the responsible self want nothing from the political class except peace and security. They don't want free education; they'd rather buy their own and get the right education for their individual children. They don't want a state pension; they'd rather save their own money and retire when they want to rather than when the government wants them to. They don't want government health care; they'd rather pay for their own and get what they need, not what a cabal of political activists wants them to need. They don't want and army of experts regulating everything and "keeping us safe." They prefer to make their own mistakes and learn from them.

On this view you can see that the gentry liberal ruling class has done a pretty good job of marginalizing the people of the responsible self and riling up the tribal instincts of the people of the subordinate self. Nothing remarkable or scandalous about this. They are just following the logic of their political needs.

But the problem is the law of unintended consequences. Politics is division. The more politics, the more division, and for the gentry liberal ruling class politics is everything. We are now seeing the long term result of ruling class identity politics. The result is the breakup of nation states into smaller states, smaller states that cannot swing their weight in international affairs.

It's all very well to have a Scotland. But what happens if the Russian bear should come calling? It's all very well to encourage African Americans in racial pride; but what happens when a Detroit or a Baltimore self-destructs? It's all very well to encourage a Latino identity in Hispanic immigrants; but what happens if, say, California decides to secede.

Our liberal friends have the conceit that their superior intelligence and evolved culture makes them the natural cultural leaders and political authorities, and equal to every political challenge. Don't worry; they can handle the elements of their coalition of the fringes.

But suppose they can't? That's what the collapse of the Labour Party in Scotland suggests. Once the lordly liberal elite has taught the Scots or the Muslims how to organize and protest for their rights there is always the possibility that their students will strike out on their own and start their own activism schools.

And then what?

How Humans Can Cooperate Without Being Forced

I don't now why it is, but today there's an explosion of pieces on the virtues of capitalism.

First there is the excellent Kevin Williamson asking why the left is so firmly opposed to President Obama's (!) free-trade bill before Congress. The left these days is full of nostaglia for the glory days of the 1945-73 period, when growth was good and unions were strong. Look, Williamson writes, growth was good because the Second World War had destroyed so much. He quotes Ike's Cross of Iron speech:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Well, lefties are all opposed to defense spending, although defense spending was up at 10% of GDP through most of the post-war period. They are opposed to military force, except to fight Fascists. But they are all in favor of force when it comes to competing with foreigners to serve the consumers.

The president's Trans-Pacific Partnership would liberalize trade between twelve Pacific nations (not China).

With the exception of those under White House discipline, progressives are almost uniformly hostile to TPP, as indeed the Left is generally hostile to all international trade deals. 

So what's their problem?

The Left wants to withdraw from international trade and detests globalization. Progressives lament an almost entirely mythical “race to the bottom” in global commerce. 

The Left seems to hate economic cooperation among nations, and is getting nasty about the Chinese.

The anti-capitalist progressives have made clear what they do not want: free trade, free exchange, nasty foreigners and their nasty cheap goods, international exchange with fewer bosses declaring who may buy and sell and under what conditions, etc. What is it they do want?

You can't have a rerun of the 1945-73 period without the prior destruction of war. So what is it that the Left really wants?

"Capitalism is cooperation," writes Williamson. And that theme is taken up by David Boaz celebrating F.A. Hayek's birthday.

When we see an orderly process, we naturally assume that someone has designed or planned it. Hayek says that we fail to distinguish between two kinds of orders: the "made" or planned order, such as a business firm or other limited organization, and the "grown" or spontaneous order, such as the whole society or market process.

It is The Fatal Conceit of the Left not to understand that the economy doesn't need a guiding hand. It needs rules; it needs a government to punish thieves and robbers: street and corporate. But not a gentry liberal class regulating and directing traffic.

The fatal conceit of intellectuals, [Hayek] said, is to think that smart people can design an economy or a society better than the apparently chaotic interactions of millions of people. Such intellectuals fail to realize how much they don’t know or how a market makes use of all the localized knowledge each of us possesses. 

As in Jonathan Gruber.

There's a lot of talk about "settled science" these days, although I thought that the whole question had been settled by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions forty years ago. Science is settled, as in "normal science," until it gets upset by a revolution, a change in paradigm. I'd say that settles it.

Now liberals talk a pretty good line about climate science being "settled". That's because they don't want to argue the science of climate and whether there really is catastrophic global warming that would need the moral equivalent of war, led by a general staff of gentry liberals, to correct.

On the other hand liberals are completely uninterested in the settled science of economics, that a government-run economy is a really unscientific, not to say unjust, not to say superstitious, way to go. Why? Oh I'd say that settled science says that a government-run economy is The Road to Serfdom. And we don't want that.

Look I get it. The Left's religion is that everything must be done by politics. The US's gentry liberal class wants to believe that we need "smart people" like them to organize our economy and society.

If politics is a really bad idea for organizing the economy then what will the Lefties do then, poor things? If "smart people" aren't needed to direct economic traffic or to lead the Army of Climate, then what will the gentry liberals do then poor things?

The modern era is unprecedented in this one weird way. We have developed knowledge that tells us that free exchange is the fundamental difference between humans and the rest of life on earth. We don't need alpha males ordering us around, telling us what to do. We just need alpha males to catch the malefactors and a community of women to shame the freeloaders.

Fix that one weird thing and humans will freely cooperate and flourish without the need for force.

Why Are We Helpless at the Feet of the New "Aristos"

Today there are a couple of pieces out about today's aristocracy. Or maybe we should say oligarchy. Or gentry liberals. Or just ruling class.

First, there's the excellent Kevin Williamson writing about the progressive need for the monster of "inequality" to fight. It's relatively easy to eradicate "absolute poverty." But relative poverty is a different matter. "Economic inequality... is never going away." Because it's like the SAT; it's automatically normed into a Bell curve.

The enduring nature of economic inequality may be a political blessing for progressives — it provides a perennial source of discontent — but it is a problem, too, for one very important but under-appreciated reason: The main sources of economic inequality are not matters of public policy.

 No problem. The progressives will make it a matter of public policy.

In a liberal society, some things are not political questions, but the Left, with its authoritarian mottos — “The personal is the political,” “If you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem,” etc. — is in its most fundamental assumptions the opposite of liberal: It is totalitarian.

Fighting inequality justifies the progressive lust for political power, its faith in political power. So it's never going to go away unless we People of the Responsible Self make it go away.

Now here's a Breitbart London guy, Jonathan Foreman, writing on British Election Day that it really doesn't matter who wins. The same Establishment will be in power. He's criticizing a book by a Guardian writer that assumes that the Establishment is very different from reality: "equal parts fantasy, ignorance and ideologically-motivated dishonesty."

It took no note of the way power in the UK long ago shifted away from landowning peers, bowler-wearing toffs and other targets of early 1960s satire and into the hands of a new establishment increasingly dominated by a metropolitan bourgeoisie whose attitudes and aspirations are not in the least deferential to the old upper classes and their way of life.

 If you really want to know who belongs in the Establishment here's how to do it.

All you have to do is identify those individuals whom our System rewards with sinecures and other unelected official positions that bring with them prestige, power and money. 

Many of those positions are to be found in "Quangos" (quasi-autonomous-non-governmental organizations), those 900-odd uniquely British, peculiar institutions that might have been designed to keep influence in the hands of the Right People.

 Hey! No big deal, right. How bad can those Quangos be? This bad: 

Quangos cost the taxpayer some £170 billion per year, employ almost a million people, and exercise vast power without democratic accountability. The few thousand people who run the “Quangocracy” are almost the very definition of an Establishment. Especially given the fact that once you’ve been appointed to a Quango, you’ve basically made it into the magic circle, and you’re in forever. Moreover, so long as you don’t break with Establishment mores or bien-pensant political codes, further boons in the form of more board memberships and leadership positions (some of them high-paying and influential) are likely to come your way.

What are we talking about here? We are talking about someone like a certain Suzi Leather: "Booker Prize judge, Chair of the British Council, President of SOAS, Chair of the Human Genetics Commission, Commissioner of the National Commission for Education."

We have a similar system here. We have all kinds of boards and commissions and research institutes that are staffed and led by the right kind of people. We have people at the highest levels of the mainstream media married to people with high positions in the Obama administration. Michael Barone came up with a name for these people: Gentry liberals.

Gentry liberals think that it's all perfectly normal to have their flagrant nepotism and conflicts of interest, although they'd be outraged if a Republican did that.

But it is a scandal that we conservatives and libertarians haven't completely de-legitimized these proud and conceited toffs.

In fact until we do knock them off their perch then our project of freedom and limited government and cities on a hill is going nowhere. Same goes for the chaps in Limey-land.

Maybe we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves. They didn't get the French Revolution until the old regime had really screwed up, running out of money and losing wars and stuff.

Above all, according to Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution, you need a rising class of people that are just feeling fit to be tied by the old regime, like the Puritans in Stuart England, the rebels in colonial British North America, and the philosophes in 18th century France.

In my view, what we need is a class of cultural and political leaders that can articulate the yearnings and the needs of the middle in the US and the UK. That middle would be the folk I call the People of the Responsible Self, responsible individuals that ask only to make a useful contribution to society, not to lord it over the masses.

Up to now in the modern era you have to tip the hat to the new ruling class, the People of the Creative Self, and their over-under coalition with the People of the Subordinate Self. Both the British Establishment and our gentry liberals have done a masterful job of assembling their coalition of the marginalized, people who genuinely were marginalized or could be taught to feel marginalized.

OK. That's the world we live it. The point is not to understand the world; the point is to change it.

Yeah. Why shouldn't conservatives read Marx?